Convenience Store Woman Page 5

  “Yes, we will!”

  Once the manager and Mrs. Izumi had left the back room, Shiraha tutted. When I glanced over at him, he spat, “Huh. He sure does talk big for a lowly convenience store manager.”

  When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as I do so I always think: that’s what a human is.

  And sometimes even those who are doing the same job are biased against it. Before I knew what I was doing, I looked Shiraha in the face.

  I find the shape of people’s eyes particularly interesting when they’re being condescending. I see a wariness or a fear of being contradicted or sometimes a belligerent spark ready to jump on any attack. And if they’re unaware of being condescending, their glazed-over eyeballs are steeped in a fluid mix of ecstasy and a sense of superiority.

  I looked into Shiraha’s eyes. There I saw only prejudice in its simplest form.

  As if sensing my gaze on him, he opened his mouth to speak, revealing the yellowing roots of teeth that were black in places. He obviously hadn’t been to the dentist for a long time.

  “Who is he to throw his weight around anyway?” he went on. “He’s only employed to run a small store like this, so he’s basically a loser, isn’t he? Just a useless piece of shit.”

  They were harsh words, but he muttered them so quietly I somehow didn’t get the feeling he really was all that angry. From where I stood, there were two types of prejudiced people—those who had a deep-rooted urge for prejudice and those who unthinkingly repeated a barrage of slurs they’d heard somewhere. Shiraha appeared to be the latter.

  He carried on muttering at speed, now and then fumbling his words.

  “Everyone here is a stupid loser. It’s the same in any convenience store. You’ll only find housewives who can’t get by on their husbands’ salary, job-hoppers without plans for the future, and the crappiest students who can’t get better jobs like being a home tutor. Or foreigners who send money home. All losers.”

  “I see.”

  He really was just like me, uttering words that sounded human when really he wasn’t saying anything at all. But he sure did seem to like the word “loser.” He’d used it several times in no time at all. I recalled how Sugawara had said, “Shiraha gives me the creeps, especially the way he’s so adept at spouting excuses when what he really wants is to slack off.” I nodded. Then a simple question occurred to me, so I put it to him.

  “Why did you come to work here, Shiraha?”

  “Marriage hunting,” he said, as if it were no big deal.

  “What?” I exclaimed in surprise. I’d heard all kinds of reasons: “It’s close to home” or “it looks fun.” But this was the first time I met anyone who’d come to work in a convenience store in order to find a marriage partner.

  “But it’s a dead loss.” Shiraha said. “There’s no one here who’d make a decent wife. The young ones are too flighty, and the others are too old.”

  “Well, most of the workers are university students, and you don’t often get anyone of marriageable age.”

  “Some of the customers are kind of okay, but most of them are too haughty. This place is surrounded by big companies and the type of women who work for them are too domineering for my taste.”

  I don’t know who he thought he was talking to, but all the while he was staring at a notice on the wall that read: LET‘S REACH OUR TARGETS FOR THE SUMMER GIFTS!

  “They’re all after snaring a guy who works at the same company and won’t even look at me. Women have been like that since the Stone Age. The youngest, prettiest girls in the village go to the strongest hunters. They leave strong genes, while the rest of us just have to console ourselves with what’s left. Our so-called modern society is just an illusion. We’re living a world that has hardly changed since prehistoric times. We might go on about equality of the sexes, but—”

  “Shiraha, get changed into your uniform, will you? If we don’t do the morning practice now we won’t finish in time,” I said, interrupting his rant against the customers.

  He grudgingly picked up his backpack and went to his locker, still muttering to himself as he shoved his things inside it.

  As I watched him, the middle-aged man the manager had thrown out of the store earlier came to mind.

  “Um, you do realize you’ll be fixed?”

  “What?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard right.

  “Oh, nothing. Hurry up and change so we can do the morning practice!”

  A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment, so the likes of you are fixed right away I thought as I watched him taking his time getting changed. But I didn’t say it out loud.

  * * *

  On Monday morning I arrived at the store to find a big red cross through Shiraha’s name on the shift roster. I was thinking he must have suddenly taken time off, when Mrs. Izumi turned up, right on time even though it was supposed to be her day off.

  “Good morning! Um, what happened with Shiraha?” I asked the manager as he came off his night shift into the back room.

  “Ah, Shiraha …” He and Mrs. Izumi exchanged a wry look. “Yesterday we had a little talk and decided to leave him off the work roster,” the manager said nonchalantly. I wasn’t entirely surprised.

  “I was willing to overlook his slacking off and even how he would secretly eat the food put out for disposal, but there was a woman customer, a regular, who’d forgotten her parasol and came back to get it, and he started behaving all stalkerish toward her, copying her phone number from the delivery service slip and trying to find out where she lived. Mrs. Izumi here realized what was going on and I checked the security video right away. So I talked to him and told him to leave.”

  What an idiot, I thought. Store workers sometimes break little rules, but I’d never heard of anything as ugly as this. It was just lucky it hadn’t become a police matter.

  “The guy was weird from the start. He got the phone number for a girl working the night shift from the store’s contact data and started calling her, and then hung around in the back room so he could suggest going home together. He even tried to chat up Mrs. Izumi, who’s married. I wish he’d put that much energy into doing the job! You didn’t like him either, did you, Miss Furukura?” he said.

  Mrs. Izumi made a face. “He really gave me the creeps. What a pervert. When he didn’t have any luck with the store workers, he started trying it on with the customers! Just the pits. We really should have had him arrested.”

  “Oh, he hadn’t gone that far, not yet at least.”

  “It’s criminal, you know. Criminal! With his sort, the sooner you have him arrested the better.”

  For all they were complaining, though, somehow there was an air of relief in the store. Now that Shiraha was no longer there, it had gone back to being the peaceful place it had been before his arrival. And everyone had become strangely cheerful and chatty, as if refreshed now that the nuisance had gone.

  “To tell the truth, he was getting on my nerves. I’d rather we were short-staffed!” said Sugawara with a smile as she arrived for her shift. “He was just the worst, always making excuses, and if you warned him about slacking off he’d start going on about the Stone Age. A nutjob, if you ask me.”

  “Oh yes, that!” Mrs. Izumi burst out laughing. “That Stone Age stuff was weird. What was he going on about? Completely nonsensical! Please don’t employ anyone like that again,” she added, turning to the manager.

  “Well, it was only because we were so short-staffed—”

  “Getting fired from a casual job in a convenience store at his age! Hopeless, really. He’d be doing us all a favor if he dropped dead, seriously.”

  Everyone laughed. “He really would,” I said nodding, thinking that if I ever became a foreign object, I’d no doubt be eliminated in much the same way.

  “We’ll have to find someone else … I’d better put up an ad.”
/>   And so one of the cells of the store was again being replaced.

  After the morning practice, which was livelier than usual, I was on my way to the cash register when I saw a regular customer, a woman with a walking stick, reaching for something on the bottom shelf, bending down so far it looked as though she would topple over.

  “Let me help you! Is this what you were after?” I asked, picking up a pot of strawberry jam.

  “Thank you,” she said with a smile.

  I carried her basket to the till. As she fished out her purse to pay, she again muttered, “This place really doesn’t ever change, does it?”

  Actually, someone was eliminated from here today, I thought. But I merely told her “thank you” and started scanning her purchases.

  Her figure overlapped with that of the old lady who had been the very first customer when the store opened eighteen years ago. She too had come daily, walking with a stick, until one day I realized she wasn’t coming anymore. Maybe her health had deteriorated, or maybe she’d moved. We had no way of knowing.

  But here I was repeating the same scene of that first day. Since then we had greeted the same morning 6,607 times.

  I gently placed the eggs in a plastic bag. The same eggs I sold yesterday, only different. The customer put the same chopsticks into the same plastic bag as yesterday, took the same change, and gave the same morning smile.

  * * *

  Miho texted to let me know she was holding a barbecue party at her house on Sunday. I had just promised to help her with the shopping in the morning when my cell phone rang. It was a call from home.

  “Keiko, didn’t you say you were going to Miho’s place tomorrow? Won’t you show your face here afterward? Your father misses you.”

  “Um, I don’t think I can. I have to be in good physical shape for work the next day, so I’d better get home early.”

  “Really? What a pity … You didn’t come over for New Year’s either. Please do come soon.”

  “Okay.”

  We were so short-staffed over New Year’s that I’d worked every day of the holiday. The convenience store is open 365 days a year, and many of the staff are unable to come in over the New Year, what with housewives being busy with their families and international students returning to their home countries. I’d wanted to go see my parents, but when I realized what a fix the store was in I’d without hesitation opted to work.

  “Well, how are you?” my mother went on. “You spend all day on your feet, Keiko. It must be tiring. Um, how have things been lately? What’s new?”

  Hearing her pry like this, I got the feeling that somehow she was still hoping for some kind of new development in my life. She was probably a bit tired of how I hadn’t progressed at all in eighteen years.

  When I told her everything was fine as usual, she sounded both relieved and disappointed at once.

  After we hung up, I looked at myself in the mirror. I had aged since the day I’d been reborn as a convenience store worker. That didn’t bother me, except that I got tired more easily than before. I sometimes wondered what would become of me if I got too old to work here. Manager #6 had to quit his job when he hurt his back and was unable to work. To ensure that didn’t happen to me, I had to keep my body in good shape, for the sake of the store.

  The next morning, as promised, I helped Miho with the shopping and preparations for the barbecue. At noon, Miho’s husband, Satsuki’s husband, and some friends who lived a little way away came over. It was the first time we’d all been together for ages.

  Of the fourteen or fifteen people gathered together, there were only two others apart from me who weren’t married. I hadn’t thought anything of it since not everyone had come as a couple, but unmarried Miki whispered to me: “We’re the only ones here who can’t hold our heads up high, aren’t we?”

  “It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen everyone! When was the last time? That hanami party?”

  “Same here. It’s my first time back since then too.”

  “So, what are you guys all up to these days?”

  For quite a few of the friends gathered, it was the first time they had been back in the area for some time, so one by one we all gave updates on our situations.

  “I’m living in Yokohama now. It’s better for work, after all.”

  “Oh, have you changed jobs?”

  “Yes! I’m in a fashion accessories firm now. The atmosphere in my previous job was a bit, well … you know.”

  “I got married and live in Saitama now. I’m still in the same job, though.”

  “As you can see, I had a baby and am on maternity leave,” Yukari said, and then it was my turn.

  “I’m working part-time in a convenience store. My health …”

  I was about to give the usual excuse my sister had made for me, when Eri leaned forward. “Part-time? Oh, so that means you got married!” she said, as if it were self-evident. “When was that?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I answered.

  “But, then, how come you’re only doing that sort of job?” Mamiko asked, puzzled.

  “Well, you see, my health …”

  “You see, Keiko’s not very strong, and that’s why she doesn’t have a regular job,” Miho said, covering for me.

  I started to thank Miho for speaking up for me, but Yukari’s husband butted in suspiciously. “What? But you have to be on your feet all day in a job like that.”

  It was the first time I’d ever met him, and here he was leaning forward and frowning at me as if questioning my very existence.

  “Um, well, I don’t have any experience of other jobs, and the store is comfortable for me both physically and mentally.”

  He stared at me as though I were some kind of alien. “What, you never …? I mean, if finding a job is so hard, then at least you should get married. Look, these days there are always things like online marriage sites, you know,” he sputtered.

  As I watched, some of his spittle flew out and landed on the barbecue meat. He really should avoid leaning forward over food when talking, I thought. But then Miho’s husband started nodding vigorously too.

  “That’s right, why don’t you just find someone? It doesn’t really matter who it is, after all. Women have it easy in that sense. It’d be disastrous if you were a man, though.”

  “How about if we find someone for you? Yoji, you have a wide circle of connections, don’t you?” asked Satsuki.

  “Yes, great idea!” Miho and the others exclaimed excitedly. “Can you think of anyone? There must be someone just right for her.”

  Miho’s husband whispered in her ear, then forced a smile. “Oh, but all my friends are married now … no, it’s impossible. There’s no one.”

  “So why don’t you register on a marriage site? We should take a photo now for you to use. For that sort of thing, it’s best not to use a selfie. You’re much more likely to come across as likable and get lots of responses with a photo of you surrounded by a lot of other people, like today’s barbecue.”

  “Yes, it’s true! Come on, let’s take a photo now!” Miho said.

  Stifling a laugh, Yukari’s husband said, “Yes, it’s a golden opportunity!”

  “Opportunity? Do you think any good can come out of it?” I asked naively.

  He looked flustered. “Well, worth trying, the sooner the better. You can’t go on like this, and deep down you must be getting desperate, no? Once you get past a certain age it’ll be too late.”

  “I can’t go on like this? You mean I shouldn’t be living the way I am now? Why do you say that?”

  I genuinely wanted to know, but I heard Miho’s husband mutter in a low voice: “Oh, for crying out loud.”

  “I’m getting desperate too,” Miki chimed in. Then she added breezily: “But I’m always traveling abroad on business.”

  “Well, you’ve got a high-flying job, Miki,” Yukari’s husband said soothingly. “You earn more than most men, which I guess makes it pretty hard to find a good match.”
>
  “Oh, the meat’s burning. The meat!” Miho shouted, distracting everyone’s attention and, relieved, they all began helping themselves to meat. Everyone was biting into the meat that had been sprayed by Yukari’s husband’s saliva.

  The next thing I knew, just like that time in elementary school, they all turned their backs on me and started edging away, staring curiously at me over their shoulders as though contemplating some ghastly life form.

  Oh, I thought absently, I’ve become a foreign object.

  In my mind’s eye I saw Shiraha, who had been forced to leave the store. Maybe it would be my turn next.

  The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.

  So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me.

  Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.

  * * *

  Somehow I felt the need to hear the sound of the convenience store, so on my way home from Miho’s that evening I dropped into work.

  “Hey, Miss Furukura, what’s up?” The high school girl on the evening shift was busy doing some cleaning but paused when she caught sight of me. “Wasn’t it your day off today?”

  “Yes, that’s right. I went to visit my parents, but I thought I’d just place a few orders on my way home.”

  “Wow, amazing, you’re really dedicated, aren’t you?”

  The manager had arrived early and was in the back room.

  “Good evening. Are you about to start your shift?” I asked him.

  “Oh, Miss Furukura, what brings you in now?”

  “I got back earlier than expected, and since I was passing nearby I thought I’d just come and input some figures …”

  “Oh, you mean the confectionery orders? I dealt with those earlier, but you can check them for me if you like.”

  “Thank you.”

  The manager looked a bit pale. Maybe he hadn’t been getting enough sleep.

  I sat down at the store computer and got to work.

  “How are things on the night shift? Do you think you’ll have enough people?”