People from My Neighborhood

August 1, 2021
Far from straightforward domestic drama, Japanese writer Kawakami's (Parade, 2019) latest is a collection of interconnected micro-stories about the people living in a neighborhood. From the first story, in which our occasional first-person narrator is followed home by an exceptionally hairy child that never ages, readers know they'll find magical realism here. As the three-to-five-page stories compound, readers get to know locals like the dog-school principal, the owner of a bar that no one ever visits, bad girl Kanae and her sister who can talk to the dead, and a princess who stays for a brief stint. The happenings are strange: a plague of pigeonitis (exactly what it sounds like) that affects the whole town, a lottery of which the losers must care for a child from a family with too many, a house that plays music for people on their birthdays. It is all weird, wonderful, and surprisingly funny. Readers who appreciate the fairy-tale feel in the stories of Helen Oyeyemi will find that here, in this wholly original collection.

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September 6, 2021
Kawakami’s magical and engaging collection (after Strange Weather in Tokyo) pulls the reader into a small Japanese community via stories told by unnamed narrators. In “The Secret,” the narrator’s life changes upon meeting a child who never ages despite the two spending 30 years together. “Grandma” follows a neighbor who plays cards with a child narrator and asks the child for money, until something causes their dynamic to change. “The Office” features a gazebo where a man waits for “customers.” The narrator brings a friend named Kanae to the gazebo, who is rude to the man, though they later discover the man has a surprising talent. In “Brains,” Kanae encourages the narrator to tickle her older sister, a form of torture, because her sister’s nearly blue eyes make her look like a stranger, despite her Japanese features. In “The Hachirō
Lottery,” a group of families take turns caring for a neighborhood child who has 14 siblings. Everyone fortifies themselves against an alarming gravity-defying event in “Weightlessness,” though Kanae convinces the narrator to sneak out of school to experience the phenomenon. Throughout, Kawakami effectively anchors the stories’ uncanny moments with everyday details. This thought-provoking, offbeat collection is worth a look.

Starred review from September 15, 2021
Thirty-six linked fabulist shorts set in a small Japanese town. Kawakami's opening story, "The Secret," sets the stage for the book to come. One day, while walking back to her room, the narrator comes across a white cloth lying underneath a zelkova tree. When she lifts the cloth she discovers a bossy child who moves in with her and stays for the next 30 years, her constant companion, listening with "great sympathy" to her "tales of woe," neither aging nor changing in any way. When she asks, "Why did you come here?" the child thinks for a moment before answering, "It's a secret," and the story ends. This gleeful tone of wonder, matter-of-fact domestic compromise, fey visitation, and cheek-by-jowl coexistence of the mundane and the fabulous carries through the rest of the collection. Some stories focus on introducing members of the community: the old chicken farmer who risks going to Chicken Hell to harass his hens; the principal of a school for dogs; Grandpa Shadows, whose two shadows don't get along. Other stories explore notable events like the time gravity stops working or the "secret yet intense" war of false memory between Dolly Kawamata and the proprietor of the local karaoke bar. Yet others illuminate the town's enduring traditions: There's the taxi driver who gives three ghosts a tour of town every year and the lottery where the townfolk draw lots to see who will have to take in the belligerent son of the town's poorest family. While most stories stay within the confines of the town's borders, sometimes the scope widens. A cursed housing development becomes so prosperous it "secede[s] from Japan and form[s] its own armed forces, which sometimes [holds] maneuvers in Tokyo Bay," for example. The result is a book that evokes Italo Calvino's worldly fabulism and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's Grimms-ian domestic surrealism, but with a cultural lexicon that is distinctly Japanese. An engaging and winsome book that charms without diminishing the precise unease created by Kawakami's spare prose.

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