Irasshaimase!

It’s only recently that I’ve noticed convenience stores in the U.S. upping up their prepared food game. Growing up, the thought of buying anything from 7-11 apart from maybe a Slurpee would have been inconceivable. However, when I lived in Japan, I looked forward to commuting by train just so I could stock up on konbini rice balls, bottled tea, and candy for the trip.

With the same eager anticipation of entering those sliding doors, I opened Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. Since it was translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, it nicely meets the challenge of reading a translated book written by and/or translated by a woman.

Even when she’s not wearing her Smile Mart uniform, Keiko Furukura has internalized the rhythms of the store where she’s been employed for 18 years. Stocking, cleaning, promoting new products, and serving customers provides a much need structure to her days. She even chooses her evening meal and goes to bed early to ensure her body is ready for the next day’s work. As other employees come and go, she adopts their mannerisms, speech patterns, and wardrobe choices to make sure her life resembles “normal.”  

When a former coworker gets kicked out of his latest apartment, Keiko offers him a spare futon and meals in exchange for the privilege of telling her friends and family she’s living with someone. Rather than serving as a red flag, his blatant existence as a freeloader only serves to legitimize the relationship as “typical.”  

It’s only after the guy convinces Keiko to quit that she realizes just how much she depends on the store for survival – both financially and psychologically.

Murata provides not only a glimpse into the unique universe of the konbini, but tells a more universal tale of the struggle to fit in when one doesn’t.

"put your brain in your lunch box"

Although I went through a Stephen King phase in high school, bringing home Cujo and Christine home from the library where I volunteered shelving books, I have never had the stomach for the horror genre.

So it was with some trepidation that I reached into my TBR stack for a book that my mom had lent me some months ago, maybe even at Christmas?

If a novel could cause PTSD, My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent would be a top contender.  But with each new terror, you simply turn the page with squinted eyes waiting (hoping) for someone to die or seek vengeance or perhaps both. With that caveat, let me proceed.

Turtle lives with her widower father in rural Northern California. After downing a morning breakfast of raw eggs and a slurp of her father’s beer, she takes the bus to school. She doesn’t have any friends and resists the overtures of the new kid that doesn’t know any better than to try being friendly. Her interior monologue is a stream of berating comments that put down others – and herself.  She’d much rather be at home shooting, cleaning her vast arsenal of firearms, or perfecting her survival skills. The end of the world, in the guise of climate change, is at hand.

When she can’t stand her father’s “affection” for a moment longer, one night she does leave. She meets two teenagers lost in the woods and guides them to safety. (The rapid-fire dialogue between Brett and Jacob is incentive enough to keep reading). When she returns home, she realizes she’s entered a whole other world of hurt. Her friendship with Jacob proves harrowing, but exposes her to a new normal. She begins contemplating a more permanent escape.

Close to midnight, I was nearing the end of the book. Some neighbors thought that would be a good time to shoot off the last of their fireworks. Once I had climbed back into my skin, I could only manage to skim through the rest of scene where Turtle finally confronts her father.

In addition to trigger warnings, this book should also come with a “one-sitting” warning. If you can bear to pick it up, you won’t dare put it back down.

“We are bound by a common anguish”

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep

This hefty tome doesn’t look like a page turner. Sadly, it’s been sitting on my nightstand for almost four months. But contrary to appearances, when I finally opened its pages, I discovered that it’s got everything: true crime, mystery, history and literary goddesses.

Cep opens the book with a brief description of a murder trial in an Alabama courtroom.  A man is on trial for the murder of Reverend Willie Maxwell. Defending him is Maxwell’s own lawyer, Tom Radney. Covering the trial for a book she plans to write is one Harper Lee.

Before enlightening us more on these curious circumstances, Cep dives into the backstory of each character sitting in the courtroom, beginning with the murder victim. Rounding out these character sketches (if several chapters on each can be called a “sketch”) are fascinating interludes explaining  everything from hydroelectric power to voodoo, from the life insurance industry to Alabama politics.

Although Lee herself doesn’t appear until Chapter 15 of this book, fans won’t be disappointed. Cep’s description of the drama – both inside and outside the courtroom – will more than appease fans of To Kill a Mockingbird. And when she does bring Nelle into the story, the reader has a better understanding of the time and place that shaped her sensibilities. From her childhood with Truman Capote to her later years struggling with writer’s block (and perhaps alcoholism), Lee’s story is more gripping than the ones she, sadly, wasn’t able to write herself.

“mirth, melancholy, and redemption”

In Summerlong by Dean Bakopoulos, the residents of a small Midwestern college town are experiencing one of the hottest summers on record.

Don Lowry, a real estate agent with two kids, despite memorizing three new jokes every Sunday night, doesn’t find life funny anymore.

As one of the characters tells Don, “You’re at the hardest time of life, Don. Midlife is when you have to accept what you’ve created, knowing that the life you have is the only one you will live.”

His wife Claire, a novelist experiencing writer’s block, is also struggling with that realization. She’s also become disenchanted with married life. Not helping matters is her discovery that Don has neglected to tell her their house has entered foreclosure.

Over the course of the summer, Don and Claire both latch on to a different twenty-something, who find themselves, in turn, gravitating towards each other.

Grieving the loss of her first love, ABC has come back to her college town and found a job caring for a widow named Ruth. In her downtime, ABC finds comfort in getting high with the man whose face she sees on FOR SALE signs all over town, “Don Lowry!”

Abandoning his acting career, Charlie has returned home to clear out his father’s study in the hopes of finding the novel he supposedly spent years writing. After a chance meeting in a convenience store parking lot, Charlie offers Claire the use of his swimming pool. In other words, an escape. 

Although there isn’t much action (apart from a certain kind),  Bakopoulos' writing is engaging, and the dialogue sometimes uncomfortably real. And the character of Ruth, who’s a little older and wiser, provides some much needed perspective with her almost magical prescience.   

Reminiscent of a John Updike story, Summerlong features adults in the grips of middle age malaise behaving badly. In this story, too, the pool is also abandoned, for a last-ditch vacation to Lake Superior. Sometimes a change of scenery is necessary to either revive a relationship or perhaps finally put it to rest.