People from My Neighborhood: Stories

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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. There's a little boy that can't live at home, so there's a yearly lottery between the other families in the neighbourhood who gets him that year. Stories are told in the first person. We are not told the protagonist’s name…I have a suspicion it was a female.

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."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 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. 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: naïf, magical, and frequently veering into the macabre” ( Financial Times). 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. 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.

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. 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 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 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 Twenty-six tightly drawn narratives that feature Kawakami’s signature unsparing and clever prose . . . An offbeat and energetic look at the magical and mysterious elements that can arise in the most normal circumstances." —Annabel Gutterman, TIME

The town grew more and more run down as time passed, but the estate thrived. It seceded from Japan and formed its own armed forces, which sometimes held manoeuvres in Tokyo Bay. The Elf: about a Music House that located next to the park which you could only visit during your birthday. It plays music to visitors but no one ever tell details about their experience. "Everyone hears different music. The music that rules their destiny." So mysteriously captivating. 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 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. 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.There’s no clean-cut narrative to People From My Neighbourhood. Rather, it is a collection of short stories all based in one single place, featuring increasingly familiar faces encountering bizarre situations or bringing fresh oddness to the town. It’s worth once more comparing this town to Royston Vasey, though without the political edge. Kawakami’s world adheres to its own logic. For instance, it seems as though our narrator is one of the only people to have aged in her neighbourhood. Not that things stay the same; rather that as one thing disappears, another takes its place, and some things started life old. Or maybe they started it as something else entirely. It’s as though the passing of time in the neighbourhood doesn’t really fit with age or change in that way. And yet, we accept this logic as we would in a dream: timelessness is a given, a condition of Kawakami’s compelling other-world. 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.

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.

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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. People undergo avian transformations. A stranger moves to the area with whispers of her dark past behind her. Gravity leaves them behind for a day. A new baby, undergoing numerous transformations along the way, shows up in the neighbourhood looking for a new family.