무라타 사야카 『편의점 인간』에 투영된 격차 사회

Abstract

Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is a novel published in June 2016 in the issue of Bungakukai and won the 155th Akutagawa Prize in the same year. The novel is a story of Furukura, a 36-year-old single woman with no dating experience, who has been unable to find a full-time job for 18 years and has made a living only by working part-time at a convenience store. The novel’s great popularity is due to a combination of the following factors: It dramatically portrays the lives of young people in contemporary Japanese society; the subject matter is a familiar space called ‘convenience store’; and the author’s unusual background that she continues to work part-time at a convenience store. This paper analyzes the symbol of ‘convenience store’, the discourse of ‘social polarization’ in contemporary Japanese society, and then re-interprets the character Furukura, the protagonist of the novel. This paper confirms that ‘convenience store’ is a symbol of contemporary society in which people from various walks of life such as the head office, store owners, part-timers, and customers reside simultaneously. In the novel, ‘convenience store’ includes multiple meanings such as an everyday space, human isolation and communication, social polarization due to the deepening of neoliberalism, and the development of consumer society. Convenience Store Woman portrays Japanese society, where the social polarization derived from economic inequality has been exacerbated since the 2000s, and the people living in that era. Lastly, this paper also explores the meaning of the protagonist Furukura’s determination to live as a ‘convenience store woman’.