PEOPLE FROM MY NEIGHBORHOOD

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.