Performing Normalcy: Identity, Social Scripts, and the Construction of Self in Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman

Abstract

Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (2016; English translation 2018) follows Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six-year-old part-time worker whose sense of self is assembled almost entirely from the scripted routines of a Tokyo convenience store. This article reads the novel as a sustained inquiry into how “normalcy” is produced, rehearsed, and policed in everyday life. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, Michel Foucault’s account of disciplinary power, and recent scholarship on social camouflaging and the construction of normalcy in disability studies, the study examines four textual sites: the store manual as a behavioral script, Keiko’s mimicry of colleagues’ speech and dress, the surveillance exercised by family and friends over her life course, and her staged cohabitation with Shiraha. The research is conceptual and interpretive rather than empirical; it relies on close textual reading supported by a structured review of theoretical and critical literature. The analysis finds that the novel exposes normalcy as a collective performance whose success depends less on inner conviction than on legibility to others. Keiko’s “deviance” lies not in any failure to perform but in her unusual awareness that performance is all there is. The novel’s ending, in which Keiko reclaims the store as the ground of her identity, is interpreted as an ambivalent act of self-authorship rather than a straightforward liberation. The article concludes that Murata’s text offers a productive lens for literary, sociological, and organizational studies of conformity, labour, and identity in late-capitalist societies