Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

First Line: A convenience store is a world of sound.

 

Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura has never "fit in", has never felt normal even in her own family, but when, at the age of eighteen, she starts working at Smile Mart as a convenience store worker, she finds peace and true purpose in her life. She understands the rules of social interaction because most of it is spelled out in the employee manual. She learns how to copy her fellow workers in how they dress and speak so well that she appears normal, and her younger sister helps her in crafting "normal" responses to questions her friends and co-workers may ask.

 

This has been Keiko's life for eighteen years. It's hard to tell where the convenience store ends and she begins. She's happy. She knows her place in the world. She contributes. But her family and those close to her aren't happy. Her family want her to be "cured" and to become a normal functioning part of society. They pressure her to find a husband. To get married. To have children. To be like everyone else. And this pressure leads Keiko to take desperate measures.

 

~

 

I was very fortunate with my immediate family. I knew from the age of eight that I didn't want to have babies. When I played house with the children across the street, I went to work and my "husband" stayed home with the kids. This feeling never changed, and no one in my immediate family ever tried to get me to "see sense". They were willing to let me be me even if it meant no husband and no babies. For several years in my working life, I supervised dozens of teenagers. Perhaps it was my way with them that made everyone think I was married and had at least six children. Even if it wasn't, at least no one bothered me about my lack of marital status and children; they already "knew" I was married. I was very lucky indeed because I saw many others being harassed by their families to conform.

Poor Keiko Furukura was not as fortunate as I. She's spent her entire life being the square peg everyone tries to pound into the round hole. Keiko tends to take everything literally, and when Murata described some incidents in her childhood, they made me laugh-- which has to be another indication that I'm a fellow square peg. Keiko is perfectly happy, but her family insists on her being "cured", on her meeting their expectations for her life. 

Convenience Store Worker is a little gem of a novella that sucked me right in. I knew that Keiko would bow to her family's pressure, and I hated that. I hoped that she would be strong enough to survive her attempt to please others and that she'd be able to return to being her kind of happy. I can see why Sayaka Murata is such a popular writer in Japan, and I will be looking for more of her work. Now if only more people would abide by her message in Convenience Store Worker: Don't stick your nose in someone else's business. Square pegs do have a place and a purpose in this world.

 

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

eISBN: 9780802165800

Grove Atlantic © 2018

eBook, 135 pages

 

Novella, Standalone

Rating: A

Source: Purchased from Amazon.

The Forgotten Highlander by Alistair Urquhart

First Line: As one of the last survivors of my battalion of the Gordon Highlanders, the majority of whom were either killed or captured by the Japanese Imperial Army in Singapore, I know that I am a lucky man.

The life of World War II veteran Alistair Urquhart almost beggars belief. As a hard-working young man with a bright future ahead of him in Aberdeen, Scotland, Alistair is drafted into the Gordon Highlanders and shipped with his fellow soldiers to Singapore.

Urquhart, along with so many of his fellows, is captured when the Japanese overrun Singapore, and they all are packed into boxcars and shipped to work on the Death Railway between Thailand and Burma. Tens of thousands of natives and POWs died in its construction, but Urquhart managed to survive. He was then crammed aboard a Japanese hell ship that was torpedoed by an American submarine. After five days, Urquhart was picked up by Japanese fishermen and taken to another work camp at Omuta. Two months later he was ten miles away from Ground Zero when the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. In August of 1945 he was freed by the U.S. Navy. 

When I first read the synopsis of this book, two thoughts ran through my mind. (1) Alistair Urquhart went through even more than Louis Zamperini, an American POW made famous by Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken. (2) A line from an old television variety show-- "If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all." What an incredible will that man must have!

Although the quality of writing isn't nearly as high as Hillenbrand's in Unbroken, I enjoyed this book more. It has everything to do with Urquhart's voice. In The Forgotten Highlander, you get it direct, unfiltered by someone else. His rage, though well-tempered from the passage of years, comes through loud and clear, and it's not just directed at the Japanese. This man is a Scot, and Scots are known for treating everyone as though they're standing on a level playing field. He had no use for the prejudice and colonialism he found in Singapore, and he found things so badly run that he was surprised that the Japanese hadn't taken over long ago. He also points the finger at himself. He was far from being all sweetness and light during his years as a POW, and when his behavior was detrimental to himself and others, he lets us know about it. His honesty brings this story to an even higher level.

This man was forced to endure a hell that you and I can't even begin to imagine. What Urquhart finds completely unacceptable is that young Japanese know very little about how their own country conducted itself in World War II. Those growing up in Germany know their true history, and Urquhart believes Japanese children should, too. (I'll rework Santayana a bit to say "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.")

The Forgotten Highlander is ugly. It's brutal. Above all, it's honest. It even has flashes of humor-- and it's stories like these that are vital in our understanding of World War II. Alistair Urquhart is an incredible man, and I am fortunate to have read his story. 

The Forgotten Highlander: An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific 

by Alistair Urquhart

eISBN: 9781616081522

Skyhorse Publishing © 2010

eBook, 312 pages

Non-Fiction, Standalone

Rating: A

Source: Purchased from Amazon 

Born in the Year of Courage by Emily Crofford

First Line: Manjiro lay wondering why he had awakened with a sense of foreboding.

Based on the life of a real person, Born in the Year of Courage is the story of a poor, fifteen-year-old fisherman named Manjiro who, in 1841, was marooned on an island with his crewmates and later rescued by an American whaling ship. Since the American ship was not allowed to enter Japanese territorial waters, Manjiro and the others knew the only thing they could do was stay aboard the whaler.

When the whaler leaves Hawaii, the other fishermen choose to stay in that tropical paradise, but Manjiro follows Captain Whitfield. Manjiro is raised by the Whitfields as a son. He learns English, attends school, and signs on as second mate and navigator on board another American ship. Extremely hard-working and loyal, Manjiro remains true to both his Japanese and his American families, and as an adult works tirelessly to open Japan to contact with the rest of the world. 

This book, geared towards pre-teens, is just as interesting to read for adults. Crofford shares much information into the lives of the Japanese in the first half of the nineteenth century as well as what life aboard a whaling ship was like. The chapters concerning the shipwreck and being marooned on a rather barren island are gripping.

Manjiro, a simple man whose culture didn't allow him to have a surname, is a truly inspiring person who believed that oceans link countries, not separate them, and he spent his life working for what he believed in. I am a long way from being a pre-teen, but I was very impressed with the power and insight of this book. 

Born in the Year of Courage by Emily Crofford

ISBN: 9781575054247

First Avenue Editions © 1991

Paperback, 160 pages

Young Adult, Historical Fiction

Rating: B

Source: Paperback Swap 

The Dragon Scroll by I.J. Parker

Title: The Dragon Scroll
Author: I.J. Parker
ISBN: 9780143035329
Publisher: Penguin, 2005
Paperback, 340 pages
Genre: Historical Mystery, #1 Sugawara Akitada mystery
Rating: A
Source: Purchased at Bookcloseouts

First Line: There were two watchers in the garden that night.

When author I.J. Parker contacted me about reading her latest historical mystery, The Masuda Affair, I thought honesty would be the best policy. Explaining that I tend to be a stickler for reading mystery series in order, I did say that I had a copy of her first Sugawara Akitada mystery on my shelves, and I'd be more than happy to read and review it. That was quite all right with the author, and I'm grateful that the author gave me the tiny shove I needed to begin this series.


Like many other people in the late 1970s, I devoured James Clavell's Shōgun. I loved the characters, the story, the history-- and the mini-series based upon Clavell's novel cemented my new found interest in Japanese history.

Author I.J. Parker's mystery series is set in eleventh-century Japan, roughly 500 years before Clavell's novel. In The Dragon Scroll, young Sugawara Akitada is an impoverished nobleman and a government clerk in the Ministry of Justice. His first assignment is to travel to the remote province of Kazusa to track down the thieves who have stolen the last three years' worth of tax shipments. To be blunt about it, he's being set up to fail.

Traveling along the Tokaido Road with his older family retainer, Seimei, the two are soon joined by Tora, a young working class man who, for some unknown reason, doesn't have the papers necessary to travel within Japan. Against the mutterings of Seimei, Akitada decides to trust Tora and obtains a set of identity papers for him.

In no time, the three men are in the capital of Kazusa. The former governor of the province requests a meeting with Akitada, but before that can take place, the man is murdered. Akitada finds himself beset by bandits, rogues, and shifty politicians, but he is determined to bring both thieves and murderers to justice.

This book has a wonderful sense of pace-- and a wonderful cast of characters. Akitada, Seimei and Tora play off each other very well, and Parker puts a sharp sense of humor to good use. Her descriptive powers remind me of Japanese woodcuts, like in this scene:

Above them the wind swept ragged smoky clouds along; before them the charcoal-dark ocean boiled and subsided with a continuous roar, vomiting up dirty yellow foam and swallowing it again; and all about them swirled and blew the spray and the everlasting rain, tearing at their cloaks and slapping the wet, salt-laden wisps of their hats against their stinging cheeks.

Parker has told a story with such a strong sense of time and place and populated it with characters who are smart enough, funny enough and cantankerous enough to live on the page. I have to know what happens to Akitada and Seimei and Tora next. I have to.

The only bad thing about being given the necessary push to read this first book in the series is that now I want to read them all, one right after the other. Books have always been my "Lay's Potato Chips".

Buy from Amazon.

Buy from The Book Depository.

Buy from an Indie bookseller.

A Taste of Ancient Japan to Whet Your Appetite

Shinsen-en Garden

Isn't this a beautiful garden? The heron certainly seems to be enjoying it. Back in the eleventh century, the Shinsen-en Garden was part of the Heian Imperial Palace in Kyoto, Japan.

What has this got to do with anything? Well, the world's first true novel was written by a lady of the Heian court. She was known as Murasaki Shikibu, and the novel she wrote is known as The Tale of the Genji. There is a wonderful website dedicated to giving all of us a better understanding of the book, and one of the ways this is done is by photographing many of the sites in Japan that are mentioned in the book.

I haven't read The Tale of the Genji lately, but I do have an ulterior motive for talking about it right now. Murasaki Shikibu wrote her novel in the eleventh century, which is the same time frame as the book I'm about to review.

Like many others at the time, I became fascinated with Japanese history when I read James Clavell's Shōgun. The mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain only served to fan the flames of my interest. When I read I.J. Parker's excellent The Dragon Scroll, I could picture many things very clearly, but it was still nice to know in scrolling through the pages of the Genji website that my mind was fairly accurate after thirty years.

If visiting eleventh-century Japan from your chair intrigues you, take a look at the photos on the Genji site, read my review of The Dragon Scroll, and locate copies of I.J. Parker's books. You'll be glad you did!

Extras by Scott Westerfeld

Title: Extras
Author: Scott Westerfeld
ISBN: 9781416951179, Simon Pulse, 2007
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Rating: B

First Line: "Moggle," Aya whispered. "You awake?"

It is now several years after the massive shift of Specials, the third in Westerfeld's Uglies series. 15-year-old Aya Fuse will do anything to boost her public name recognition, which is essential in the current "recognition economy". Yes...a celebrity-based system has now replaced the boring, brainless cult of Pretties. You have to have a high name rank in order to get any real perks in life. What Asa doesn't know is that the story that she follows is a dangerous one that will have many repercussions.

I have really enjoyed this series. Westerfeld is extremely talented in mining rich themes from today's culture and spinning them into engrossing stories. That said, I think this book is the weakest in the series. There are too many secondary characters, and some of the action is a bit difficult to follow. I do love how Westerfeld's mind works though. Tally Youngblood risked life and limb to change the world, only to have the world shift to this "recognition economy" which is just as shallow as the Pretties cult was. The world Westerfeld envisions is all too close to the world we have today, and that gives me plenty to ponder.

As a reader, I was reading Young Adult books well before the age of twelve, and I jumped straight into adult fiction. One of the things that book blogging has done for me is to make me aware of how much excellent writing is being done in the Young Adult category, and I'm enjoying the time I spend reading it. Westerfeld is now one of my favorite authors, and I'll keep a look-out for any of his future books.