Since @aislin (very kindly) cajoled me to join the 地球星人 book club, I read コンビニ人間!
As that having been unread on my plate for a while and surely being a common Murata entry point was my only minor obstacle to not joining that book club.
I quite enjoyed it!
I read the whole thing without a dictionary at all after realizing I could do it, and since my approach to reading has been to just get so used to my dictionary it’s like a second limb I barely think about rather than trying to avoid using it, that was a really fun and rewarding novelty, especially after 獄門島 which was 350 pages of wall-to-wall lookups. Certainly it’s on the easier side when it comes to novels, still I don’t think I could have done that a year or two ago, so pretty neat!
Especially since the book would have first come onto my radar from the original book club on this forum which would have been going when I had just started learning any Japanese at all, a handful of months into Wanikani and lurking occasionally on the forums. Not that long ago by some measures… pretty big change by others.
The book also turned out to be pretty relevant to me right now.
thoughts about that
[spoiler]
I related a lot to the protagonist, in the sense that I also tend to think of myself as having been born from the time I settled into a comfortable status quo in early adulthood after a confusing blur of a childhood, and generally show no ambition while being content with my own weird interests despite not having many major markers of a traditional successful life. Especially now, I feel like covid and the last few years in general kinda stamped out my last bit of “I should aim higher” yearning, since before quarantine I consciously turned inward to try to make my internal status quo sustainable and make living alone pleasant and workable… which I intended as a base to then branch out and try to work on stuff like meeting people, traveling etc., which I was about ready to get started on in, oh… March of 2020.
Then All This + work from home made all of those ideas even more distant and made being happy by myself even more critical, and honestly my takeaway from all of it is that having a situation where you can be comfortable and happy by yourself is its own reward and I’m very lucky to have it and don’t especially feel like I need to seek out anything else at the moment. (though sheesh it would be nice to be able to travel someday).
Which is all to say that the “just sticking with a comfortable pattern” vs. “pursuing successful traditional human life markers” conflict the character struggles with is relevant to me, and I found her back-and-forth about it relatable. It’s easy for me to suspect that my own attempts at things like 婚活 would be, while maybe not quite as unusual and ill-fitting as hers, at least up there! And because of my own present situation I was mainly rooting for her to just do her own thing and stay at the convenience store (so I think it’s a happy ending). That might be unfair of me though, since admittedly my own situation is much more concretely stable than a ベイト, and also I feel like I encounter disapproving/concerned voices far far less frequently (as quarantine’s pretty much ironed out all the “eating cake or barbecue with old school friends” I was surely going to before… so now largely the only people I talk to on a deeper-than-cordial level are people who know me very well already). But then again, I’m also younger, so perhaps if things keep going like they do that conflict will be even more relevant to me around the time of life depicted in the book.
Personally my takeaway from the book and its ending is that we’re not all the same cookie-cutter 縄文人間 (白羽, you dumbass), and keeping to yourself and getting joy from the stuff you’re into is as valid and real a life as any other. So for now at least I’m more than happy to exploit the chance I have to get to do that.
Other tidbits: I admire how Murata makes 白羽 work pretty well as a character and contribute complex positive and negative things to the narrative and 恵子’s arc, while also making it absolutely clear that he completely sucks. The 餌 stuff is very funny.
Also, weird little detail, but I especially liked the font in the 文庫 edition. It’s a little bit more flowing and pen/brushlike than the usual ones I see. Thought it looked nice.
I haven’t read any of the book clubs (or the commentary at the back of the book) yet to keep my thoughts fresh, but I’m sure there’s plenty to catch up on now!
The next book I’m going to read is 銀河英雄伝説２:野望篇, because one of my private goals for the year was to clear out one full group of 5 books in my backlog system, and reading that would get the job done. One year ago I would have been starting to get going in the first book after slowing creeping through it for a long time previously, so it’ll definitely be interesting to see how that experience is different the second time around with a lot more books under my belt!
But also of course I’ll be reading パノラマ島綺譚 for the book club since I nominated it. Hopefully it’s good!