Hello, welcome back to Chari's. Today we are going to be talking about convenience store women by Sayaka Marata. This came out in Japan in 2016 and was translated into English by Ginny Tapley Takamori in 2018. This book follows a woman called Keiko. We meet her when she is 36 years old and she has been working for 18 years in a convenience store. She is just kind of like a bit weird and thinks a bit differently to most people and is genuinely really satisfied with her job. But increasingly her friends and family are finding it really strange that she is not either much around vicious or settling down with the husband and children by now. The plot kicks off when a man comes to work in the store who is looking for a wife. And Keiko and him kind of realise that they could have a mutually beneficial arrangement that would get her friends and family off her back for not having a family yet. This was quite a strange, very quirky, but nice quick read. I've seen a lot of people describe it as funny. Like on the cover it says funny twice, both by Sally Rooney and Elifatman calls it hilarious. And oh god it's not funny at all. It's only funny in the way that you have to kind of laugh off something that disturbs you. The more I thought about this book after I finished it, the more I found it like deeply, deeply depressing. Because it's about this woman whose autonomy is being taken from her. She has to have this facade of being like a normal person and fulfilling all of these social expectations. Like in some levels it's kind of just like amusing the way that she will imitate the dress sense of her co-workers to sort of fit in. But in other ways it's really horrible. So she takes up with this incredibly like abusive and like a boring man. I'm not gonna say that this ends on a depressing note because it doesn't. It is just a relentlessly sad novel about a woman that is not allowed to be the person who she deeply is. Kiko's relationship to the store though is just delightful. The goings-on of this shop are just her natural rhythms. Like she just really understands the flow of what things have to happen, or what times and what people are gonna need and what people are gonna want. And she makes it- she kind of like lays out how complex this system, this like beautiful harmonious system of this shop is and how it provides for people. And no one else in the book appreciates it at all. It's been really strange reading this book over lockdown when you know there's been all of this chatter about how grocery shop workers are the young slang heroes and are really underappreciated. But the truth is that no one really respects the idea of working in a corner shop. The idea of only one is has some sort of attainment to it. But the idea of being satisfied and not progressing is something that's really frowned upon. And even the rest of the characters of this book don't respect the role. They see it as temporary or like something you have when you're down on your luck. But yeah, Kiko really like elevates it to this just wonderful position and it really is so perfect for her. So that was really nice. But overall it was very depressing and not in the way that I sometimes really like depressing books where there's this tiny glimmer of hope and that tiny glimmer of hope. Just like fills you with wonder. Although this does has like the glimmer of the wonder that is this relationship between her and the shop. It's still like it doesn't you'd ever get resolution on like the darkest elements of the book. So in that way like it didn't like thrill me but I still would recommend it. It reminded me that people are different. I mean there's such like an easy thing to say. But it's I think a lot of people myself included for sure go through life with my set of values and the people that don't align with those values. You sort of like tacitly assume that like either they're they're unsuccessful in the eyes of your values or they value different things and that is inherently of a lower value to whatever you value. But this is just so like she's so innocent and delightful that it kind of like throws away all of that all of that stuff. I've definitely been the person that the people in this book like out of the garden parties who look down on someone for not like being more ambitious. I mean I'm not thinking of like a specific example. I mean in the way that probably most of us do. And this book like really disarms that notion and yeah for that I I found it really brilliant. So this has been a video on convenience store women by Sarah Comerata. Have you read it? Did you enjoy it? Let me know your thoughts in the comments down below and I'll see you in my next video. Bye.