THE STEREOTYPICAL PORTRAYAL OF THE WOMAN IN SAYAKA MURATA’S CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN

Abstract

This article is devoted to the main character of Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. The novel is in many ways autobiographical and based on Sayaka Murata’s own life experience, she managed to deeply reveal many of the current problems of modern society in Japan by the example of the image of the main character in the novel. In the main, the novel depicts the wonder and vulnerability of a culture of convenience and conformity, while also highlighting the gender discrimination faced by women in contemporary Japan. The pivotal issue raised is about the stereotype of women who are influenced by patriarchal culture and gender discrimination in society. This article aims to explain the forms of woman stereotypes and also show how woman characters can break these stereotypes. The descriptive qualitative method was used in this research, which applied Simone De Beauvoir's theory of Existentialist Feminism and Mansour Fakih's concept of Gender Discrimination about the relationship with the concept of gender that leads to discrimination. The results of the analysis show that the stereotype of women consists in three forms, namely: women as mothers, women as incompetent people, women as sex objects.