People from My Neighborhood: Stories

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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. 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).

Some stories were too magical and unique, while some were mundane but still, I love its nuances and prose (quite a similar atmosphere with Record of A Night Too Brief book). Most of it were heartwarmingly sneaky and too innocent cause of the childlike tone used by the narrator-- I really love Kanae's family, her sister especially. Neighbourhood gossips and rumors, weird discoveries around the corner, new people that came to fill in empty houses (and bringing along their dark pasts), weather changes, surreal incidents that giving new vibe to the neighbourhood.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.

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. From relatable stories to magical realism and fantasy, People From My Neighbourhood was a fiction with the unexpected, bizarrely crafted and very imaginative. Love it a lot! Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami is one of her country’s most popular contemporary novelists. She was made famous worldwide for her book Strange Weather in Tokyo (2013), which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In addition, Kawakami is known for her absurdist writing style, which permeates the stylistic atmosphere in People From my Neighborhood (2020). With the extraordinary effort of translator Ted Goossen, Kawakami’s unearthly charm and surrealist dreamscapes are now available for English-reading audiences to journey within. 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 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

BookBrowse Review

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.

People From My Neighbourhood, Hiromi Kawakami, Ted Goossen (trans) (Granta, August 2020; Soft Skull, November 2021) Stories are told in the first person. We are not told the protagonist’s name…I have a suspicion it was a female. 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”.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