![]() ![]() He tells her that he wants to find a wife to finance him. It's the novel’s cumulative, idiosyncratic poetry that lingers Enter Shiraha, a lazy, feckless and resoundingly truculent convenience store colleague who is soon fired, only to be rescued by Keiko who takes pity on him. ![]() ![]() Concerned that she’s hurtling towards a childless middle age in a dead-end job, they hanker to “fix” her, begging her to get some therapy or, better still, find a husband. Now part of the “machine of society” and revelling in the newfound safety and comfort of her job, she reckons she’s at long last “pulled off being a ‘person”’.īut now Keiko is 36 years old and her family still isn’t happy. ![]() Discovering that she excels at the daily monotone of restocks and product promotions and difficult customers, Keiko finds contentment and self-respect among the brightly lit aisles and hot food cabinets. Her salvation appears when, aged 18, she secures herself a job at the local Smile Mart convenience store and, paying conscientious attention to the training video, realises “it was the first time anyone had ever taught me how to accomplish a normal facial expression and manner of speech”. Another time she asks her mother if she can eat a dead budgie found in the park. At school she bashes a boy over the head with a shovel to stop him fighting. Keiko has been a worry to her family all her life, bullied and friendless, her behaviour sometimes even chilling. N ot all novel titles manage so very literally to describe the contents, but this one – unapologetically deadpan yet enticingly comic – absolutely does. ![]()
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