People from My Neighborhood: Stories

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An eerie, surreal collection, absurd and funny, that fans of fabulism and magical realism will enjoy. The stories all come together to paint a portrait of a town where the lines between reality and magic are thin and the shadows hold all manner of surprises." —Leah Rachel von Essen, Book Riot But here I chose to let go and have fun with these excitingly strange and surreal stories. Though I couldn’t help but draw parallels with Tom Waits’ iconic What’s He Building: the story of a voyeuristic and nosy neighbour imagining absurd horrors out of thin air. 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. Me ha fascinado ver a la autora en esta faceta suya como cuentista, como es capaz de contar historias enteras, ¡hasta crear distopías!, en menos de cinco páginas. ¡Brutal! Además, a partir de estas pequeñas historias, la autora aprovecha muy inteligentemente para irnos dejando pequeñas reflexiones y mirada crítica a distintos comportamientos habituales en las sociedades contemporáneas. Complete with egg-people, teenage gangs, vicious but endearing street dogs, and sociopolitical commentary, Kawakami’s slice-of-life collection of short stories is an exercise in experimenting with absurdism and relationship-driven storytelling. Filled with cheerful uncanniness and bizarre moments that will make you laugh – you will wonder, “Do I really know the people in my neighborhood, apartment, or town?” More than anything, Kawakami expresses that there is magic in places that seem utterly ordinary.

Grandpa Shadows: of a grandpa who lived on the outskirts of town, with two shadows-- one was docile and submissive, the other was rebellious. Mystical and spooky. As the title itself suggests this collection transports readers to a Japanese neighbourhood and each story reads like a short vignette detailing an odd episode involving a resident of this neighbourhood. The stories are loosely interconnected as we have recurring figures—such as Kanae and her sisters or the school principal—who make more than one appearance. Occasionally one is even left with the impression that they vaguely contradict one another, or that time doesn’t quite unfold as it should in this neighbourhood. This elasticity with time and reality results in a rather playful collection that is recognizably a product of Kawakami’s active imagination. Her offbeat approach to everyday scenarios does make for an inventive collection of stories. There is a story about the unusual lottery that takes place in this neighbourhood (the loser has to take care of Hachirō, a boy with a voracious and seemingly never-ending appetite), one about the bitter rivalry between two girls named Yōko, one about a princess moving to the neighbourhood, another recounting the origin of the Sand Festival, and many detailing people who are curses or are part of some sort of prophecy.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. 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, magic A bossy child who lives under a white cloth near a tree; a schoolgirl who keeps doll’s brains in a desk drawer; an old man with two shadows, one docile and one rebellious; a diplomat no one has ever seen who goes fishing at an artificial lake no one has ever heard of. These are some of the inhabitants of People from My Neighborhood. People From My Neighbourhood” is a very slim collection of microstories (or what in Chinese-speaking countries is called short-shorts) by Hiromi Kawakami about - as the title says - people from the neighbourhood of the main character. They span several decades and are all interconnected, with the same neighbours appearing in them. Missing slightly my own shitamachi in Tokyo I hoped that reading these stories will be a trip down memory lane for me but I was mistaken.

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. And what’s more, when I was a child, didn’t I imagine them as caricatures – witches, old men, seers, rebels, charlatans? It’s as though People From My Neighbourhood reminds us of how we once perceived the world. The telling captures the elaborate fantasy that embellishes the stories of the very old when they recount their lives to the very young (the only people who will understand the magic they have lived, and not scoff).

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I knew heading into this one that it would be a gamble, since magical realism doesn’t often work for me. But, when it does it tends to be when it’s in short story format, and having heard such good things about Kawakami’s other work, I decided to give this collection of micro fiction a shot. Book Genre: Contemporary, Fantasy, Fiction, Japan, Japanese Literature, Magical Realism, Short Stories From this off-key note, the book flows like a janky, trippy, and darkly funny musical featuring such characters as Uncle Red Shoes and Grandpa Shadows. “It seemed Uncle Red Shoes had not always lived in our neighbourhood”.

Tempting as it is, People from My Neighborhood is not a book to rush. . . The interlinking short stories in this collection are fairy tales in the best Brothers Grimm tradition: naïf, magical and frequently veering into the macabre . . . in a world where much is insubstantial . . . Kawakami’s clean narrative style is very much her own.”— Financial Times It’s an absolute joy to see a writer as keenly insightful as Hiromi Kawakami dabble in surrealism and comedy. At times, People From My Neighbourhood feels like a science experiment. Underneath these bizarre stories are themes of identity, place and community. Of what makes us human and finding beauty in the small things that the spaces we inhabit provide. The absurdity of some of the stories is grounding. The oddities of people, and what they do to extract meaning from a meaningless life. The tight, clearheaded prose is beautifully translated by Ted Goossen (who also translates Haruki Murakami), and each story draws readers in with a puzzling mystery or a strange character. Almost none of the conflicts are resolved, and if there is a fault to be found in the book, it’s that many of the stories lead to the same kind of curious, unresolved conclusion.They may look like they are in their teens, or in their fifties, or in their eighties, depending on the moment. The weather seems to be the determining factor." Returning to the neighborhood, he reintroduces himself to the town’s denizens before going to work in the family trade: abstract art. He hates art, but “in a feat of sheer self-discipline” he becomes a renowned, though still unmarried, abstract painter. Though a success in all other things, Sōkichi never finds the kind of relationship he wants. 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 Es divertido porque los relatos combinan historias completamente cotidianas, que podrían ser reflejo de la vida en el día de cualquier lugar: nacimiento de amistades, rencillas familiares, anécdotas de mascotas, descripción de un negocio local… con otras que tienen toques de realismo mágico. Además, conforme vas avanzando en la lectura, las historias dejan de estar muy asentadas en la realidad para irse elevando a terrenos fantásticos. Immensely imaginative with scenarios ranging from lightly humorous and satirical to surreal and downright bizarre, People From My Neighborhood:Stories by Hiromi Kawakami is a wonderful collection of thirty-six interlinked short stories/vignettes. The stories feature a cast of interesting characters, some recurring and some new, from the narrator’s neighborhood -her childhood friend Kanae and Kanae’s sister and others such as the neighborhood Grandma, a dog school principal, Uncle Red Shoes who opens a dancing school,the lady who owns Love, “the tiny drinking place”, the Kawamata family and many others.