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About People From My Neighborhood: Stories
Product Description 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: naïf, magical, and frequently veering into the macabre" (Financial Times).A bossy child who lives under a white cloth near a tree; 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 and brief enough to allow for dipping in and out—Hiromi Kawakami creates a universe ruled by mystery and transformation. Review An NPR Best Book of the Year"Kawakami’s style traffics in brevity, giving us images distilled to their core, sentences that go directly to the heart, and the narrative command to deliver entire lives within one sweeping breath . . . The surreal turns into something powerful in Kawakami’s hands, all the more devastating because it escapes our full understanding." —Brenda Peynado, The New York Times Book Review"Twenty-six tightly drawn narratives that feature Kawakami’s signature unsparing and clever prose . . . An offbeat and energetic look at the magical and mysterious elements that can arise in the most normal circumstances." —Annabel Gutterman, TIME"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"An enchanting origami of linked stories, most no more than three or four pages, set in a neighborhood of eccentrics whose better selves betray them . . . Kawakami’s characters tread the shimmering line between the absurd and hyperreal, vivid as Japanese block prints." —Hamilton Cain, O, The Oprah Magazine“Beguiling, with a strangeness that feels culturally rooted.” —Sunday Times “Offers a delicious combination of intrigue, magic and comedy, like an unusual but satisfying snack. Kawakami continues to show off her prowess as a sharp-witted writer with a keen eye for the unexplored mysteries of humanity.” —Japan Times “Tempting as it is, People from My Neighborhood is not a book to rush . . . The interlinking short stories in this collection are fairy tales in the best Brothers Grimm tradition: naïf, magical and frequently veering into the macabre . . . in a world where much is insubstantial . . . Kawakami's clean narrative style is very much her own.” —Financial Times“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"Hiromi Kawakami’s delightfully quirky writing shines in this slim collection of microfiction, translated by Ted Goossen . . . An author who has been compared to Gabriel García Márquez and Italo Calvino, Kawakami deftly interweaves the mundane with the magical and the mysterious with the playful." —Rosa Cartagena, Bitch"Kawakami offers a series of impressions—fragments of lives that are just slightly off-kilter from the everyday . . . The pleasure of reading People from My Neighborhood lies in the uncanny, the feeling of recognizing something familiar that isn't quite right, or something that
