Irasshaimase - pós-modernidade, individualidade e identidade na obra Querida Konbini, de Sayaka Murata

Abstract

Postmodernity is described as the era of immediacy and consumerism, in which the individual is fragmented and displaced. Work, public spaces, and life itself are transferred to the private section, and identity issues such as sexuality, gender, and nationality become factors of inclusion and exclusion. The postmodern individual is forced to establish their identity in fragments, cuttings based on patterns of existence. In this sense, Sayaka Murata portrays in her novel Convenience Store Woman (2018) the phenomenon of the individual’s disappearance in postmodern Japanese society. The main objective of the present investigation is to analyze the aspects of identity and individuality in postmodern Japanese society represented in Sayaka Murata's novel, Convenience Store Woman. Bibliographic research, the theoretical contributions were Stuart Hall (2020), Zygmunt Bauman (2021; 2022), Richard Sennett (2015), David Le Breton (2018;2022; 2023), Yuko Iida (2019), Noriko Mizuta (1987), Virginia Woolf (2014) and Teresa de Lauretis (2019). There is a continuous growth in translations of Japanese novels written by female authors into Brazil. Thus, this research meets the necessity to understand this phenomenon from the perspective of contemporary literary studies. The research was performed in three main moments: first, the analysis of Keiko Furukura’s character, contextualized in the postmodern individual, forced to maintain an incessant lifestyle; second, Keiko's identity construction based on social marks such as gender, sexuality and body; third, an investigation of the construction of Keiko's body through the through the sounds that compose the convenience store and the relationship between individual and space. It is concluded that Keiko is an individual who does not fit into social standards, both professionally and personally, and, as a solution to the constant impositions of society, resorts to the convenience store as a refuge, becoming an instrument of the store, an “Employee”. The complete indifference to the world outside the store, an attitude taken as resistance at the denouement of the novel, allows Keiko to continue moving the great machine that is postmodern Japanese society, not as an individual, but as an instrument, metamorphosing herself into a body-machine and choosing to remain in a static time and limited space, the convenience store.