People from My Neighborhood: Stories

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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 People From My Neighbourhood, Hiromi Kawakami, Ted Goossen (trans) (Granta, August 2020; Soft Skull, November 2021) 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.

There's a school built out of chocolate, biscuits and sweets. When one of the pupils nibbles at some of the architecture, they have to cook and/or bake an exact replacement. Some of the stuff is namebrand, however, and use ingredients that aren't easily obtainable, so the copies become less and less like the original, slowly changing the school into a fake school. 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.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. Postcode pins are shown within geographic boundaries because we assign quintiles to boundaries rather than specific postcodes. This means all postcodes within the same geographic boundary will have the same quintile. Most get their own stories, and also feature in other characters’. One prominent example is The Love, a local pub owned by a middle-aged woman with no name and which gets no solid business but always remains. The Love’s owner is given quite the ending upon the book’s conclusion.

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. 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. 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.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... . The school principal had a wife and two daughters. His wife was a lawyer and his daughters both worked in banks. 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 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. The reason why I rated it three stars though was: i) as made known, I'm not a big fan of magical realism. ii) Even when each short story is literally, short but to a point, I feel like it's never-ending and started to get draggy. I enjoyed them most of the time but somehow wished the story would be done soon.

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. 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 Sixteen of the 26 stories were published in Japan in 2016 under the title Konoatari no hitotachi (Folk from round about). The English edition is published by Granta in 2020; the translator is Ted Goossen (more about him directly below).Turns out that some people are hatched from eggs, and they're not real humans. The narrator learns this from an local doctor. 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 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. 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

People From My Neighbourhood’, de momento no disponible en español, es un conjunto de cortísimos que giran, como cabe esperar, en torno a las personas que viven en un barrio. Pueden leerse forma independiente como pequeñas pildoritas pero quizá recomendaría leerlas más o menos de seguido para captar la multitud de hilos que van uniendo todos los relatos y que conforman un pequeño universo. No porque sea difícil entenderlos sino, más que nada porque quizá se te olviden algunos detalles si nos espacias mucho. We get a story dedicated to her older sister (a truly creepy tale of cruel sisterly abuse which ends on the image of what a doll’s brains might look like) before Kanae herself is fleshed out more thoroughly in “The Juvenile Delinquent”.

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Compare “The Hachiro Lottery”, which is only quietly odd, to “Grandpa Shadows”, the short story of a man with two shadows, one far more sinister than the other. The sinister shadow has a habit of attaching itself to another person for days at a time as a kind of curse. Like with her previous works in English, her subdued storytelling is softer than Yoko Ogawa's and the spheres from which she draws her subject matter are not as far-flung as Yoko Tawada's, but any of her books are approachable, somewhat enjoyable, and similar in feel to Banana Yoshimoto's. 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.