Hooking Up With Society
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata, Portobello Books, 2018, 176pp, £12.99 (paperback)
Ponti, Sharlene Teo, Picador, 2018, 304pp, £14.99 (hardcover)
Ponti by Sharlene Teo and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata have been lauded for their depiction of the lives of ordinary women, alienated from the society they live in. Both novels explore what it means to feel out of step with the world, not as a means of suggesting that if one tries hard enough one can ultimately feel at home, but because the magic feeling of certainty, of belonging, can never really exist. Both also tap into a wider concern of other young women writing in our moment about convention and its effect on our psychic lives. Olivia Sudjic’s 2018 essay on anxiety, Exposure, sets out the ways that anxiety both creates and stymies the writing process. In particular, she talks about impostor syndrome: having published her first novel at a young age, she traces her difficulties in starting a new novel, or indeed, identifying herself as a novelist at all. This imposter syndrome derives in part, Sudjic suggests, from the worry that comes from putting yourself out into the world as a young woman writer and the particular readings and criticisms that come from it. Sudjic suggests too, that this ‘oversharing’, this label of ‘exposure’, is much more readily hurled at women than it is at men.
Describing such problems and wrestling with their solutions though writing the lives of young women is nothing new. But the contexts have shifted. Sudjic is both encouraged and made anxious by the possibilities afforded to women on the internet: ‘One of the huge positives of the internet is all the anxious women who go there to practice this form of vigilance and self-surveillance, as well as the communities of strays, strays and “outsiders” that grow from this’. This is an important idea, and one that Convenience
Store Woman picks up on: are women allowed to be ‘outsiders’ at all? And where is it that this can happen? The novel tells the story of a woman who has worked at the same convenience store for 18 years. Keiko has always felt herself different and, though as Murata puts it ‘a convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment’, for Keiko, ‘there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don’t know how to be a normal person outside of that manual’. Though she is concerned and at points anxious about seeming normal to her family and peers, Keiko seems also to be gifted with an acceptance of her own strengths and limitations: regardless of how much other people find her strange, or even scarily obsessed, she finds comfort, even happiness in the regularity of the shop’s rules and rhythms.
In Ponti, the anxiety of the three female protagonists is unspoken, but emerges in different ways. Amisa, the beautiful young woman who plays the lead in a film trilogy about a monster, is so stunning that she feels herself constantly on show, and is seemingly unsure of her own desires, as she is so aware of the desires of the men around her. Her daughter Szu, whose first-person monologue opens the book, cannot quite find her niche in school: ‘I am in trouble again. I keep finding myself in trouble’, and is in awe of her beautiful mother, who she mythologises not into the Pontianak monster but an otherworldly woman of glamour. Though Szu says ‘I am the most normal person I know’ she is bullied by girls at her school for her apparent averageness. While Amisa may play the monster in her films, it is Szu who believes herself to be most monstrous: ‘I am Miss Frankenstein, I am the bottom of the bell curve, I can’t even string long words together’. The novel also includes another character, Circe, an old-school friend of Szu, now reflecting back at that time as a 33-year-old. Divorced young and working as a social media consultant, she is reminded of both Szu and Amisa when she is tasked with writing the copy for a re-release of the now cult film trilogy Ponti. Teo explores both the rural and urban landscape of Singapore from the 1970s until the near-future of 2020, thinking about desire, agency and female friendships.
In both novels, some of the women clearly suffer from mental health problems: Amisa seems dejected and depressed, and takes to her bedroom; Szu eventually succumbs to an eating disorder. In Convenience Store Woman, it would appear that Keiko, in her difficultly in reading social situations and in communication, is on the autism spectrum, though she remains undiagnosed. It would be trite to summarise these novels as oblique references to contemporary mental health crises; instead, both writers seem to share a concern with questioning how society can deal with difference – and particularly, in the case of Murata’s work, to explore the life of a woman on the autism spectrum (something that is still underrepresented). Both novels explore the way that we, as individuals, police each other, the way that society controls itself. It is a disquieting thought but both Teo and Murata demonstrate that we are part of the very systems we imagine repress us. This is not to assign blame, but exposes the simplistic narratives through which normativity is borne: some people are good, some people are bad, some are pretty, some are ugly. Normativity has to be simple if it is to be replicated. Or, to put it another way, we have to be able to easily understand what is normal, so that we can know with complete certainty what is not.
This critique of normativity comes from how both writers think and talk about family. Keiko’s family have been worried and concerned by her difference since she was a child. As she describes: ‘My family always loved and cherished me, and that’s why there were so worried and wanted to cure me’. What it is they want to cure her from seems to simply be her singularity. As she gets older, they disapprove of her lengthy time at the convenience store, as well as her lack of relationships or interest in love. Though Keiko believes her family loves her, as the novel develops, she realises that this love is conditional. When she later lets her family believe she is in a couple with Shihara, a jaded extremely misogynist ex-colleague, the happiness of her parents and sister disturbs her. She realises that her sister is ‘far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality – however messy – is far more comprehensible’. Family is not a site of protection, but something else, a way of enforcing a
way of living she just cannot understand. Keiko’s belief in the convenience store, her reading of the rules, and the satisfaction she gets from knowing and understanding it go beyond her family.
In Ponti, Szu lives with her mother and Aunt Yunxi; her father leaves the family when she is young, and does not maintain contact. She feels strangely toward her mother, at a distance from her. Her mother holds herself at a distance from life itself, disappointed by her lack of success, and the narrative seems to suggest, by her lack of self-determination in her own life. In the narratives of Szu, Amisa, and in Circe’s, which reflects on their relationship, all seem to be struck by a central ambivalence that underscores all relationships. Later in the novel, Szu’s mother dies and her estranged father returns to the house. When he is not welcomed, he decides to tell a home truth to his daughter about the family unit: ‘She’s not your real aunt…Did your mother ever tell you? Did you ever guess?’ And a few sentences later: ‘This woman is a scammer…Always has been. She was a bad influence on your mother’. But Szu, surprised by how little she feels for her him, does not care and tells him to leave. Though their set-up might be strange, her aunt, regardless of her actual blood relation or not, has always cared for her, and continues to do so after her mother’s death. Teo shows the formation of connections and bonds that go beyond family ties.
In another important book from 2018, Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, the author takes as her central question the problem of deciding to have a child, and if it’s a decision one can even make. She asks herself many questions: ‘Do I want a child to show myself to be the (normal) sort of woman who wants and ultimately has a child?’ Keiko, though people question her sense of herself, has also come to similar realisation that her life is ‘formed almost completely of the people around me’. She isn’t fazed by this realisation, and though the novel finds her becoming increasingly obsessed with the space of the store, she realises that we feed into each other’s lives, whether we like it or not: ‘Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think’. This unpleasant metaphor is also in Ponti, as Szu and Circe are preoccupied by the perfect performance of teenage-dom, worrying about how they stack up against to their peers. Amisa also negotiates this through her supreme beauty which marks her
out for both attention and scorn. In becoming the Pontianak, she performs her own monstrous beauty, heightening this difference and exposing the line between subjection and taking ownership of one’s subjecthood. In these ideas of performing normality, Murata and Teo provide another route into thinking about gender, not only through its more obvious oppressions, but through its mundane rules and its quotidian rituals.