Convenience Store Woman Read online

  “Not particularly. I pretty much get it.”

  “Oh, have you worked in a store before?” Sugawara asked.

  “What? No, I haven’t,” he muttered.

  “Well in that case, you still have a lot to learn!” the manager told him. “Start by checking the product displays, will you Miss Furukura? I’m off home to get some sleep now.”

  “Will do!”

  “I’ll take the till!” Sugawara said and rushed off.

  I took Shiraha over to the drink cartons and, using Sugawara’s style of speech, said: “Well, let’s get started, then! Drink cartons sell particularly well in the morning, so make sure the display’s nice and neat. And check that the price cards are in place, okay? And don’t forget shout-outs and customer greetings while you work. And make sure you get out of the way quickly if a customer wants to buy something.”

  “Yeah, all right,” Shiraha said and half-heartedly started straightening the drink cartons.

  “Let me know once you’ve finished that, and I’ll show you how to do the cleaning.”

  He carried on working without bothering to answer.

  I went to help out on the till for the morning rush. By the time the lines had subsided and I went back to check on Shiraha, he was nowhere in sight. The drinks cabinet was a mess, with milk cartons placed among the orange juice.

  I went in search of him, only to find him idly flicking through the store manual.

  “What’s the matter? Is there something you don’t understand?”

  Turning over another page, he answered pompously: “You know, for a chain store manual this isn’t very good. Kind of misses the mark I’d say. You have to start by doing this sort of thing properly, otherwise the company will never improve. That’s what I think.”

  “Shiraha, you haven’t finished tidying the displays like I asked you to, have you?”

  “Uh, yeah, I did,” he said without looking up from the manual.

  I went up to him and raised my voice. “Shiraha, the store displays are more important than the manual! Keeping them neat, along with the customer greetings and shout-outs, are the two most basic of the basic tasks of a store worker, you know! If you don’t understand how, let’s do it together.”

  Ignoring his irritation, I took him back to the drink cartons and rearranged the display while talking him through it in simple terms. “Line things up neatly so they’re facing the customer, like this! And don’t mess up the order of the products. Vegetable juice goes here and soy milk here.”

  “This sort of work isn’t suited to men,” he muttered. “After all, things haven’t changed since the Stone Age, have they? Men go hunting and women keep the home and gather fruit and wild herbs while they wait for the men to come back. This type of work is more suited to the way women’s brains are set up.”

  “Shiraha, we’re in the twenty-first century! Here in the convenience store we’re not men and women. We’re all store workers. Oh, there’s some stock in the back room. Let’s go and sort that out together so you can see how it’s done.”

  I took some of the stock out of the walk-in refrigerator, explained to Shiraha how to refill the displays, and then hurried back to my own work.

  As I carried some boxes of frankfurters over to the cash register, I noticed Sugawara frowning as she filled the coffee machine with beans.

  “That guy is weird, isn’t he? He’s only just finished his training and today’s his first day, right? He hasn’t even spent any time on the till yet, and here he is telling me to let him place the orders!”

  “Really?”

  Well, at least he was keen to do something, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing I thought. She looked up at me and smiled, dimples forming in her plump cheeks.

  “Nothing ever fazes you, does it, Miss Furukura?”

  “What?”

  “No, really, you’re amazing. I can’t stand that sort of guy. He just rubs me the wrong way. But you, well, sometimes you join in when me and Mrs. Izumi are wound up about something, but you yourself never complain, do you? I’ve never seen you get upset even with an annoying newbie.”

  I was startled. I had the feeling I was being told I was a fake and hastily rearranged my expression.

  “That’s not true! It’s just that I don’t let it show.”

  “Wow, really?” She giggled. “I’d be really shocked if you lost your temper with me, Miss Furukura.”

  She was now calm, while I had to pay the utmost attention to the way I moved my facial muscles and formed my words.

  I heard the sound of a basket being put down by the cash register and quickly turned to see a regular customer standing there leaning on her walking stick.

  “Irasshaimasé!” I called out and started briskly scanning the product bar codes.

  The woman narrowed her eyes and said, “This place never changes, does it?”

  I paused, then answered, “You’re right, it doesn’t!”

  Nevertheless, the store manager, the store assistants, the disposable chopsticks, the spoons, the uniforms, the milk and eggs I’d just run through the bar code scanner, the plastic bag I placed them in—none of these had been in the store right from the very beginning. The same items had always been in their places, but they were continually being replaced. Maybe it made sense to say the store never changes.

  As I thought about this, I informed the customer at the top of my lungs: “That’ll be three hundred and ninety yen please!”

  * * *

  On Friday, my day off, I headed to the residential district in Yokohama where my sister lived in a condo in a new housing development opposite the station. Her husband commuted to his job at an electric company and almost always came home on the last train.

  The apartment wasn’t all that large, but it was new and smart and comfortably furnished.

  “Hey, come on in! I’ve just put Yutaro to sleep.”

  “Thanks,” I said and tiptoed inside. It was the first time I’d visited my sister since my nephew was born.

  “So how is it being a parent? It must be hard work!”

  “Well yeah, but I’m getting used to it. It’s much better now that he sleeps at night.”

  When I first saw my nephew through the glass window at the hospital, he looked like an alien creature. But now he’d grown into something more humanlike, complete with hair.

  We sat down to eat the cake I’d brought, accompanied by normal tea for me and caffeine-free rooibos tea for Mami.

  “Delicious. I hardly ever get out now Yutaro is here, so I don’t get to eat anything like this.”

  “Glad you like it.”

  “Whenever you give me food, it reminds me of when we were little,” she said with an embarrassed smile.

  I stroked my sleeping nephew’s cheek with my forefinger. It felt strangely soft, like stroking a blister.

  “You know, when I look at Yutaro, I think, ‘Yeah, he really is just an animal,’” my sister said happily. The boy was frail and often came down with a fever, so she was always fussing over him. She couldn’t help feeling anxious, despite knowing fevers were common for babies and he would be okay.

  “So how are you? Work going well?”

  “Sure, I’m doing fine. Oh, and I went to see Miho and the others back home recently.”

  “What, again? Lucky them! You should come and see your nephew more often,” she said, laughing.

  As far as I was concerned, though, there wasn’t any difference between Miho’s child and my nephew, and I didn’t understand the logic of coming out all the way here just to see him. Maybe this particular baby should be more important to me than the others. But so far as I could see, aside from a few minor differences they were all just an animal called a baby and looked much the same, just like stray cats all looked much the same.

  “Oh, come to think of it, Mami, I wanted to ask you if you can come up with a better excuse for me. Lately when I tell them I’m not very strong, they give me disbelieving looks.”

  “Okay, I’ll
have a think about it. But anyway, you’re being rehabilitated, so it’s not like you’re lying exactly. No need to be embarrassed about it.”

  “But once they get it into their heads that I’m not normal, since they all think they are normal they’ll give me a hard time about it, won’t they? That’d be a lot of bother. So it’d be handy to have an excuse to fend them off with.”

  When something was strange, everyone thought they had the right to come stomping in all over your life to figure out why. I found that arrogant and infuriating, not to mention a pain in the neck. Sometimes I even wanted to hit them with a shovel to shut them up, like I did that time in elementary school.

  But I recalled how upset my sister had been when I’d casually mentioned this to her before and kept my mouth shut.

  She had always been kind to me ever since we were little, and I never wanted to hurt her, so I changed the subject and said cheerfully, “Oh, that reminds me. I met Yukari for the first time in ages, and she told me I’d changed.”

  “Yeah, you are a bit different from the way you used to be.”

  “I am? But then so are you, Mami. I get the impression you’re more like a grown-up than before.”

  “What do you mean by that? I’ve been an adult for some time now.”

  My sister now had crow’s feet, the way she talked was much more relaxed, and her clothes were monotone. There were probably lots of people like this in her life now I thought.

  The baby started to cry. My sister hurriedly picked him up and tried to soothe him. What a lot of hassle I thought. I looked at the small knife we’d used to cut the cake still lying there on the table: if it was just a matter of making him quiet, it would be easy enough. My sister cuddled him tightly to her. Watching them, I wiped some cream from the cake off my lip.

  * * *

  The following morning when I arrived at work, the store was shrouded in an unusually tense atmosphere. Entering through the automatic door, I saw a regular customer looking fearfully over at the magazine corner. A woman who always came to buy coffee rushed past me and out of the store, and two men were standing by the bakery section talking under their breath.

  Wondering what on earth was going on, I glanced in the direction the customers were looking and realized they were all eyeing a middle-aged man in a shabby suit.

  He was walking around the store, talking to various customers. I strained my ears to hear what he was saying, and he appeared to be telling them off. “Hey, you there. Stop making the floor dirty!” he said shrilly to a man with dirty shoes and then to a woman perusing the chocolates: “Oy! Stop messing up the display!” Everyone was watching him nervously, afraid he might pick on them next.

  A long, straggly line had formed at the cash register, where Dat-kun was frantically working the till while the manager dealt with a parcel delivery order for a set of golf clubs. The man went over to them and roared, “Line up properly along the wall, will you? And make it snappy!” The office workers looked alarmed, but they just wanted to finish their shopping quickly and get back to work, so they avoided eye contact and did their best to ignore him.

  I hurried into the back room and took my uniform out of my locker. Watching the security camera as I changed, I saw the male customer head for the magazine corner where he loudly admonished another customer who was standing there reading: “No reading magazines in the store! Come on, buy it or get out!”

  The young man who had been shouted at glared at him irritably and called out to Dat-kun, who was furiously working the till. “Hey, who is this guy? From head office?”

  Flustered, Dat-kun looked up from the till. “No, he’s … um … a customer.”

  “What the crap? You don’t even work here! Who the hell do you think you are?” the young man demanded, pushing up against the bossy customer. “What gives you the right to go around poking your nose in where it’s not wanted?”

  Whenever there was any trouble, we were supposed to leave it to a senior employee to deal with. As per the rules, I quickly finished putting on my uniform and ran to the cash register to take over from the manager. “Thanks, that’s a great help,” he said quietly, then rushed around the counter and slipped himself between the two men. I handed the golf club delivery slip to the customer, keeping an eye on the situation in case it developed into a fight. If that happened, the procedure was to immediately press the alarm.

  In the end, the manager apparently handled the situation well and the troublemaker left the store muttering under his breath.

  A wave of relief passed through the store, and the morning atmosphere returned to normal.

  A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment where foreign matter is immediately eliminated. The threatening atmosphere that had briefly permeated the store was swept away, and the customers again concentrated on buying their coffee and pastries as if nothing had happened.

  “Thank you, Miss Furukura, that was a big help,” the manager said once the line at last came to an end and I went to the back room.

  “Not at all. I’m glad there wasn’t a fight.”

  “I wonder what on earth got into that guy? I’ve never seen him before.”

  Mrs. Izumi was already there in the back room and asked the manager, “Did something happen?”

  “No, just a really weird customer was going around the store shouting at people. Luckily he left before causing any real trouble.”

  “Really? Was he a regular?”

  “No, never seen him before. No idea what he was trying to do. He didn’t seem like a thug, though. Anyway, if he comes back be sure to contact me right away. We don’t want him causing trouble for the other customers.”

  “Yes, will do.”

  “Well then, I’ll be off home now. I’m on again tonight.”

  “You must be exhausted. Oh, by the way, can you give Shiraha a talking-to for me? He’s always shirking his duties, and he doesn’t take any notice of what I tell him.”

  Mrs. Izumi almost had the status of a head office employee, so she could discuss employee matters like this with the manager.

  “He really does seem useless. I’ve had a bad feeling about him ever since the interview. The way he talks the job down, saying it’s only a convenience store, like he’s taking the piss. So why did he apply in the first place? I only took him on because we’re so short-staffed, but … he just doesn’t listen unless you really spell everything out for him.”

  “He’s often late too. Today he’s supposed to be on from nine, but he’s not even here yet,” Mrs. Izumi said with a frown. “How old is he? Thirty-five or so? And taking a job like this! He’s beyond hope, isn’t he?”

  “A dead-ender. The worst type, just a burden on society. People have a duty to fulfill their role in society either through the workplace or the family.”

  Mrs. Izumi nodded vigorously, then nudged the manager. “But then sometimes there are special circumstances, like in Miss Furukura’s case, which is understandable.”

  “Ah, yes, right. In Miss Furukura’s case it can’t be helped. It’s different for men and women too!” the manager also hastily added. Before I could respond he went on: “Shiraha’s such a loser, though. I’ve even caught him fiddling with his cell phone while working the till.”

  “Yes! I’ve seen him do that too.”

  “What? While he’s working?” I asked in surprise.

  It was a fundamental rule never to carry your phone around while at work. I couldn’t understand why he’d violate such a simple directive.

  “You know I always check the security camera for the times I’m not here, right? Shiraha’s new on the job, so I keep an eye on him to see what he’s like. On the surface he seems to be doing kind of okay, but he does have a habit of neglecting the work, doesn’t he?”

  “I’m sorry I never noticed it.”

  “No, no, it’s nothing for you to apologize about, Miss Furukura. You’ve been doing really well with greeting customers, I must say. Every time I check the camera, I’m impressed
. You’re really great. You never take time off, and you never do anything less than an excellent job.”

  Manager #8 was looking over me when he wasn’t there and knew that I was a faithful disciple to the store.

  “Thank you!” I said, bowing deeply.

  Just then the door opened and Shiraha came in.

  “Oh … good morning,” he said listlessly, his voice barely audible. He was all skin and bones and probably needed the suspenders visible through his white shirt to hold his trousers up. The skin on his arms looked as though it was stuck straight onto his bones, and I wondered how all his internal organs could fit into such a skinny body.

  “Shiraha, you’re late! You should be here changed and ready to start the morning session five minutes before time! And make sure you greet everyone properly with a bright and cheerful ‘good morning’ when you come into the office. Plus, it’s forbidden to use your cell phone except during your breaks. You have it with you when you’re working on the till, don’t you? I’ve seen you look at it.”

  “Ah … Oh, sorry …” Shiraha was visibly disconcerted. “Um, you mean yesterday? Were you watching me, Miss Furukura?”

  He seemed to think I’d told on him. “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “The camera, Shiraha,” the manager said. “The security camera! When I’m on night shift I always check up on what’s been going on during the day shift. Well, maybe I didn’t explain the rule against using your cell phone clearly enough, but don’t do it, okay?”

  “Oh, okay. I didn’t know. Sorry.”

  “Right. Don’t do it again. Oh, Mrs. Izumi, will you come out into the store with me? I want to get the summer gifts section up on the aisle end shelves. I want to make a big display this time.”

  “Sure. The samples have already arrived, haven’t they? I’ll give you a hand!”

  “I want to get it done today. I need to include an extra shelf at the bottom for miscellaneous summer goods, so we have to change the heights of all the shelves. Miss Furukura and Shiraha, can you get on with the morning practice on your own? I want to get this seen to first.”