People from My Neighborhood: Stories

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Kawakami's book is an intriguing and compelling bitesize read. It's also funny, full of heart and, despite appearances, deeply familiar. It asks the reader to embrace fluidity, but it does so quietly and without insistence. For all of our voyeurism and curiosity, we get the sense that, ultimately, this is a world that will exist and transform with or without witnesses. 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”. 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 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. 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... .

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). The translator has done an excellent job translating the crisp, concise style, and each story entices readers with a perplexing mystery or a fascinating character. Despite the shortcoming, it's that many of the stories all come to the same strange, unresolved ending, making it of it’s own kind. Immensely imaginative with scenarios ranging from lightly humorous and satirical to surreal and downright bizarre, People From My Neighborhood:Stories by Hiromi Kawakami is a wonderful collection of thirty-six interlinked short stories/vignettes. The stories feature a cast of interesting characters, some recurring and some new, from the narrator’s neighborhood -her childhood friend Kanae and Kanae’s sister and others such as the neighborhood Grandma, a dog school principal, Uncle Red Shoes who opens a dancing school,the lady who owns Love, “the tiny drinking place”, the Kawamata family and many others. 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.A juvenile delinquent turned good, a boy who sneaks into people's gardens to plant foul-smelling chrysanthemums, a 103 year old man with two shadows, a mysterious council estate that has strange powers, a contagious disease that turns you into a pigeon, a doctor who believes some humans are hatched from eggs, 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. 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. People from My Neigh­borhood delivers a heartfelt, beautiful, dreamlike rendition of urban life that is both glorious on its own merits and will emotionally resonate with those of us who, due to the pandemic, have been required to stay at home, kept at arms lengths from our fam­ily, friends, and community.”—Ian Mond, Locus 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

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! It’s an absolute joy to see a writer as keenly insightful as Hiromi Kawakami dabble in surrealism and comedy. At times, People From My Neighbourhood feels like a science experiment. Interview with Hiromi Kawakami in which stories in this book are mentioned… http://www.zoomjapan.info/2017/05/25/... As the volume progresses, Kawakami moves further into the territory of magical realism. “Weightless” is a striking example of Kawakami’s surreal storytelling and delicious sense of irony: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: naif, magic 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.

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.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: naif, magical, and frequently veering into the macabre” (Financial Times).A bossy child who lives under a white cloth near a t-ree; 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. In their lives, details of the local and everyday–the lunch menu at a tiny drinking place called the Love, the color and shape of the roof of the tax office–slip into accounts of duels, prophetic dreams, revolutions, and visitations from ghosts and gods. In twenty-six “palm of the hand” stories–fictions small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand–Hiromi Kawakami creates a universe ruled by mystery and transformation. People from My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami – eBook Details 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). The publisher describes People from My Neighborhood as “super short ‘palm of the hand’” stories, a phrase coined by Japanese Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. Kawakami’s is a book to keep on hand and to become intimate with: a book with which readers can have a relationship of their own. 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.