Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the shaseibun-like sensory quality in Murata’s international breakthrough novel. The emphasis will be on its defamilializing/queering effect, which I would argue invites our empathy for the protagonist’s otherwise “quirky” and at times “chilling” positioning act.

Paper long abstract:

A convenience store is a world of sound. From the tinkle of the door chime to…the calls of the store workers, the beeps of the bar code scanner, the rustle of customers picking up items and placing them in baskets, and the clacking of heels walking around the store. It all blends into the convenience store sound that ceaselessly caresses my eardrums.

(Murata 2019, 1)

Surprising as it may sound, there is a shaseibun-like sensory quality to this “sublimely weird” late Heisei text, Convenience Store Woman (CSW for short), which has become an international million seller. As many have pointed out, the foremost agenda for the Meiji novelists was to establish the unified external point of view in a genbun-itchi style without relinquishing the long-treasured sense of rinjôkan (a sense of being on the scene), which was not easy because they often worked against each other. In this challenging process emerged the now standard narrative pattern that switches between -ru and -ta, of which Natsume Sôseki’s shaseibun can be seen as a distinct variant. Although he abandoned the shaseibun project after a while, my hypothesis is that its spirit has survived the vicissitudes of genre formations and trends in the post-Meiji history of Japanese literature.

The aim of this paper is to read CSW through the shaseibun-oriented cognitive lens to analyze its impact on our reading experience. Shaseibun has a great potential for defamiliarization as it is an attempt at “transforming standardized conceptual expressions into something that evokes more perceptual (sensory) experiences” (Komori Yôichi 1996), which I would argue is precisely what CSW does. It is written exclusively from the “unreliable,” first-person perspective of Keiko the protagonist for whom the social norms that others take for granted (“doxas”) are mere “noises” that interfere with her well-being as a konbini-worker. The world filtered through her mind’s eyes looks quite different from what we are used to, which has a radically defamiliarizing/queering effect on our perception. The paper will examine how this cognitive estrangement invites our curiosity and even empathy for Keiko’s otherwise “quirky” and at times even “chilling” positioning act.