This book is simply about a person being true to herself. It’s not just that Keiko is a non-conformist; even most “non-conformists” find their own tribe. It’s that she is someone completely illegible to everyone else. That everyone around her doesn’t understand why Kieko has remained working at the convenience store for the last 18 years, has not married and started a family, is the driving tension of the book. Kieko doesn’t feel lonely or unfulfilled; only when others comment on the seeming waste she has made of her life that she feels anxiety, and seeks change. She gives in to this pressure by entering an arrangement with Shiraha, only to realize that doing so was a mistake, and at the end joyfully comes back to work at a konbini once more.
Where Kieko feels aimless and lost outside of the konbini, inside of it she becomes alive and fulfilled. She’s good at what she does, and everyone at one form or another seeks this kind of validation from a job well done. Of course usually this means some kind of creative pursuit like making art, not keeping a convenience store meticulously clean and well-stocked. But who are we to judge what brings her happiness? The real tragedy of Kieko is not that she has wasted her life, nor that she has failed to conform to the expectations of society, but rather it is that society has failed to recognize and cultivate what makes a fulfilling life for her. An employee like Kieko, who is very perceptive of the store’s needs, who is always attentive to customers, should be compensated much more than the meager wage she makes. Her family and her friends should accept her solitude and her lack of desire to have a family.
I think that everyone reacts to Kieko’s life with pity out of a sense of anxiety about their own life, not out of genuine concern for hers. (And even if it was genuine concern, it is clear that the concern is misguided.) What if I got stuck working the same dead-end job for the rest of my life? What if I never find someone to marry? These are their concerns, not Kieko’s, and to see her indifference at what to them seems like abject failure must be a disorienting experience. Her life screams out to them: It doesn’t have to be like this. You can always want something else. To those who have shuttered the big questions of life away and who have taken the path of least resistance (read: the path that everyone else has set out for them), this is a painful thing to confront. So it is natural that they would rather take Keiko to be weird and pathetic than to start wondering who exactly they are and what they should be really doing with their life.