James Nicoll Reviews

Hiromi Kawakami’s 2016 People From My Neighborhood is a collection of novellas and.. um… something like vignettes. The 2020 English translation is by Ted Goossen. 

The narrator lives in a town filled with marvels, marvels they are determined to share with the reader.

Some local curiosities are unremarkable; schoolyard bullies are found everywhere. So are gossips. Some customs are eccentric (although rational) solutions to such mundane issues such ​“who shall care for a superfluous child?” Some events are improbable, but not impossible, such as an ambassador from [where exactly?] selecting that very town to host his embassy. But then there’s the school made from candy, mysterious lovers found growing in the ground, the man with two shadows, and even more phenomena that appear supernatural — or at least inconsistent with the world as we know it.

The twenty-four interlinked vignettes might not show all of the local wonders, but they certainly show enough to amuse.

So, ha ha, another adventure in reviewing Kawakami. I was going to review Strange Weather in Tokyo, because the title seemed to offer something appropriately spec-fic adjacent. Turns out that’s a variant title for Sensei no kaban, reviewed here as The Briefcase. No, I don’t know why Counterpoint used two different titles for what seems to be the same Allison Markin Powell translation.

Let’s examine this collection.

The Parade. That did have overt fantastic elements… but even for a novella, it was too short for my purposes. 

The rest of the collection contains what might be seen as short stories. But that would be overstating their length. Even ​“vignette” might give the wrong impression. Many of the entries in this book are short-shorts, as is clear from the fact that the twenty-four episodes add up to just 121 pages.

Another way to look at the book is that each element is just as long as it needs to be. Not every episode has a plot as such, but they do have a purpose, which they serve admirably. The collection as a whole isn’t a narrative, but the interconnected vignettes paint a vivid picture of a remarkable town over the course of decades¹. People wasn’t exactly my thing, but it was a delightful way to spend an evening².

People From My Neighborhood is available here (Granta), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Bookshop UK), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: Although I’m not really sure which decades or if linear time is something found in this collection.

2: Not to mention a welcome distraction from PM Carney’s wellness check on the American President. USA delenda est.