The Joy of Not Fitting in: Asexuality Dynamics in Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman

Abstract

The notions of success, sexuality, and happiness are largely arbitrary and mediated by culture, gender, and societal norms. The linear narrative of many women’s lives has largely been circumscribed and bound by family structures. The vocal feminist defies these norms flagrantly, but what if the woman is just another Fly on the wall, doing a mind-numbing routine for two decades yet finds comfort in the banality of her existence? Sayaka Murata’s protagonist Keiko Furukura is an ordinary saleswoman in a supermarket at the heart of Tokyo. Juxtaposing Keiko’s ordinariness with the opulence and grandeur of uptown Tokyo, this paper explores the struggles and subtleties of living a life of nonconformity without regard to sexual orientation. At 36, with no great career, no companion, no money and no prospects of a ‘bright’ future, Keiko is ‘different’, the oddball without purposefully intending to be one. Reading Keiko’s life in the light of contemporary asexuality theories, this paper chooses to play on the binaries of success/failure, sexual/ asexual, society/individual, insider/outlier and illuminate the cause of the most marginalised stream of sexuality studies: asexuality.