Wondering about the owner of the café “The Love”, the narrator says: “How the woman ever makes a living out of that place is a mystery to us all”. The few things uniting its inhabitants are curiosity and gossip. Like most, this one is built on whispers, stories and hearsay. And yet, we accept this logic as we would in a dream: timelessness is a given, a condition of Kawakami’s compelling other-world.Įqually, this neighbourhood is not so unlike our own. It’s as though the passing of time in the neighbourhood doesn’t really fit with age or change in that way. Or maybe they started it as something else entirely. Not that things stay the same rather that as one thing disappears, another takes its place, and some things started life old. For instance, it seems as though our narrator is one of the only people to have aged in her neighbourhood. Kawakami’s world adheres to its own logic. People From My Neighbourhood evokes a world where everything overlaps and connects, but nothing touches. But the arbitrary reigns supreme, and connections are just what we choose to see. Sometimes the chapter titles only make sense in the final line of the story, and even then, we ask: why that detail? There are themes which link individual stories: gambling brings together the nineteenth and twentieth tales, “Lord of the Flies” and “The Baseball Game”, and curses run as a thread through the consecutive stories “Grandpa Shadows”, “The Six-Person Flats” and “The Rivals”. Each story is just three or four pages long. It’s like a dream woven from the fragments of a world seen from a window.
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