Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

It’s been some time since I read something in translation, which longtime bookconscious followers will know is one of my favorite things to do. When I was through with the graphic memoir I wrote about last week, I shopped my shelves and nothing was jumping out saying “read me now.” So I browsed Hoopla, where I had borrowed the previous book, and came across Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, which I heard about over the summer and hadn’t read yet.

It’s a short novel about a thirty-six year old woman, Keiko Furukura, who has worked part-time in a convenience store since she was eighteen. She was there when it opened and is on her 8th manager. We learn that growing up, Keiko was different — she reacted to things like a dead pet budgie in a park quite dispassionately, and seemed to have a literal take on the world. Her parents alternately worried and felt mortified that their child was different, and so Keiko learned to fit in by saying very little, and making sure that when she did, she sounded like those around her.

In the course of this novel, Keiko figures out that her untraditional life — living in a shabby apartment alone, not dating or socializing much, working part-time in a job mostly taken by immigrants, people stuck between jobs, or students rather than having a career trajectory — makes other people uncomfortable. People like her sister, who is married and has a baby, or the few high school acquaintances she still knows.

So Keiko tries conforming to society’s expectations. I don’t want to give away details about the way that plays out, but I will say I found myself fearing for her, and so when Keiko makes a strong stand for being herself, it came as a relief. I know that’s all vague, but you really should read this book, and I don’t want to spoil it!

Murata and her translator, Ginny Tapley Takemori, bring the culture of the Japanese convenience store alive — from the regulars and the specials to the management and the manual. I appreciated that bits of Japanese, like the greeting the store workers are expected to call out when shoppers come in, are left in tact. Murata manages to make Keiko both a sympathetic character and a symbol of conformist society’s dehumanizing effects on those who do not choose to be outsiders, but instead cannot fit in as expected. It’s a darkly funny book in some ways, although it did not make me laugh as some other readers have commented it did.

I really enjoy books like this that are windows into lives very different than mine. Convenience Store Woman is that, and it’s also a brief story that stays with you, simple in and of itself but carrying greater truths that may cause the reader to keep turning it over in their mind, wondering, and being thankful to have entered into this little world.

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The Portrait by Antoine Laurain

I’ve written about two of Antoine Laurain‘s other novels here at bookconscious: The Red Notebook and The President’s Hat.  Like those books, The Portrait is about an object that changes someone’s life. In this case, as you can guess from the title, the object is an eighteenth century portrait that Pierre-Francois Chaumont, a Parisian patent attorney with a lifelong love of collecting, finds at an auction and buys because the man in the painting looks just like him. He has no idea who it might be, but there is a coat of arms in the painting so he researches it.

I don’t want to spoil the story by saying exactly what he finds out, but it leads him to discover, if you will, a whole new self. I had a little trouble with the plot — Chaumont basically walks entirely away from his old life, taking time to bully and blackmail someone into helping him do so. Then he takes a great deal of trouble to recover his collectibles and antiques only to lose them again in what seems a very preventable accident. Also no one in his old life seems terribly troubled by his absence, based on the tiny glimpses we get of the aftermath.

The idea that an image could be a portal of sorts is appealing, and I enjoyed as always the details about France and French life. A minor character, Pierre’s Uncle Edgar, was more interesting than Pierre himself to me, but the other minor characters were nearly one dimensional. Pierre seems rather self absorbed and sees women as merely beautiful body parts.

So if you want to try Laurain, I wouldn’t start with this book, but it was, overlooking the disagreeable main character, a diverting short read. It might be interesting to talk about with a book group because the plot poses an ethical, if completely improbable, question: is it right to take on someone else’s identity if no one seems to really get hurt?

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The Red Collar by Jean-Christophe Rufin

This short novel is from Europa Editions, a publisher I’ve praised on the blog many times for bringing terrific international fiction to American readers. When I ordered The Red Collar for my library’s collection I tagged it as a book I was especially looking forward to and it was just as I’d hoped. If you had to explain to someone what it means to be human you could give them this book.

Jean-Christophe Rufin is one of the founders of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières. He’s also a diplomat, who served as France’s ambassador to Senegal and an accomplished novelist who has twice won the Prix Goncourt, one of France’s major literary awards. I’ve never read his work before.

The Red Collar is about Wilhelm, a briard sheepdog mix, who followed Jacques Morlac when he was mobilized to fight in the French army in 1915. When the book opens, Morlac is in prison and Whilhelm is outside “baying relentlessly.” Major Hugues Lantier du Grez is the officer investigating Morlac’s case. When he arrives in the village to question Morlac and determine his fate, Lantier is taken with the dog’s loyalty.

Through his interviews with Morlac, we learn that Lantier witnessed an extreme act of canine bravery and loyalty in his childhood, that predisposed him to admire Wilhelm. Rufin writes of Lantier, “He had joined the army to defend order against barbary. . . .It wasn’t long before war came along and showed him that the opposite was true, that order feeds off human beings, that it consumes them and crushes them. But deep down and in spite of everything, he was still bound to his vocation. And that vocation had its origins in the actions of a dog.”

We also learn that Morlac feels respect for Wilhelm but no particular affection, even though the dog followed him all the way to Macedonia and is responsible for the events that led to Morlac’s Legion of Honor, the highest military commendation in France. Lantier finds out that Valentin, Morlac’s pre-war love and the mother of his child, has not seen him since his return from the war, and has a connection to Wilhelm as well. Through these three lives, and Wilhelm’s, Rufin compares human and animal nature, explores the hopes and disillusionment of the people sent to fight in WWI and the civilians they left behind, and most of all, dissects the concepts of faithfulness and pride.

This compact, beautifully written book is a gem. Rufin manages, in a very entertaining story, to distill the human heart. He gets to the essence of human experience as manifested in philosophy, politics, and love. And he pays tribute to dogs’ faithfulness. All in 150 pages. A terrific read.

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The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain

If you’re a regular here at bookconscious you know I’m a fan of fiction in translation. Over the past few nights I’ve enjoyed The Red Notebook by French author Antoine Laurain. As the book opens, we see Laure Valadier being mugged. A few pages later, Laurent Latellier, owner of Le Cahier Rouge (The Red Notebook) bookstore, notices a handbag on top of a garbage bin.

With the wallet and phone missing, Laurent can’t see who it belongs to. He tries his local police station but they are too busy to help. Still, he can’t bring himself to give up on finding the owner. So he goes through the contents. In the purse he finds . . . a red notebook.

And much more, including a copy of Patrick Modiano‘s Accident Nocturne, signed, “For Laure, in memory of our meeting in the rain.” Laurent is stunned. “Modiano, the most elusive of French authors. Who hadn’t done any book signings for years. . . .” Laurent remembers that another bookseller has seen the Nobel laureate walking in Luxumbourg Garden. He goes for two mornings, waiting to run into the great man, and is rewarded with a description of the woman whose bag he found.

I don’t want to give away any more of the investigation, but you get the idea. Laurent’s headstrong teenaged daughter Chloe plays a part, and so do another author who visits Le Cahier Rouge and Laure’s friend and coworker William. It’s not a straightforward matter of finding the purse’s owner and all living happily after. Laure has her own part to play, her own mystery to solve.

Reading this book was like watching a beautifully done foreign film — I wanted to be in the scenes, eating Laurent’s pot-au-feu, stopping in the cafe’s, riding the “lift” in Laure’s building, “The kind of museum piece found only in old Parisian apartment blocks . . . ” to the “left-hand apartment . . . dimly lit by a tulip-shaped lamp on the landing.” Charming, but not saccharine.

I not only wanted to be in Paris, I wished I was friends with Laure, with William, with Laurent. I wanted to meet the cats in the book, and the people in the gilding workshop where William and Laure work. Just reading about people gilding things for a living transported me to a more exotic life. The Red Notebook is not a flimsy escapist read, though. It’s a thoughtful book. A gentle mystery, but also a reflection on what is mysterious. A romantic story that examines what we reveal to others, even those closest to us, and what we keep hidden.

I liked it so much I’m going to go back and read Antoine Laurain’s previous book, The President’s Hat, next.

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