A Documentary billed as a Comedy
Keiko is in many ways a normal, unremarkable woman, she dresses well, she meets her friends for tea and cakes, spends time with her sister, she’s well regarded at work, she’s financially conscious, she takes care to take care of her appearance and her health.
Keiko has been working the same part time job at a convenience store since she was 18 (she’s now 36), she lives alone, in a tiny apartment, shared only with the roaches in the walls, she has almost nothing in common with her friends, save gender, approximate age, and having been at school with a few of them.
Her sister and her parents can’t figure out why she is the way she is, why she doesn’t want what they want her to want, why she struggles with concepts that should come naturally to her, why she is still single, why a woman with a degree and obvious drive is stocking shelves and hawking hotdogs.
At work she is anomalous, a single adult woman in a field populated by cash strapped immigrants, high school and college students, job surfers trying to break into their desired career, and bored housewives.
Where her colleagues view their jobs as a stepping stone, diversion or blunt necessity, Keiko is different, the store is the only place where she seems to be real, the only place where she has ever felt valued for who she is, what she can do, the only place she feels comfortable.
Her job is her life, she is her job.
Keiko is Autistic.
The Review Bit
This book is billed on the cover and in most advertising as a comedy, a skewed look at the normal world through an alien’s eyes, finding absurdity in the mundane and vice versa.
Maybe this is how most people engage with it, I’m genuinely not sure if there is much in here the average person would laugh at. I laughed exactly once, within the first 10 pages.
The next 150ish pages were spent flitting between discomfort and camaraderie for Keiko as she tries to work her way through a world that views her at best as a consumable item and at worst as a deviant organism to be eliminated.
Nothing very much happens in this book, our protagonist is a whitebread woman with a service sector job, no interest in sex, little in other people, an attitude towards food and drink that would make an orthorexic bodybuilder nervous, and no real ambitions other than getting by, going to work, and hopefully fitting in a little better, not out of any desire to fit, but so other people will stop being worried that she doesn’t.
It is a hard book to spoil, and simultaneously a hard book to talk about without spoiling, The bulk of the book is spent showing the reader the world from Keiko’s perspective, which I guess is where the humour is meant to come from. Keiko is a very well constructed & written portrayal of a woman with high functioning autism, and is presented quite sympathetically without being infantilised. Anyone who has Autism or deals closely with Autistic people will find Keiko quite familiar. In particular I think the book is valuable in that it shows a well realised, grounded depiction of some of the traits more common in autistic women then men, for example Keiko is a sharp dresser and can pass near flawlessly as normal in brief interactions, but only because she is adept at camouflaging herself, paying extremely careful attention to the fashion senses and speech patterns of the women her age around her to understand what she needs to do to avoid scrutiny, even if she doesn’t particularly understand why they care about the things they do.
I think one of the two things the book does exceptionally is capture how many of the things that autistic people do that may seem baffling to normal people follow an explicable and straightforward logic that makes sense to the individual, but would be completely nonsensical to someone with a different kind of brain.
There are also quite a few serious topics in here, just below the surface, commentary & discussion on gender roles, the politics of self fulfillment, what it means to not fit in, the way society treats disabled and atypical people, the politics of working and the perceived value of different types of employment. I won’t discuss these themes aside from mentioning them as the book is quite short and nothing much happens in it, so discussing how they are handled would rather ruin reading it for yourself.
Ultimately, I found the book more sad than funny, maybe that’s because of my insider knowledge, maybe I’m just pessimistic.
Where to Get It
This is a mass market paperback and is widely available, I got my copy used from a local bookstore.
Additional Discussion Below, Read The Book First!
Achtung! Spoilers!
I think the other thing this book does exceptionally well is give a pretty good look at what Alexithymia can be like, without ever really pointing it out. Keiko does not actually seem to be aware of what she is feeling in many parts of the story, and struggles to articulate stress, frustration, joy, depression etc. at moments when they are obvious from her behaviour, in some moments she makes decisions without considering how doing those things will make her feel, seemingly she is sometimes unable to.
It’s a bitch of a problem, I can tell you.
I found the book sad, I can see Keiko’s future, her wasted potential, Keiko is highly driven, extremely knowledgeable in her field, honest to a fault and teamwork orientated, her employers are sitting on a potential star employee that would be extremely effective as a trainer or in a similar hands on service improvement role, something she demonstrates at the very end of the book.
But Keiko will never realise that potential, because nobody above her gives a shit about her, she will be stuck working in her deadend post because it is all she is comfortable with until she is too old to do the long hours on her feet or the hauling items back and forth whereafter she will be ejected onto unemployment and likely death by the diseases of poverty or from simple misery.
Her family are on the verge of giving up on her because they cannot handle the fact that her version of happiness is not what they want it to be, her sister is so disturbed by her preferred lifestyle that she’s almost deliriously happy when she believes she has shacked up with a jobless & supremely greasy loser that managed to get fired from a convenience store, even when she also believes he gets drunk and sleeps with other women behind Keiko’s back. It is better in society’s eyes to lead a normal, unhappy, shitty life than have an atypical one you actually enjoy.
I think another omnipresent theme that isn’t explicitly acknowledged at any point but is touched on here and there is the damage a lack of understanding and support brings. Keiko is taken to a therapist as a child, who can’t figure out what is wrong with her even when it would be blindingly obvious to anyone that has pawed through the DSMV, as an adult, she is living in a city that presumably has many thousands of autistic adults in it, but she doesn’t even seem to be aware of the concept, she could easily have real friends that understand her, but because of a lack of societal knowledge has been denied that community and that self understanding. Japan still lags badly behind much of the developed world in public awareness of developmental disorders, this has hurt Keiko, as it hurts many thousands of real Japanese everyday.
I do not present quite like Keiko, but many times in the past I have struggled with the same things, as have many millions of people before her & I, in a way, Keiko is every autistic person, fighting to understand these aliens around her, that demand we play by rules they won’t tell us, ones they themselves don’t even seem to know half the time.
I hope all the Keiko’s reading this are happy, there are plenty of us out there, and we’ll make it.
Review