5/13/2023 0 Comments The convenience store womanShe sees people as “cogs” in society, presenting both the world and its inhabitants as parts of a functional machine, and it is only by becoming a “cog” as part of the convenience store that Keiko values her life. Throughout the novel, Keiko presents herself as an object of the convenience store, owned by it and directed by its needs. Although Amelia Brown rightly describes Keiko as “empowered” by the end of the novel, the brainwashing influence of biopower makes this empowerment faintly tragic, and sparks questions about whether escaping biopower is even possible. But the implied morality of Murata’s novel suggests that the state of bodily control to which Keiko willingly subjects herself may not be as simple as either oppression or free will. In Sayaka Murata’s 2016 novel, Convenience Store Woman, her main character, Keiko, a worker at a SmileMart who dedicates her whole life to her job, is an object of biopower. Coined by Michel Foucault, “biopower” is a term used to describe the ways in which the human body is subjugated and controlled by the state.
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