People from My Neighborhood: Stories

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Would give a full star rating for its cover cause of the classy hue. This little book consists of micro-short stories of each people living in the narrator's neighbourhood, a very straightforward narratives with minimalist concept. Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami is one of her country’s most popular contemporary novelists. She was made famous worldwide for her book Strange Weather in Tokyo (2013), which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In addition, Kawakami is known for her absurdist writing style, which permeates the stylistic atmosphere in People From my Neighborhood (2020). With the extraordinary effort of translator Ted Goossen, Kawakami’s unearthly charm and surrealist dreamscapes are now available for English-reading audiences to journey within. A lot of what I read I would classify as weird fiction. To me it's quite a broad term, running from the uncanny to full on horror or science fiction, and everything inbetween. There's traditional weird (H.P. Lovecraft). There's post-modern weird (J.G. Ballard). And then there's a special category that Japanese authors tend to gravitate to - I'd call it naive weird. It has all the components of the uncanny, but without any of the chilling or menacing nature a lot of weird fiction tends to have.

A juvenile delinquent turned good, a boy who sneaks into people's gardens to plant foul-smelling chrysanthemums, a 103 year old man with two shadows, a mysterious council estate that has strange powers, a contagious disease that turns you into a pigeon, a doctor who believes some humans are hatched from eggs, Kawakami’s style traffics in brevity, giving us images distilled to their core, sentences that go directly to the heart, and the narrative command to deliver entire lives within one sweeping breath . . . The surreal turns into something powerful in Kawakami’s hands, all the more devastating because it escapes our full understanding.”—Brenda Peynado, The New York Times Book Review Interview with Hiromi Kawakami in which stories in this book are mentioned… http://www.zoomjapan.info/2017/05/25/... In truth, I was hoping for a little more of a progression, but the stories amble along merrily at their own pace, with little concern for the wider context. However, even if it doesn’t really go anywhere much, the book is still great fun and a pleasure to read, one that can be seen as the work of a writer enjoying herself and inviting the reader to share in the experience (which is always nice!). Goossen’s work reads nicely here, the off-beat style coming across well, but it’s interesting that Kawakami’s usual English voice, Allison Markin Powell, is absent. I wonder if she was busy working on another of Kawakami’s novels… Pero qué bien me lo he pasado con esta lectura! Este reencuentro con una de mis autoras japonesas contemporáneas favoritas ha sido maravilloso y lleno de sorpresas. Primera vez que leo relatos de Hiromi Kawakami, hasta ahora solo me había sumergido en sus novelas: pausadas, llenas de sensibilidad, muy centradas en las relaciones humanas. Por decirlo así un poco en bruto “novelas muy japonesas” (algo que yo adoro, por supuesto).Book Genre: Contemporary, Fantasy, Fiction, Japan, Japanese Literature, Magical Realism, Short Stories I don't know how I'd describe these stories - maybe magical realism? But as you progress through the collection, stranger and stranger incidents begin to occur, and you realise that this neighbourhood is not as benign as it originally seems. Some stories were too magical and unique, while some were mundane but still, I love its nuances and prose (quite a similar atmosphere with Record of A Night Too Brief book). Most of it were heartwarmingly sneaky and too innocent cause of the childlike tone used by the narrator-- I really love Kanae's family, her sister especially. Neighbourhood gossips and rumors, weird discoveries around the corner, new people that came to fill in empty houses (and bringing along their dark pasts), weather changes, surreal incidents that giving new vibe to the neighbourhood. Kawakami slowly builds a familiar cast of characters, including herself; Kanae, her friend and a juvenile delinquent; Hachiro, the youngest of 15 children; Dolly, a girl with magical powers who has returned from America; and a host of weird and weirder adults.

Hiromi Kawakami collects here a dreamlike conglomeration of semi-related characters and events from her part of town, if the title and interior clues are to be believed.Delighting in both the fantastical and the mundane, the tales in this collection exemplify the Japanese literary form of 'palm of the hand' stories . . . Recurrent characters ground the narrative in a measure of reality, and a current of sadness runs beneath the quirky plots." — The New Yorker The subtle strangeness of this neighbourhood is hugely reminiscent of Royston Vasey in The League of Gentlemen: a place full of usual people who behave unusually or are subject to unusual circumstances, be they quietly supernatural, antisocial, or plainly bizarre. Kawakami’s style traffics in brevity, giving us images distilled to their core, sentences that go directly to the heart, and the narrative command to deliver entire lives within one sweeping breath . . . The surreal turns into something powerful in Kawakami’s hands, all the more devastating because it escapes our full understanding." —Brenda Peynado, The New York Times Book Review

Equally, this neighbourhood is not so unlike our own. Like most, this one is built on whispers, stories and hearsay. The few things uniting its inhabitants are curiosity and gossip. Wondering about the owner of the café “The Love”, the narrator says: “How the woman ever makes a living out of that place is a mystery to us all”. “Us”, the neighbourhood, the unit, brought together by nosy speculation. From the author of the internationally bestselling Strange Weather in Tokyo, a collection of interlinking stories that masterfully blend the mundane and the mythical—“fairy tales in the best Brothers Grimm tradition: naif, magical, and frequently veering into the macabre” ( Financial Times). Plus the literary magazine has now hooked up with a publishing house and will be publishing translated works beginning in the spring of 2022! See: https://www.stonebridge.com/post/monk... . In one of its most strangely surreal and supernatural moments of People From My Neighbourhood, one man moves to murder another in cold blood by stabbing him through the heart when, suddenly, the would-be victim “turned into a large swarm of flies and flew away”. A collection of 36 very short stories set in a small town in Japan. Eccentric, bizarre, enchanting, each tale is interconnected and weaves together to form a fantastical world.Sure, not every story works, but that tends to be because elements of the story don't speak to me, and that feels so deeply personal, I can't really hold that against the book. I truly enjoy Japanese quirky stories - Yōko Ogawa, Taeko Kōno, Sayaka Murata, Hiroko Oyamada, Yukiko Motoya, Yōko Tawada have all written great stories whose kookiness appeals to me. In Kawakami’s stories a reader has no way of predicting what will happen. There is no logic, no correlation between the cause and the effect, realism is mixed with magic, fantasy, nightmarish visions and elements of Japanese folktales. Many stories evoke dystopian scenarios and some ideas explored in them reminded me slightly of “The Emissary” by Tawada and “The Memory Police” by Ogawa, as well as films by Tetsuya Nakashima (especially “Confessions” and “Memories of Matsuko”). There is a school that’s made completely of edible sweets, bizarre neighbourhood lotteries, people born from eggs, naughty ghosts of children, magic spells. Between the lines though Kawakami often points out social exclusion and marginalisation, bullying, loneliness and the pressure to conform, all wrapped in a layer of oddness. Here are snippets from 3 of the stories to give you a flavor of the writing style/stories in this collection: