As we continue into the latter half of this increasingly surreal year, one finds the need for a little magic. Thus it is with a feeling of great timeliness that we present our Book Club selection for the month of August, the well-loved Hiromi Kawakami’s new fiction collection, People From My Neighborhood. In turns enigmatic and poignant, as puzzling as it is profound, Kawakami’s readily quiet, pondering work is devoted to the way our human patterns may be spliced through with intrigue, strangeness, and fantasy; amongst these intersections of normality and sublimity one finds a great and wandering beauty.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!
People From My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen, Granta, 2020
Like a box of chocolates, Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighbourhood (translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen) contains an assortment of bite-sized delights, each distinct yet related. This peculiar collection of flash fiction paints a portrait of exactly what the title suggests—the denizens of the narrator’s neighborhood—while striking a perfect balance between intriguing specificity and beguiling universality. The opening chapters introduce readers to each of the neighborhood’s curious inhabitants, while later chapters build upon the foundation, gradually erecting a universe of complex human relationships, rigorous social commentary, immense beauty, and more than a little magic.
Existing fans of Kawakami’s will surely recognize these common features of her award-winning body of work, while first-time readers will likely go searching for more. Goossen is better known as a translator of Murakami and editor of the English version of the Japanese literary magazine MONKEY: New Writing from Japan (formerly Monkey Business); ever committed to introducing Anglophone readers to non-canonical Japanese writers, he brings his flair for nonchalant magical realism to this winning new collaboration.
The first story, “The Secret,” introduces readers to the anonymous narrator and sets the tone for the collection. First presented as genderless, (we only find out later that she is female) she discovers an androgynous child, who turns out to be male, under a white blanket in a park. The child, wild and independent, comes home with her. Despite occasional disappearances, he keeps her company as she ages, all the while remaining a child. In this story, we receive her only concrete—but general—description of herself: “I’ve come to realize that he can’t be human after all, seeing how he’s stayed the same all these years. Humans change over time. I certainly have. I’ve aged and become grumpy. But I’ve come to love him, though I didn’t at first.” This one statement exemplifies many of the collection’s trademark characteristics and overarching themes: a version of time in which past, present, and eternity coexist, the supernatural, and the narrator’s fascinating method of characterization.
Their companionship is never mentioned again, though it silently underlies the whole collection. It also introduces Kawakami’s way of twinning characters, sometimes with other humans and sometimes with less familiar beings, elaborating a sense of potential or alterity within each. We find a concrete example of this device in a neighbor called Grandpa Shadows—named as such for his two shadows. “One shadow was docile and submissive, the other rebellious,” the narrator reveals, and then goes on to report how encounters with the rebellious shadow tend to end badly. In the story “Baby,” a baby is found in the neighborhood, and the narrator tells us about the three-year journey necessary for a baby to arrive in its body on earth. During the last stage of the journey, “A haro comes in the form of human twins. More specifically, it is a single entity divided into two halves. These pieces often become separated from one another, for the haro is a nervous creature, quickly distracted and prone to wandering off. If its two halves stray more than five hundred metres from each other, they vanish in an instant.” This passage suggests that the alterity, otherness, and strangeness within the self and the familiar is a precondition of being, an assertion only reinforced by the fact of the story’s existence in its second language. Just as we humans contain versions of ourselves within us—all veracious—so too do stories.
As is clear by its description, People from my Neighbourhood masterfully employs the techniques of magical realism, and the sheer beauty and playfulness of much of the imagery do much to justify the application of the genre. In “Weightlessness,” for example, the narrator’s friend reassures her, “We’ll be OK once we make it to the trees,” after they escape the negligent gaze of the teacher trying to lead them to safety when, “for the first time in ages, we had a no-gravity alert.” All the disobedient children spend the “no-gravity event” among the treetops until “Backpacks, handkerchiefs, shopping bags, snot—it all came falling down.”
Equally important, however, are the layers of resonance made possible by the injection of magic. Paired with the straight-faced tone of the narrator’s voice and the brevity and earnestness of the sentences, the reader is suspended in uncertainty as to how the magical realist elements of the story should be taken. Does the collection simply imitate the way adult memory idealizes the childhood perspective? Does it illustrate interior emotions by externalizing them and giving them concrete form? Does it comment upon the nature of collective emotion and experience? Or are we perhaps meant to take magic at face value, as it is given to us? The collection makes all of these interpretations available in abundance, allowing for a great richness of possible significance.
The portrayal and analysis of collective experience makes this a text that truly meets our moment. Though each story elaborates upon a particular character or event, there is little interiority and no sentiment. The gaze is that of an implicated observer, and any commentary comes from a chorus of gossip and public opinion. The narrator shows the reader only public spaces. Time jumps around unspecifically. Most importantly, the collective consciousness is capable of normalizing absolutely anything and does so almost aggressively.
One interpretation of the magic in the collection could be to equate it with power; the source of the magical occurrences could precisely be the power of the collective imagination. In “Pigeonitis,” the neighborhood falls victim to a highly contagious, extremely disruptive epidemic that gives the ill pigeon-like qualities. Very quickly, official instructions begin to compete with the unreliable assertions of lay-experts. Individuals find their perspectives shaped by their role within society: “We were all frightened, with one exception—Kanae’s sister. ‘So your chest expands and your eyes get big and round,’ she murmured. ‘I could live with that.’” The community adjusts its definition of normality in real time:
For one thing, you lost the power to think ahead. Completely. Your only concern was what was taking place in the immediate present. Once the disease had taken hold, our town was a terrible sight for several months. Everything was an absolute shambles, no one paid any attention to being on time, and all work was put on hold. None of this, however, bothered those who had the illness. Soon, almost everyone had caught it, and people sailed blissfully through the chaos of their daily lives. ‘Eat all the bugs we want! Make all the babies we can!’ Everyone was buoyed up by this mentality, and in fact the pregnancy rate during this period skyrocketed. You could only catch pigeonitis once, which meant the whole town was immune once the outbreak had passed. After about six months, there were no new cases, and things gradually returned to normal. We all kept quiet about what had taken place during that time, so that the solidarity of our community was actually enhanced.
Whether or not it was originally written with the COVID-19 pandemic in mind, the brevity, incisiveness, and humor of this story earns it a place in the canon of writing that captures this particular zeitgeist.
Rarely does one encounter such a delightful combination of whimsy and complex profundity as can be found in this collection, in which a radical commitment to the unexpected keeps the reader disarmed and fully engaged. As in a labyrinth, charming detours and dead ends distract our quest for some central truth, leaving us eager to revisit the journey.
Lindsay Semel is an Assistant Editor for Asymptote. She daylights as a farmer in North-Western Galicia and moonlights as a freelance writer and editor.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
Announcing our August Book Club Selection: People From My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami
The portrayal and analysis of collective experience makes this a text that truly meets our moment.
As we continue into the latter half of this increasingly surreal year, one finds the need for a little magic. Thus it is with a feeling of great timeliness that we present our Book Club selection for the month of August, the well-loved Hiromi Kawakami’s new fiction collection, People From My Neighborhood. In turns enigmatic and poignant, as puzzling as it is profound, Kawakami’s readily quiet, pondering work is devoted to the way our human patterns may be spliced through with intrigue, strangeness, and fantasy; amongst these intersections of normality and sublimity one finds a great and wandering beauty.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!
People From My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen, Granta, 2020
Like a box of chocolates, Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighbourhood (translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen) contains an assortment of bite-sized delights, each distinct yet related. This peculiar collection of flash fiction paints a portrait of exactly what the title suggests—the denizens of the narrator’s neighborhood—while striking a perfect balance between intriguing specificity and beguiling universality. The opening chapters introduce readers to each of the neighborhood’s curious inhabitants, while later chapters build upon the foundation, gradually erecting a universe of complex human relationships, rigorous social commentary, immense beauty, and more than a little magic.
Existing fans of Kawakami’s will surely recognize these common features of her award-winning body of work, while first-time readers will likely go searching for more. Goossen is better known as a translator of Murakami and editor of the English version of the Japanese literary magazine MONKEY: New Writing from Japan (formerly Monkey Business); ever committed to introducing Anglophone readers to non-canonical Japanese writers, he brings his flair for nonchalant magical realism to this winning new collaboration.
The first story, “The Secret,” introduces readers to the anonymous narrator and sets the tone for the collection. First presented as genderless, (we only find out later that she is female) she discovers an androgynous child, who turns out to be male, under a white blanket in a park. The child, wild and independent, comes home with her. Despite occasional disappearances, he keeps her company as she ages, all the while remaining a child. In this story, we receive her only concrete—but general—description of herself: “I’ve come to realize that he can’t be human after all, seeing how he’s stayed the same all these years. Humans change over time. I certainly have. I’ve aged and become grumpy. But I’ve come to love him, though I didn’t at first.” This one statement exemplifies many of the collection’s trademark characteristics and overarching themes: a version of time in which past, present, and eternity coexist, the supernatural, and the narrator’s fascinating method of characterization.
Their companionship is never mentioned again, though it silently underlies the whole collection. It also introduces Kawakami’s way of twinning characters, sometimes with other humans and sometimes with less familiar beings, elaborating a sense of potential or alterity within each. We find a concrete example of this device in a neighbor called Grandpa Shadows—named as such for his two shadows. “One shadow was docile and submissive, the other rebellious,” the narrator reveals, and then goes on to report how encounters with the rebellious shadow tend to end badly. In the story “Baby,” a baby is found in the neighborhood, and the narrator tells us about the three-year journey necessary for a baby to arrive in its body on earth. During the last stage of the journey, “A haro comes in the form of human twins. More specifically, it is a single entity divided into two halves. These pieces often become separated from one another, for the haro is a nervous creature, quickly distracted and prone to wandering off. If its two halves stray more than five hundred metres from each other, they vanish in an instant.” This passage suggests that the alterity, otherness, and strangeness within the self and the familiar is a precondition of being, an assertion only reinforced by the fact of the story’s existence in its second language. Just as we humans contain versions of ourselves within us—all veracious—so too do stories.
As is clear by its description, People from my Neighbourhood masterfully employs the techniques of magical realism, and the sheer beauty and playfulness of much of the imagery do much to justify the application of the genre. In “Weightlessness,” for example, the narrator’s friend reassures her, “We’ll be OK once we make it to the trees,” after they escape the negligent gaze of the teacher trying to lead them to safety when, “for the first time in ages, we had a no-gravity alert.” All the disobedient children spend the “no-gravity event” among the treetops until “Backpacks, handkerchiefs, shopping bags, snot—it all came falling down.”
Equally important, however, are the layers of resonance made possible by the injection of magic. Paired with the straight-faced tone of the narrator’s voice and the brevity and earnestness of the sentences, the reader is suspended in uncertainty as to how the magical realist elements of the story should be taken. Does the collection simply imitate the way adult memory idealizes the childhood perspective? Does it illustrate interior emotions by externalizing them and giving them concrete form? Does it comment upon the nature of collective emotion and experience? Or are we perhaps meant to take magic at face value, as it is given to us? The collection makes all of these interpretations available in abundance, allowing for a great richness of possible significance.
The portrayal and analysis of collective experience makes this a text that truly meets our moment. Though each story elaborates upon a particular character or event, there is little interiority and no sentiment. The gaze is that of an implicated observer, and any commentary comes from a chorus of gossip and public opinion. The narrator shows the reader only public spaces. Time jumps around unspecifically. Most importantly, the collective consciousness is capable of normalizing absolutely anything and does so almost aggressively.
One interpretation of the magic in the collection could be to equate it with power; the source of the magical occurrences could precisely be the power of the collective imagination. In “Pigeonitis,” the neighborhood falls victim to a highly contagious, extremely disruptive epidemic that gives the ill pigeon-like qualities. Very quickly, official instructions begin to compete with the unreliable assertions of lay-experts. Individuals find their perspectives shaped by their role within society: “We were all frightened, with one exception—Kanae’s sister. ‘So your chest expands and your eyes get big and round,’ she murmured. ‘I could live with that.’” The community adjusts its definition of normality in real time:
Whether or not it was originally written with the COVID-19 pandemic in mind, the brevity, incisiveness, and humor of this story earns it a place in the canon of writing that captures this particular zeitgeist.
Rarely does one encounter such a delightful combination of whimsy and complex profundity as can be found in this collection, in which a radical commitment to the unexpected keeps the reader disarmed and fully engaged. As in a labyrinth, charming detours and dead ends distract our quest for some central truth, leaving us eager to revisit the journey.
Lindsay Semel is an Assistant Editor for Asymptote. She daylights as a farmer in North-Western Galicia and moonlights as a freelance writer and editor.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog:
Contributor:- Lindsay Semel
; Language: - Japanese
; Place: - Japan
; Writer: - Hiromi Kawakami
; Tags: - family
, - fantasy
, - Japanese literature
, - Magical Realism
, - social commentary
, - strangeness
, - Women Writers