A small child living under a sheet, a doll's brain in a box, a vicious dog that bites everyone, a tenement whose only occupants are ghosts, a tiny drinking place called The Love that nobody goes to. 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. Hiromi Kawakami collects here a dreamlike conglomeration of semi-related characters and events from her part of town, if the title and interior clues are to be believed. Stories are told in the first person. We are not told the protagonist’s name…I have a suspicion it was a female. Equally, this neighbourhood is not so unlike our own. Like most, this one is built on whispers, stories and hearsay. The few things uniting its inhabitants are curiosity and gossip. Wondering about the owner of the café “The Love”, the narrator says: “How the woman ever makes a living out of that place is a mystery to us all”. “Us”, the neighbourhood, the unit, brought together by nosy speculation.

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. 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”. Aquí sin embargo me he encontrado con una Kawakami muy diferente, casi jugando, pasándoselo bien y contagiando ese sentimiento de divertimento a quien la lee.

Sections in this guide

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”. 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. 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. 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).

Kawakami also grows more political, and her stories become, to some degree, commentary on late-stage capitalism. In “Bass Fishing”, the price of shares in the town plummets and throws the town into chaos. In “Sports Day”, the local bank sponsors an annual physical fitness competition with events like money-counting and best loan evaluation. The Rivals: about two girls named Yōko that grew up across the street from one another at the neighbourhood. The two girls keep on having constant competition that one Yōko having an affair with another Yōko's husband. A story of infidelity, revenge thay ended up with a tragedy but love the lesson behind it. Harsh but cunning. Occasionally, the school principal wore a wig to the park. It was chestnut brown and parted on the side. 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, 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.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.

POLAR4 and Adult HE 2011 were produced using Middle Layer Super Output Areas (MSOAs) in England and Wales, Intermediate Zones (IZs) in Scotland and Super Output Areas (SOAs) in Northern Ireland.

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. 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.

Grandpa Shadows: of a grandpa who lived on the outskirts of town, with two shadows-- one was docile and submissive, the other was rebellious. Mystical and spooky. 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.

I truly enjoy Japanese quirky stories - Yōko Ogawa, Taeko Kōno, Sayaka Murata, Hiroko Oyamada, Yukiko Motoya, Yōko Tawada have all written great stories whose kookiness appeals to me. In Kawakami’s stories a reader has no way of predicting what will happen. There is no logic, no correlation between the cause and the effect, realism is mixed with magic, fantasy, nightmarish visions and elements of Japanese folktales. Many stories evoke dystopian scenarios and some ideas explored in them reminded me slightly of “The Emissary” by Tawada and “The Memory Police” by Ogawa, as well as films by Tetsuya Nakashima (especially “Confessions” and “Memories of Matsuko”). There is a school that’s made completely of edible sweets, bizarre neighbourhood lotteries, people born from eggs, naughty ghosts of children, magic spells. Between the lines though Kawakami often points out social exclusion and marginalisation, bullying, loneliness and the pressure to conform, all wrapped in a layer of oddness.