Aesthetic Engagement and Soundscape: A Case of Convenience Store Woman, a Contemporary Japanese Novel

RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACT The award-winning novel Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, first published in 2016 asコンビニ人間 (Konbini ningen), has received a lot of media attention from readers of both the original Japanese version and the English translation. For some, the novel depicts the wonder and vulnerability of a culture of convenience and conformity, while others have suggested that it highlights the gender discrimination faced by women in contemporary Japan. Yet the novel is ripe for analyses from other perspectives. This paper presents one such new approach to analysing Murata’s Convenience Store Woman: its social-cum-auditory aesthetic. The theory of social aesthetics, developed by Arnold Berleant, essentially holds that there are perceptive values to be found not only in objects but also in social situations. The paper will argue that the convenience store’s environment – the social interactions, and soundscape presented in the novel – invokes and evokes a variety of aesthetic qualities, among them ‘acceptance’, ‘sensuousness’, and ‘reciprocity’. Combining a re-reading methodology and an application of Berleant’s social aesthetics theory, I will show how these sensibilities can be observed through the experiences of Keiko Furukawa, a life-long convenience store worker and the novel’s protagonist. Specifically, the focus will be on Keiko’s auditory sensibilities. Aesthetic Engagement and Soundscape: A Case of Convenience Store Woman, a Contemporary Japanese Novel Garcia Chambers Shirayuri University, JP CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Garcia Chambers Shirayuri University, JP [email protected] KEYWORDS: aesthetic experience; aesthetic field; Arnold Berleant; auditory sensibilities; everyday aesthetics; Japanese sensibilities; social aesthetics; soundscape TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Chambers, Garcia. ‘Aesthetic Engagement and Soundscape: A Case of Convenience Store Woman, a Contemporary Japanese Novel.’ Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics LX/XVI, no. 1 (2023): pp. 36–54. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/ eeja.312 37Chambers Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.312 I. INTRODUCTION The very first sentence of the award-winning novel Convenience Store Woman (コンビニ人間, Konbini ningen) reads deductively: ‘A convenience store is a world of sound.’1 And true to logic, if not anything else, translator Ginny Tapley Takemori presents the novel’s last line inductively: ‘I could distinctively feel all my cells stirring within my skin as they responded in unison to the music reverberating on the other side of the glass.’2 Author Sayaka Murata, herself an experienced convenience store worker, conjures a world in which her novel’s heroine, 36-year-old Keiko Furukawa, finds salvation and normalcy as a part-timer at a convenience store for 18 years.3 Inside the store, a 24-hour brightly lit box, Keiko is able to satisfy not only her practical and everyday survival needs by earning her bread but also to present herself as a functioning member of society. However, prior to turning 36, especially during the years approaching 30, questions begin to be raised within her inner circles about when she would finally fulfil the crowning societal achievement of a Japanese woman: getting married.4 The novel is structured around such kinds of existential predicament and how Keiko devises, strategizes, and improvises her own way to deal with them. Yet, in addition to the foregoing explicit and implicit sociocultural, socio-economic, psychosocial, and philosophical topics that this 163-page novel highlights, it has also sparked ‘conversations’ on cultural and aesthetic sensibilities in contemporary life in Japan. The English readership reviewers, especially in the electronic media, have had a field day commenting on topics encompassing critiques and analyses that could easily fall under the sub-genre of literary criticism, gender studies, cultural studies, and Japanese contemporary society. 5 Arguably, the sociocultural lens of convenience and conformity in Japanese society presents a rich vantage 1 Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman, trans. Tapley Takemori (London: Portobello Books, 2018), 1. 2 Ibid., 163. 3 The background story of the novel’s author, Sayaka Murata, writing as an experienced convenience store worker herself is instructively relevant as it gives authenticity to the novel. 4 Traditionally, in Japan, women getting married before the age of 30 is a symbol of accomplishment and those who fail to achieve the goal are considered loser dogs, known in Japanese as makeinu. For more, see Tomomi Yamaguchi, ‘“Loser Dogs” and “Demon Hags”: Single Women in Japan and the Declining Birth Rate’, Social Science Japan Journal 9 (2006): 109–14, in which she discusses Junko Sakai’s interesting and satirical work Makeinu no tōboe [Howl of the Loser Dogs] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2003). 5 See, for example, Leo Lewis, ‘Sayaka Murata: “My Parents Don’t Want to Read My Books”: Japan’s Most Radical New Literary Voice on Taking Aim at Her Country’s Taboos’, Financial Times, 8 June 2018; Fran Bigman, ‘Loitering in 7–11 with Convenience Store Woman Author Sayaka Murata’, Literary Hub, 20 June 2018, https://lithub.com/loiteringin-7-11-with-convenience-store-woman-author-sayaka-murata; Xi Chen, ‘Sayaka Murata’s Parable of Alienation: “Convenience Store Woman” and the Post-human’, Medium, 3 January 2019, https://medium.com/literally-literary/sayaka-muratas-parable-ofalienation-25a188337adb; Ben Easthan, review of Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, ArtReview, 27 July 2018, https://artreview.com/ara-summer-2018-book-reviewconvenience-store-woman; David Hebblethwaite, review of Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, Splice, 15 October 2018, https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/2018/10/15/achallenge-of-empathy; Katy Waldman, ‘Sayaka Murata’s Eerie Convenience Store Woman Is a Love Story between a Misfit and a Store’, New Yorker, 21 June 2018; and Mokoto Rich, ‘For Japanese Novelist Sayaka Murata, Odd Is the New Normal’, New York Times, 11 June 2018. 38Chambers Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.312 point from which to examine the novel’s cultural aesthetics. 6 Being able to carry out one’s daily life conveniently – with ease and little or no hindrances – is both time-honoured and of contemporary importance in Japanese culture. Similarly, conformity – that is, synchronizing or harmonizing one’s behaviour to the expectation and dictates of societal norms – is highly valued. 7 Enticing though it may be, characterizing and examining the novel as a conversation on the sensibilities that undergird a cultural life of convenience and conformity is merely tangential to this paper’s argument. Instead, the central goal herein is to examine and theorize the auditory sensibilities evoked and invoked by the convenience store’s soundscape as experienced by Keiko, inside and outside it. More specifically, using the rich repertoire of concepts and insights found in Arnold Berleant’s social aesthetic theory of engagement, this essay offers a reading and re-reading of Keiko’s sonic engagement: primarily, her world of euphony inside and outside the convenience store as detailed in the novel. 8 Before presenting Keiko’s sonic experience via a re-reading and an application of selected concepts of Berleant’s aesthetic engagement framework, it is important to first lay some groundwork by introducing Berleant’s theory. Next is to shine light on the convenience store (konbini) tradition in Japan as well as to provide a conceptual detailing of the contemporary and situational context of a konbini. Finally, a foray into a conceptualization of auditory sensibilities and soundscape theory should be sufficient preparation to present Keiko’s world of sonic sensibilities. II. BERLEANT’S THEORY OF SOCIAL AESTHETICS AND ENGAGEMENT Berleant’s aesthetic engagement theory has its origins in John Dewey’s classic Art as Experience.9 At the core of his experiential-centred theory is a critique of traditional, Western, ‘spectator-centred’ approaches that take their cues from the Kantian, 6 With a social sciences background, this was the angle from which I had originally intended to theorize the novel; that is, along the lines of Madeline Rideout, ‘Convenience Store Woman: Perspectives on Deviation and Conformity within the Japanese Psyche’, Oxford Blue, 28 October 2020, https://www.theoxfordblue.co.uk/convenience-storewoman-perspectives-on-deviation-and-conformity-within-the-japanese-psyche. However, I found it more intriguing to take on the challenge of analyzing Keiko’s fascination with the convenience store’s sounds. 7 See, for example, Roger Davies and Osamu Ikeno (ed.), The Japanese Mind: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Culture (Tokyo: Tuttle, 2002), 195–97, which succinctly explains shudan ishiki (Japanese group consciousness). Also, Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 334–39, looks at ‘mind correctness’: various means of achieving ‘attitudinal conformity’ in Japanese society. 8 It goes without saying that the essay is using fiction as the frame of analysis in reading aesthetic engagement into soundscapes. Though a question has been posed about the rationality of this approach, the argument herein is that analyzing sonic environments as experienced by people can incorporate sounds that travers both objective and subjective realms. 9 John Dewey’s much-quoted book Art as Experience (New York: Minton, 1934) is a principal and influential text on the scholarship that theorizes art and aesthetic experience with a non-Kantian approach. 39Chambers Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.312 disinterested aesthetics.10 These Kantian-driven approaches fail, in Berleant’s view, to account for perceptive values beyond the fine arts, and in so doing diminish our understanding of the aesthetic – that, fundamentally, the aesthetic begins with human experience.11 The aesthetic is therefore pervasive, touching all aspects of the human world, as does our sense perception. This very notion of ‘sense perception’ harkens back to aesthetics’ original, intended meaning posited by Alexander Baumgarten, who is credited with its coinage and modern usage.12 Taking his cue from this original ‘sense perception’ meaning of aesthetics, Berleant offers a phenomenological-cum-engagement theory of aesthetic experience that begins with his seminal theoretical framework, the aesthetic field.13 The aesthetic field, he posits, comprises four main factors: (1) artist/performer; (2) perceiver/viewer/ listener/reader; (3) art object/focus of the experience; and (4) activator of the aesthetic occurrence.14 Of note, this framework primarily privileges an active human element in the aesthetic process rather than any a priori aesthetic attitudes of contemplation and disinterestedness. This notion of the appreciator being an active participant suggests that he or she possesses perceptive sensibilities that are culturally embedded and with implicit, if not explicit, moral claims.15 Furthermore, the active, participatory process of the aesthetic field framework incorporates multiple elements – history, tradition, technology, geography, the four main factors mentioned earlier, and more – all interacting with and influencing each other.16 It is worth repeating that, in an aesthetic situation, the central player is the perceiver, or the engaged, experiencing individual. Marked by a process that begins with perception, it further leads to the individual’s or perceiver’s heightened awareness; lines of demarcation among the elements of this social situation then become blurred; and, simultaneously, immediacy replaces distance. This is what Berleant calls the ‘unity of experience’, which is the all-encompassing factor that occasions an aesthetic experience in social situations.17 The active and engaged individual, therefore, to re-read Berleant, returns the ‘social dimension’ to its rightful place: a central player in aesthetic theory and aesthetic experience.18 10 Berleant’s engagement theory is a signature concept of his scholarly work on contemporary aesthetics theory and aesthetic experience. He discusses ‘engagement’ substantively in the following works: ‘What Is Aesthetic Engagement?’ Contemporary Aesthetics 11 (2013), https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/liberalarts_contempaesthetics/ vol11/iss1/5; Art and Engagement (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991); ‘Aesthetics and the Unity of Experience’, Humanities Commons, 2013, http://dx.doi. org/10.17613/M6CC0TS8F. 11 This point is elaborated on in my ‘The Aesthetics of Social Situations: Encounters and Sensibilities of the Everyday Life in Japan’, Contemporary Aesthetics 18 (2020), https:// contempaesthetics.org/2020/03/03/the-aesthetics-of-social-situations-encounters-andsensibilities-of-the-everyday-life-in-japan. 12 Ibid. 13 Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 2nd ed. (Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2000). 14 Ibid., see esp. 50–51. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 See my ‘Aesthetics of Social Situations’. 18 See Arnold Berleant, ‘Ideas for a Social Aesthetic’, in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Light and Johnathan Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 26. 40Chambers Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.312 Saito agrees with Berleant on the value of the active engagement of the individual and that he or she is not merely a ‘receiver’, or what she terms a ‘sitting duck’, when it comes to the appreciative experience.19 Saito explains: ‘Aesthetic experience, even when characterized as “contemplative”, it is possible only with the investment and creative activity of the experiencing agent through the operation of sharpened sensibility, imaginative power, and associative involvement.’20 Moreover, the ‘sharpened sensibility’ and ‘imaginative power’ to which Saito points are necessary though not sufficient conditions, if I am reading Leddy correctly, to engage with aesthetic property terms of an object or a situation.21 Yet Leddy theorizes the appreciative experience, whether it occurs from a distance or while being engaged with the object or situation, as possessing some form of ‘beauty’ – the classic aesthetic property. And, from this ‘beauty’, a moment of ‘aura’ is apprehended leading to an aesthetic experience. Berleant’s notion of engagement leading to a unity of experience that both produces and characterizes an aesthetic experience is, for Leddy, an ‘aurafilled’ occasion that can also be illustrative of the ‘extraordinary in the ordinariness’ of quotidian life. Leddy converges more with Berleant when he defines his notion of aura as ‘a phenomenological characteristic of an object (or situation) experienced (and) attended with pleasure or with some combination of pain and pleasure’.22 However, as mentioned earlier, Berleant’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience is a comprehensive analysis drawn from his signature aesthetic field theory that positions the human presence at the centre. He is not merely concerned with the appreciative experience itself – the beauty of ‘objects or experience with aura’ or their ‘heightened significance’.23 Instead, Berleant argues that contextual factors including the human element must be examined in theorizing aesthetics and the appreciative experience. This is especially true when analysing aesthetic engagement within social situations. In explicating, all the while emphasizing the re-creative and performative aspects of an aesthetics of social situations, Berleant introduces nine concepts as summarized in Figure 1.24 Forming part of the analysis herein, these nine interconnected factors of an aesthetic situation are acceptance, perception, sensuousness, discovery, uniqueness, reciprocity, continuity, engagement, and multiplicity.25 19 See Yuriko Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 52–53. 20 Ibid. 21 See Thomas Leddy, The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2012). 22 Ibid., 128. 23 Ibid., see especially 35 and 132. 24 Ibid., 29. 25 Ibid., 26–29. Figure 1 Berleant’s Nine Factors of an Aesthetic Situation. 41Chambers Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.312 Noting that an aesthetics of social situations would democratically broaden the scope of theorizing the aesthetic to include the non-fine-arts, non-object-focused, or nonspectator-oriented worlds, Berleant then asks: ‘What would an aesthetics of the social situation look like?’ In a conjecturing tone, he responds: Perhaps it would resemble the aesthetics of environment, where many contributing factors come together to establish aesthetic character and give it a distinctive identity: participants, physical setting, social conditions, along with time, history, and the powerful influence of culture and tradition, all join in the perceptual character of aesthetic experience. However, he asserts that ‘no environment that we can know and speak about is without a human presence’.26 Anchored in Berleant’s thought, it is to this active human presence of a convenience store environment as expressed in the novel and its situational and social aesthetics that the paper now turns. III. A CONVENIENCE STORE CONTEXTUAL FIELD AND SOCIAL SITUATION The powerful influence of Japanese culture and tradition, its people, and the social milieu has combined to create what is now a ubiquitous, iconic, essential, and multi-service shop: the convenience store. What can be said about its naming and early history? The name in Katakana, the Japanese method of writing foreign-used words, is konbiniensu sutoa. Said to have been first used and popularized by print and electronic media in 1970, the name konbiniensu sutoa has undergone changes in popular discourse from the two-word to a single-word (konbiniensusutoa) spelling, to the dropping of the second word (sutoa, store) completely, to becoming simply konbiniensu (convenience).27 It then finally settles on its current four-mora version, ko-n-bi-ni (when pronounced in Japanese), or konbini.28 Therein lies some background to the first word of the two words, Konbini ningen, the original Japanese title of this novel, Convenience Store Woman. Not only have there been changes to its name, but perceptions of what a konbini is and what it offers to customers have also transformed over the years. Included among the descriptions one researcher notes are: ‘a small store open long hours (chōjikan eigyō) that sells daily necessities (seikatsu hitsuyōhin)’; the more nuanced characterizations, ‘life infrastructure (seikatsu infura)’ and ‘social infrastructure (shakai infura) […] alongside hospitals, banks, post offices, and neighborhood police stations (kōban)’; and even a pejorative nomenclature: ‘konbiniensu-kyokai (literally, “convenience churches”)’, implying that a ‘konbini was the church, and konbiniensu the religion of Japanese society’.29 Furthermore, its multipurpose and practical character would no doubt be central to what makes the konbini so idolized and even studied. Of the ‘11 incredible services’ that are reasons convenience stores are so convenient, 26 Ibid., 30. 27 See Gavin H. Whitelaw, ‘Konbini-Nation: The Rise of the Convenience Store in PostIndustrial Japan’, in Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan: A Transdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Katarzyna J. Cwiertka and Ewa Machotka (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 77–79. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. See especially 78–79. 42Chambers Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.312 travel site LIVE JAPAN includes free, clean restrooms and the availability of shipping and ATM services.30 Undoubtedly, today the convenience store is institutionalized and lionized in everyday Japanese society. Moreover, it is a reflection and an index of changes – whether viewed positively, negatively, or both – in youth culture, work and working conditions, the declining population and greying society, women in the workplace, technological changes, and indeed a ‘convenience mentality’.31 Yet, while the preceding socio-economic and sociocultural points intrigue, in line with the theme of this paper it is the konbini’s social situation, beginning with its contextual field, that I would now like to consider. From the perspective of an active and engaged individual, what might his or her perceptive sensibilities be within the context of a konbini when viewed as a social situation? Let us begin with a structural delineation of a typical convenience store. Figure 2 offers details on how a konbini is structured and where various foods, beverages, and other products are located, as well as showing the location of the multipurpose terminal and ATM, which offers a variety of electronic, online, and banking services.32 Within this setting, and in the absence of any customers or workers, it is only the section labelled ‘cashier’ that would indicate the possibility of any human presence. 30 ‘11 Incredible Services That Make Japan’s Convenience Stores So Convenient!’, LIVE JAPAN Perfect Guide, 14 November 2019, https://livejapan.com/en/in-tokyo/in-pref-tokyo/ in-akihabara/article-a0001306. 31 See especially Gavin H. Whitelaw, ‘Japan as a Society Dependent on Convenience Stores: What Attracts Me to Japan’s “Konbini”’, Discuss Japan: Japan Foreign Policy Forum, No. 31, 2015, https://www.japanpolicyforum.jp/pdf/2016/no31/Djweb_31_soc_05.pdf; ‘The Waste Basket? Trailing Expired Food in Japan’s Konbini’, Gastronomica 16 (2016): 102–10; and Gwen Robinson, ‘Inconvenient Truths of Japan’s “Conbini” Culture: From Auto-Flushing Toilets to 24/7 Stores, Japan’s Convenience Mentality Has Downsides’, NIKKEIAsia, 24 April 2019, https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/Tea-Leaves/Inconvenient-truths-of-Japan-scombini-culture; Laura Studarus, ‘The Unique Culture of Japanese Convenience Stores’, BBC-Travel, 11 June 2019, http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190610-the-unique-cultureof-japanese-convenience-stores. 32 This is a slightly edited version of an image of a typical Japanese convenience store layout copied from Japan-guide.com. See: https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2071.html. Figure 2 Layout of a Typical Convenience Store. 43Chambers Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.312 Notably, this prime position of a ‘cashier’, in the persona of a convenience store worker, Keiko, the protagonist of the novel, is a focal point in this essay. Recall that fundamental to the aesthetics of social situations is the human presence. In the situation or context of a convenience store, one that is in full operation, what would such a field look like, especially from the vantage point of the active human presence, the participants? Starting with the relatively static constituents, there are, for example, the well-stocked and neatly stacked shelves, the wall decoration, and in some instances the lit transparent glass that encloses sections of the store. With all their multiple shades of colour, these relatively fixed and sometimes strategically positioned items in or elements of a typical store add to the panorama of its viewscape. Present in this viewscape, but in relative motion, are the customers entering, browsing shelves, transacting, and leaving. In addition, one may observe staff attending to the restacking and repositioning of items, as well as responding to customers – ordering, cashing, enquiring, and even complaining. Notably, the scope of active human presence is simultaneously part of the store’s viewscape at any given moment when the store is in operation. Then there is the panoply of sounds: customers entering, doors chiming, staff greeting customers and announcing daily specials, the clacking of heels as customers move around, the rustling of items when picked up by customers, the beeping of barcode scanners, the playing of the promotion jingles, advertisements, and background music are all part of a typical convenience store’s soundscape. Thus, a convenience store, one that is in operation, may be contextually represented by three spheres, as can be seen in Figure 3. Here is what these three interconnected spheres depict. First, and of prime significance, are the participants or active human presence – the customers and staff. Second are the goods and services – including the self-operating machines – that connect customers and staff. And, finally, there are things commanding the attention of our eyes and ears – the viewscape and soundscape. The viewscape is accentuated by its usual brightly lit surrounding of transparent glass, while the soundscape buzzes Figure 3 A Convenience Store Contextual Field. 44Chambers Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.312 on, by the presence of customers shopping and leaving, especially during the peak hours. This third sphere, labelled viewscape and soundscape, especially at the point of its intersection with the sphere of participants / active human presence, arguably constitutes the richest repository of potential aesthetic sensibilities. That is because the viewscape and soundscape constitute a panoply of aesthetic activators that may trigger appreciative experiences in an engaged observer or listener. Note that the participants, whether passively or actively, are themselves constituents of the convenience store’s viewscape and soundscape. Thus, in the novel Convenience Store Woman, the protagonist, Keiko, is not only the consummate and conscientious worker creating her vibrations but simultaneously an active listener to the convenience store’s sounds. These sounds, though varied and largely inconsequential to other ‘listeners’ – if ever heard at all – evoke in Keiko certain sensibilities, leading her to characterize a convenience store as a ‘world of sound’. IV. SOUNDSCAPE AND KEIKO’S CONVENIENCESTORE-WORKER EXPERIENCE Arguably, the convenience store or konbini is, among other things, a metaphor for what a highly efficient, organized, and technologically equipped society Japan is. Simultaneously, it is a symbol of how deeply traditional and manual the society remains. This ambiguity might be both a cause and an instantiation of the fact that there is perceptively more to a konbini than our eyeballs tell us. Admittedly, a konbini in full operation has many practical functions. Yet this paper’s contention is that, within the totality of a konbini’s quotidian realities, there exists the potential for an awakening of sensibilities for an attuned individual. Even a cursory reading of Convenience Store Woman would show that, for Keiko, working at a konbini has not only practical, perfunctory, and personal values. It also possesses existential and aesthetic currencies: a ‘world of sound’ or a sonic environment that provides life-affirming values. Can we pause for a moment and listen or attend to the sounds around us now, like Keiko? Sounds have a ubiquitous character about them: they passively come to us both from man-made and natural sources. Moreover, we intentionally listen to sounds; for example, I deliberately chose the music of Enya I am now listening to inside a McDonald’s restaurant. Although the store is playing its own background music, it is not loud enough to drown out other sounds such as staff taking and confirming orders, customers’ chatter, and the clacking of heels as people move around. Immersed inside this McDonald’s restaurant’s environment, and indeed its soundscape, I deliberately select my own music and set the volume just enough to not impair my hearing but sufficient to block out these other sounds I judge as noise or disturbance. Clearly, then, immersed in an acoustic environment, we may exercise our preferences and tastes for the sounds. McDermott concurs, arguing that sounds ‘evoke hedonic and aversive responses in humans’; moreover, they ‘can make us sigh with contentment, spend our time and money, or cringe in pain’.33 Thus, there is a certain intimacy to sounds that connects the listener or the perceiver to the environment or the source of the sounds. As such, the primacy of the perceiver, the environment, and their interplay are central to the study of sonic environments. Studying the konbini as a 33 Josh H. McDermott, ‘Auditory Preferences and Aesthetics: Music, Voices, and Everyday Sounds’, in Neuroscience of Preference and Choice: Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms, ed. Tali Sharot and Raymond Dolan (London: Academic Press, 2012), 228 and 240. 51Chambers Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.312 To sum up this re-reading of Keiko’s auditory sensibilities, I superimpose diagrammatically on Berleant’s aesthetic field framework.61 As Figure 5 shows, the convenience store in full operation – a potential aesthetic field – has Keiko, the conscientious cashier. Keiko then comes ‘alive’, sensing all the sounds – her auditory transaction – including the sounds she is making. Moreover, Keiko is listening intensely and distinguishing sounds heard, yet focusing intricately on her tasks, and simultaneously hearing herself shouting ‘Irasshaimase! [Welcome!]’ while working as the cashier – her engagement. Keiko’s experience of the store’s soundscape unites, melts into continuities, and reaches a climax: occasioning joy, pleasures, meaning, beauty, wonder, and vulnerability (an aesthetic experience). How fortuitously redeeming: while doing what might otherwise be, for many, a boring, dead-end, cog-in-the-machine job, Keiko the consummate konbini worker is afforded a spark of lucidity and enrapturement, through her engagement with the store’s soundscape. VI. CONCLUDING COMMENTS This applied social and contemporary aesthetics essay has presented Convenience Store Woman (Konbini ningen) as a literary work that pivots around the expressed auditory sensibilities of Keiko, the protagonist. As mentioned before, Keiko works as a regular staff member at one particular konbini, but for too long society would ignorantly and unkindly judge people in this field of work: pejoratively too long as it is at the expense of making certain societal, progressive moves, for example getting married and starting a family. Yet Keiko sees working at a convenience store as being both quantitatively and qualitatively sufficient: it provides not only a means of earning her living but also making a life. If the dictum that ‘we make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give’ is to be applied here, then Keiko’s giving her body and soul to the job of a konbini worker for all of her working life is qualitatively special.62 By tapping into her human perceptive repertoire, she turns the ordinariness of a konbini worker into something qualitatively special or extraordinary. That potential, human perceptive repertoire is realized through the extent of her devotion to her job and more crucially her immersion – her baptism, if you will – into 61 A similar application of Berleant’s aesthetic field framework can be found in my ‘Aesthetics of Social Situations’. 62 This quote is attributed to Winston Churchill. The entire quote can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/857718-we-make-a-living-by-what-we-get-but-we. Figure 5 An Analysis of Keiko’s Aesthetic Experience. 52Chambers Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.312 the konbini’s soundscape – the ‘world of sounds’. Using Keiko’s own descriptions of her experiences and states of mind, the paper confirmed her perceptive values that were evoked and invoked by the convenience store’s soundscape. To bring clarity and anchorage to reading Keiko’s auditory sensibilities, Berleant’s social-cum-engagement theory of aesthetic experience has been applied. The theory helps elucidate the wonder and vulnerability, indeed the life-affirming sensibilities that Keiko, an ordinary konbini worker, experiences by being attuned to the convenience store’s soundscape. The moral and ethical claims that are implicit in Berleant’s theory of engagement that leads to an aesthetic experience are central to what led me in this direction, and these claims fruitfully come alive in Convenience Store Woman. A convenience store in operation occupies one place among the myriad of everyday, mundane events in Japanese society. Moreover, it may be argued persuasively that working in a convenience store is a manually driven, robotic, dead-end, cog-in-the-machine, and low-paid job. However, using what Saito terms her ‘sharpened sensibility’ and ‘imaginative power’, Keiko is able to find beauty in the drudgery of a konbini worker life. Palpably, there is something ‘extraordinary in the ordinariness’ of a konbini job.63 It is as existential as it is aesthetic for Keiko. The konbini has ‘aura’.64 And that ‘aura’ is its soundscape – ‘a world of sound’ that makes Keiko’s world go round. Mustn’t we imagine Keiko happy?65 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A version of this paper was presented online as ‘Social Aesthetics and the “World of Sound” in Convenience Store Woman Novel’ at the 15th Annual Conference on Asian Studies, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic, 26–27 November 2021. For helpful advice, especially in the early stages, I owe gratitude to Yuriko Saito. In addition, many thanks to the editors and two anonymous reviewers, who upon my request to recognize them by name revealed their identities: Daryl Jamieson and Thomas Leddy. And I have reserved the final acknowledgement to proofreader Kerry McCatty Furukawa, especially for her diligence and patience in checking and rechecking despite having a busy schedule. COMPETING INTERESTS The author has no competing interests to declare. REFERENCES ‘11 Incredible Services That Make Japan’s Convenience Stores So Convenient!’ LIVE JAPAN Perfect Guide, 14 November 2019. https://livejapan.com/en/in-tokyo/ in-pref-tokyo/in-akihabara/article-a0001306. 63 The notion of the ‘extraordinary in the ordinary’ is a central debate in the sub-genre of everyday aesthetics. See Leddy, Extraordinary in the Ordinary. Saito considers too the ‘extraordinary of the everyday’ and the ‘everyday life as dreary,’ yet potentially aesthetic. See Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 38–40; and Aesthetics of the Familiar, 23–25. 64 ‘Aura’ is Leddy’s key concept in his aesthetic experience theory. See Leddy, Extraordinary in the Ordinary. 65 I am channeling Camus’s renowned essay The Myth of Sisyphus, final sentence: ‘We must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1995). 53Chambers Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.312 Berleant, Arnold. The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. 2nd ed. Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2001. ------. ‘Aesthetics and the Unity of Experience.’ Humanities Commons. 2013. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/M6CC0TS8F ------. Art and Engagement. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991. ------. ‘Ideas for a Social Aesthetic.’ In The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, edited by Andrew Light and Johnathan Smith, 23–38. 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