FICTION
PEOPLE FROM MY NEIGHBOURHOOD
By Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Ted Goossen
Granta/Paperback/128 pages/$19.94/Available here
4 out of 5
Japanese author Hiromi Kawakami's writing has an accessible, addictive quality. Shortly after reading her quirky yet quietly moving novel The Nakano Thrift Shop recently, I sought out as many of her translated works as I could find.
The bite-sized writing in this slim volume is similarly crisp and enjoyable. Each story is brief enough to be devoured during a commute - I imagine salaried workers swaying in subway carriages with noses in their copies - but you could just as well binge-read the entire book in one sitting.
To summarise the linked vignettes in People From My Neighbourhood would be to risk ruining them with spoilers. Kawakami rarely needs more than three or four pages to wrap things up in a satisfying furoshiki - a traditional Japanese cloth bundle - or abruptly leave you hanging.
Suffice to say that the tales in this collection revolve around a fictional neighbourhood and a cast of recurring characters - among them feisty schoolgirls who specialise in the occult and mind control; the eighth son of a large family who rotates among different households; a dog-school principal and a nasty-tempered chicken farmer.
The town's stories - its gossip and bizarre incidents - are narrated in the first person by one of the neighbourhood kids.
As a result, curious things are told with that mix of misplaced wonder and naive acceptance peculiar to children.
A dark detail, such as a child-corrupting mass murderer in the townfolk's midst, is relayed matter-of-factly, glossed over by the messed-up priorities of the kooky inhabitants.
Time in these stories does not move in a linear fashion. The narrator sometimes sounds like a schoolgirl struggling with the complexities of friendship; in the next story, she possesses the worldliness of a grown woman looking back on her childhood.
This stylistic device or way of ordering the collection is what gives the fictional neighbourhood its nostalgic, timeless quality. Its universe alternately shrinks and expands, in a comfortingly perpetual portrait of this singular estate - even as it acknowledges the inevitability of impersonal, urban living.
Kawakami - born in Tokyo in 1958 and a much-lauded figure in contemporary Japanese literature - is particularly skilled at starting an ordinary anecdote and then making a hairpin turn into the realm of weirdness.
Epidemics and revolutions break out, individual buildings secede from the rest of Japan and then, just as suddenly, collective amnesia sets in.
One could read these eruptions of strangeness as a way of dealing with repressed societal and historical trauma. Yet, one could just as well enjoy these enigmatic works at entertaining face value.
Terms like "nonchalant magic realism" have been used to describe Kawakami's surreal style. I prefer to think of her aesthetic as a syncretism of influences ranging from Shinto Buddhist beliefs of spiritual energy residing in nature and objects to Shonen Jump manga.
Perhaps best known outside of Japan for her novel Strange Weather In Tokyo, shortlisted for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize, Kawakami deserves a wider international readership.
My favourite bit of trivia about her is that she wrote her biology thesis at Ochanomizu University on the reproduction of sea urchins.
Somehow, it is fitting for a novelist who puts the prickly, passionate and mad things in life under her microscope of fiction.
If you like this, read: The Nakano Thrift Shop (Granta, 2017, $19.94, available here), Kawa-kami's novel about a young woman working in a thrift store and her relationship with a co-worker. Each chapter is named after and related to an object sold in the store.
