I don't often find stories relatable, to the point where it's not a value I really seek in fiction. I'm content with characters and stories being interesting, because I am an adult capable of empathy and that's good enough.

So to encounter a story about a Japanese woman working at a convenience store relatable took me off guard.

If you are over a certain age and you are not behaving the way society expects you to certain people will attempt to inject themselves into your lives in order to "help" you. They're usually people you have no choice but to interact with, like relatives in a closely-knit family or coworkers. This is almost never actually well-meaning, even if they've convinced themselves it is. The advice they give is never good, never solicited, and mostly amounts to "do what you're supposed to" and often turns cruel the moment the subject of all this, in any way, asserts themselves.

Japan seems to be a bit more collectivist, and a bit more sexist than America, so while the same problems seem to exist in both places, the ability to shove back appears greatly reduced there. But all the same, I found it deeply relatable as a someone who was a weird guy in my 20's.

Though as many people have pointed out, this inquiry never stops. If you're in a long term relationship, people ask when you're getting married. If you're married, they ask when you're going to have kids. If you have a kid, they ask when you're going to have more kids. And past a certain point they transfer these invasive questions directly to the children and the cycle continues. And the askers of these questions almost never stop to consider how presumptuous and rude this line of questioning is.

This book was often hard to read because I just wanted everyone to leave the protagonist, Keiko, alone, as much as she herself wanted to be alone. All she wanted was a simple life where she worked at a convenience store and lived by herself, but she existed in a society where expressing that simple desire felt impossible. And generally when people like that try to conform, the scolding and disapproval only gets worse. There is simply no winning unless you fully decide not to play.

There's something I've noticed about reviews of this book and Murata's work in general: people really love to psychoanalyze authors through there work. And in this case I would really like to ask the general community of reviewers to knock it off. You are probably not qualified, and it adds nothing to the conversation. I know it's the great American past time to determine if someone is on the spectrum, a narcissist, OCD, etc, but it's almost as invasive as the sort of behavior Murata is criticizing in the book.

On a small, but important note to me personally, what's going on with some of the reviews of this book? There's a weird number of people who seemed to think it's hilarious, and it's hard not to see it as them laughing at the protagonist rather than with her. I'm mainly referring to this quote I saw on Wikipedia but it's not limited to this reviewer:

Julie Myerson of The Guardian gave the novel a generally positive review, calling it "sublimely weird" and praising the "nutty deadpan prose and even more nuttily likable narrator."

Honestly, what the hell is wrong with people?