Convenience Store Woman

Maybe people who thought they were being violated felt a bit better when they attacked other people in the same way.

When something was strange, everyone thought they had the right to come stomping in all over your life to figure out why.

So that was it: now that she thinks he’s “one of us” she can lecture him. She’s far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality—however messy—is far more comprehensible.

The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.

At that moment, for the first time ever, I felt I’d become a part in the machine of society. I’ve been reborn, I thought. That day, I actually became a normal cog in society.

Now, however, it felt like he’d downgraded me from store worker to female of the human species.

Maybe I’m working because I want to be a useful tool.

’ve become a foreign object.

From where I stood, there were two types of prejudiced people—those who had a deep-rooted urge for prejudice and those who unthinkingly repeated a barrage of slurs they’d heard somewhere.

Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think.