People from My Neighborhood: Stories

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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. 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. 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. 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. The secret to making People From My Neighbourhood so charming in its surrealness, and what so often had me laughing out loud to myself, is the shortness of its 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”. 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. 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. People from My Neighbourhood isn’t just an exercise in home-town nostalgia, though. The stories occasionally go off in other directions, with some even shooting us into the future. One example features an estate on the outskirts of town, where most apartments contain exactly six people – all well and good. Then the story develops in an unusual manner: 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.Readers expecting a measured heart-warming tale in the mould of The Briefcase may wonder what is going on at times, but plenty of Kawakami’s work in English, including her collection of novellas Record of a Night Too Brief, displays this tendency, and here the writer allows her imagination full rein, resulting in this clever collection of palm-of-the-hand stories. It’s a book that’s easy to devour as you slip from one story to the next, forgetting the time, but it’s probably best experienced slowly over several days (sadly, not an art I’ve ever mastered!).

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.The Bottomless Swamp: a House of Sweets that turned to School of Sweets, made of chocolate. Dark chocolate, rich in cocoa. Love the bizarreness of this story. The mystery of Rokurō, I actually think it was real! 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. 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

The ways in which time and place shape us are a common theme that flows through Kawakami’s works, from the attempt to bridge generational gaps sharing a barrail in Strange Weather in Tokyo or the shared workspace in The Nakano Thrift Shop being a catalyst for romance and camaraderie. If a person can be said to be the embodiment of space and time, even The Ten Loves of Nishino shows how the lives of ten women are shaped each through their time with the same toxic man. People from My Neighbourhood highlights the importance of place and community and the ways in which those in proximity fit into each other’s lives, being both the central figure in their own narratives and supporting cast for everyone else. While there isn’t much character development through each character's minor cameos across the collection, it greatly develops the impression of the community and makes it feel well rounded and lived-in, with the community and town itself becoming the central character.

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. 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. From story to story – each one entirely unique but also loosely linked to every other like pictures in a tapestry – a map of the neighbourhood begins to form. Certain homes and streets, and the families who reside there, come into focus and become familiar.