People from My Neighborhood: Stories

Product Information

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). 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. 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... . 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).

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. 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”. 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 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.

My Book Notes

Stories are told in the first person. We are not told the protagonist’s name…I have a suspicion it was a female.

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.Here are snippets from 3 of the stories to give you a flavor of the writing style/stories in this collection: I love how the author used her imagination and even when it almost felt pointless, it’s complementary to the Japanese culture. If truth be told, I wouldn’t think I’d enjoy it as much if it were taken from other cultures. People from My Neighborhood isn’t a conventional book of linked short stories, and it is the relationships between each story that make the collection pop. Each story flows into the next, linked, not by a narrative arc, but by a common theme shared with the story that follows it. In “The Crooner”, the neighborhood plots to get rid of a vicious dog. Next, “The School Principal”, an unemployed man in his mid-fifties, assumes command of the neighborhood’s canines. The story that follows is about another directionless, middle-aged adult. The continuity between these tales is all the more remarkable because these stories are collected from already-published work. It is almost as though the compilation, rather than the narrative, is using stream-of-consciousness.

In that same story, a housing estate on the edge of town grows into a town of its own, eventually seceding from Japan and forming its own navy — one of many absurd moments which should elicit a sudden laugh from any reader. 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. This is a book of laugh-out-loud absurdity and jolly uncanniness. An exercise in experimenting with narratives, characters, and ideas. If you wish to look deeper into the metaphors and political parallels at play here, you may. I usually do. 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.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”.