by Jay Rafferty
Hiromi Kawakami’s latest novel People from my Neighbourhood, has been out of print for the last year at one of the UK’s largest booksellers, Waterstones. It was originally released in august of 2021 but trying to find a copy in any bookstore I’ve been near is like trying to find hen’s teeth. As a big Kawakami fan this was a big disappointment. I’d had it bookmarked for purchase before they’d even announced the cover. In the mean time i made due with the back-catalogue of her work that wasn’t yet in my library, The Nakano Thrift Shop and Record of a Night too Brief. While these were great reads, as the vast majority of Kawakami’s work is, I was still anxious to get my hands on People from my Neighbourhood.
Around Easter I’d had enough of waiting for Waterstones to fulfill my literary needs and consigned myself to making a deal with the dev- I mean going to Amazon.com. Same thing really. Within a few days I had the book in my hands, surprised to say the least by its size at only 120 odd pages. The wee paperback that could fit in the backpocket of your jeans seemed slim and meek compared to its siblings. It reminded me of one of those A Hundred and One Sudoku books. If there where ever a time for the phrase ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ to be used this is it. This collection of linked vignettes packs so much into its pages, several lifetimes pass, dogs dead in one segment are revived in the next by recollection.
The novella’s recollections of the main character’s neighbourhood and its inhabitants are remarkably swift, magical and surreal. Where Kawakami’s past novels may have touched upon some elements of magical realism they were always grounded in reality, like the appearance of a Mr Nishino’s spirit in his ex’s garden (an opening scene from The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino). People from my Neighbourhoodmay start off in this fashion, a strange homeless child moving in with our main character or a chicken owner sharing agrarian superstitions but these soon begin to unwind into the wonderfully mythical: A future medium rescues a shapeless creature from a mountain path, that will soon become a dove, a man and her lover; low gravity warnings are issued by the Government; a karaoke bar owner becomes ruler of earth. Even excluding these few examples a reader will still be awed, titillated and surprised by the tales from Kawakami’s neighbourhood. The deviation from grounded magical realism to wild surrealism is so much more engrossing than the work of other writer’s who have attempted the same leap.
If I have any criticism it is this, I missed the huge appetite I acquired reading Kawakami’s earlier work. Strong Weather in Tokyo is teeming with delicious descriptions, meals that make a reader jealous. Don’t get me wrong, there’s food in the neighbourhood but their sparse mentions are few and far between, more suited to turning one’s stomach than one’s head, although evidentially that is Kawakami’s intention with leftovers and baby mush. Where the stomach is neglected, the mind is invigorated. The inhabitants of this neighbourhood are strange, ethereal, responsible, mythical, illogical, serious, astute and ridiculous. Each character or memory gets two-six pages dedicated to the topic. Vignettes of people who could easily be real, who wouldn’t seem out of place in any neighbourhood. We’ll probably never know how true these depictions are to reality but I guarantee at least one will be a person in your life’s peripheral.
I hope you pick up this tiny book and get acquainted with Kawakami’s neighbours. You’ll feel at home in these pages. I know I did.
Jay Rafferty is a redhead, an uncle and an eejit. He is the Poetry Editor at Sage Cigarettes Magazine. His debut chapbook, Holy Things, was released in early 2022 with the Broken Spine and you can read his work in several journals including Dodging the Rain, Lights on the Horizon and the Daily Drunk Magazine. When not losing games of pool he, sometimes, writes stuff.
