There's a school built out of chocolate, biscuits and sweets. When one of the pupils nibbles at some of the architecture, they have to cook and/or bake an exact replacement. Some of the stuff is namebrand, however, and use ingredients that aren't easily obtainable, so the copies become less and less like the original, slowly changing the school into a fake school. People undergo avian transformations. A stranger moves to the area with whispers of her dark past behind her. Gravity leaves them behind for a day. A new baby, undergoing numerous transformations along the way, shows up in the neighbourhood looking for a new family. The Hachirō Lottery: about a family in the neighbourhood who had too many children that the neighbourhood would do a lottery draw to rotate taking care their youngest boy, Hachirō. I like that Hachirō then be one of the main characters of the neighbourhood later on.

We get a story dedicated to her older sister (a truly creepy tale of cruel sisterly abuse which ends on the image of what a doll’s brains might look like) before Kanae herself is fleshed out more thoroughly in “The Juvenile Delinquent”. A wonderfully quiet example is “The Hachiro Lottery”, in which a boy named Hachiro, who is the fifteenth child of a local family, is passed around from household to household because his family cannot afford to keep and feed him. It’s one story among many which teeter between unusual and unsettling. Would give a full star rating for its cover cause of the classy hue. This little book consists of micro-short stories of each people living in the narrator's neighbourhood, a very straightforward narratives with minimalist concept. POLAR4 and Adult HE 2011 were produced using Middle Layer Super Output Areas (MSOAs) in England and Wales, Intermediate Zones (IZs) in Scotland and Super Output Areas (SOAs) in Northern Ireland.

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The publisher describes People from My Neighborhood as “super short ‘palm of the hand’” stories, a phrase coined by Japanese Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. Kawakami’s is a book to keep on hand and to become intimate with: a book with which readers can have a relationship of their own. I truly enjoy Japanese quirky stories - Yōko Ogawa, Taeko Kōno, Sayaka Murata, Hiroko Oyamada, Yukiko Motoya, Yōko Tawada have all written great stories whose kookiness appeals to me. In Kawakami’s stories a reader has no way of predicting what will happen. There is no logic, no correlation between the cause and the effect, realism is mixed with magic, fantasy, nightmarish visions and elements of Japanese folktales. Many stories evoke dystopian scenarios and some ideas explored in them reminded me slightly of “The Emissary” by Tawada and “The Memory Police” by Ogawa, as well as films by Tetsuya Nakashima (especially “Confessions” and “Memories of Matsuko”). There is a school that’s made completely of edible sweets, bizarre neighbourhood lotteries, people born from eggs, naughty ghosts of children, magic spells. Between the lines though Kawakami often points out social exclusion and marginalisation, bullying, loneliness and the pressure to conform, all wrapped in a layer of oddness. There's a little boy that can't live at home, so there's a yearly lottery between the other families in the neighbourhood who gets him that year.

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 Plus the literary magazine has now hooked up with a publishing house and will be publishing translated works beginning in the spring of 2022! See: https://www.stonebridge.com/post/monk... . 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 YorkerPeople 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

The subtle strangeness of this neighbourhood is hugely reminiscent of Royston Vasey in The League of Gentlemen: a place full of usual people who behave unusually or are subject to unusual circumstances, be they quietly supernatural, antisocial, or plainly bizarre. The tight, clearheaded prose is beautifully translated by Ted Goossen (who also translates Haruki Murakami), and each story draws readers in with a puzzling mystery or a strange character. Almost none of the conflicts are resolved, and if there is a fault to be found in the book, it’s that many of the stories lead to the same kind of curious, unresolved conclusion.

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As the title itself suggests this collection transports readers to a Japanese neighbourhood and each story reads like a short vignette detailing an odd episode involving a resident of this neighbourhood. The stories are loosely interconnected as we have recurring figures—such as Kanae and her sisters or the school principal—who make more than one appearance. Occasionally one is even left with the impression that they vaguely contradict one another, or that time doesn’t quite unfold as it should in this neighbourhood. This elasticity with time and reality results in a rather playful collection that is recognizably a product of Kawakami’s active imagination. Her offbeat approach to everyday scenarios does make for an inventive collection of stories. There is a story about the unusual lottery that takes place in this neighbourhood (the loser has to take care of Hachirō, a boy with a voracious and seemingly never-ending appetite), one about the bitter rivalry between two girls named Yōko, one about a princess moving to the neighbourhood, another recounting the origin of the Sand Festival, and many detailing people who are curses or are part of some sort of prophecy. Stories are told in the first person. We are not told the protagonist’s name…I have a suspicion it was a female. Complete with egg-people, teenage gangs, vicious but endearing street dogs, and sociopolitical commentary, Kawakami’s slice-of-life collection of short stories is an exercise in experimenting with absurdism and relationship-driven storytelling. Filled with cheerful uncanniness and bizarre moments that will make you laugh – you will wonder, “Do I really know the people in my neighborhood, apartment, or town?” More than anything, Kawakami expresses that there is magic in places that seem utterly ordinary. Underneath these bizarre stories are themes of identity, place and community. Of what makes us human and finding beauty in the small things that the spaces we inhabit provide. The absurdity of some of the stories is grounding. The oddities of people, and what they do to extract meaning from a meaningless life. I love how the author used her imagination and even when it almost felt pointless, it’s complementary to the Japanese culture. If truth be told, I wouldn’t think I’d enjoy it as much if it were taken from other cultures.

The reason why I rated it three stars though was: i) as made known, I'm not a big fan of magical realism. ii) Even when each short story is literally, short but to a point, I feel like it's never-ending and started to get draggy. I enjoyed them most of the time but somehow wished the story would be done soon. Readers expecting a measured heart-warming tale in the mould of The Briefcase may wonder what is going on at times, but plenty of Kawakami’s work in English, including her collection of novellas Record of a Night Too Brief, displays this tendency, and here the writer allows her imagination full rein, resulting in this clever collection of palm-of-the-hand stories. It’s a book that’s easy to devour as you slip from one story to the next, forgetting the time, but it’s probably best experienced slowly over several days (sadly, not an art I’ve ever mastered!). Interview with Hiromi Kawakami in which stories in this book are mentioned… http://www.zoomjapan.info/2017/05/25/... 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 A small child living under a sheet, a doll's brain in a box, a vicious dog that bites everyone, a tenement whose only occupants are ghosts, a tiny drinking place called The Love that nobody goes to.I knew heading into this one that it would be a gamble, since magical realism doesn’t often work for me. But, when it does it tends to be when it’s in short story format, and having heard such good things about Kawakami’s other work, I decided to give this collection of micro fiction a shot. In truth, I was hoping for a little more of a progression, but the stories amble along merrily at their own pace, with little concern for the wider context. However, even if it doesn’t really go anywhere much, the book is still great fun and a pleasure to read, one that can be seen as the work of a writer enjoying herself and inviting the reader to share in the experience (which is always nice!). Goossen’s work reads nicely here, the off-beat style coming across well, but it’s interesting that Kawakami’s usual English voice, Allison Markin Powell, is absent. I wonder if she was busy working on another of Kawakami’s novels… They may look like they are in their teens, or in their fifties, or in their eighties, depending on the moment. The weather seems to be the determining factor." The school principal had a wife and two daughters. His wife was a lawyer and his daughters both worked in banks. 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).