I read Convenience Store Woman while touring Japan, as it was the most obvious thing for a lazy pseudo intellectual to do (touring Japan suggests this was more than a holiday, which it wasn't. At least I didn't say 'travelling in Japan', like a gap year student, we can at least give me that).
Keiko is the woman in the title, she's 36, single and has worked in a 7-11 ish type shop in Tokyo for her adult life. The question the book asks is a good one: what is normal? Keiko's oddness - single, a permanent rather than temporary shop worker - disarms her friends and family. They want to put her in a box that's a familiar shape: marriage, children, career. She doesn't fit these boxes. There's a shift in the book when she invites the herbivore man from work to cohabit in her tiny flat. She does this not for any affection toward him but to change her identity as viewed by others. She is now able to be 'projected upon' as more normal, more like them. Less other. By living with someone she's more easily understood. Not actually understood, but enough to fit in to a recognisable story others want to have of her.
'Now everything about the new me was clear, even my future. They seemed to have the story wrapped up between them. It felt like they were talking about a total stranger. This single piece of information unlocked the door to their world, I was for the first time, part of their circle. Until now they'd seen me as an outsider.'
Her friends and family don't really need or want her to be happy, they want or need her to be legible. 'they didn't care about me, but the shape I was supposed to make. I was a piece in a pattern that didn't fit, and it was the pattern they were trying to fix, not me.
If we want to get theoretical, Durkheim has thought long and hard about this, defining deviance as 'not by harm but by its challenge to social consensus'. There is a hidden curriculum of social life, where norms act to maintain collective solidarity. These are not taught explicitly but are enforced rigorously.
