Reviewed by Rachel León

When three social media giants crashed for five hours in early October, people joked about having to talk to their neighbors. This speaks not only to our dwindling in-person conversational skills but also the distant relationship most of us have with those we live near. Many of us don't truly know our neighbors, and, despite their proximity, they often become caricatures.

This relatable—and, perhaps, inevitable—distance is in part what makes Hiromi Kawakami's new short story collection, People from My Neighborhood, so compelling. Written in Japanese and translated by Ted Goossen, these thirty-six interlinked stories are tiny glimpses of the narrator's neighbors. Though some stories set their focus on places, those, too, are really about the people who inhabit those spaces. With prose that's both sparse and full of humor, the stories in People from My Neighborhood remind us of the gulf between what we think we know about others and what we actually do.

The collection opens with "The Secret," centering around the discovery of a child hiding under a zelkova tree, who subsequently comes to live with the narrator. Thirty years later, the child has not aged and won't reveal why he arrived in the neighborhood. This first tale sets the tone for the book, promising more beneath the surface—we must not accept things at face value as we set off on our enigmatic journey through this neighborhood. 

Kawakami explores form in an interesting way. Often, the nameless narrator compiles all that is known about their neighbors, collecting observations and experiences throughout years into a single snippet (most of the stories run less than three pages). Many of these strange and funny stories end abruptly, as if the ending is actually a beginning—closing right as another door has opened. Such stories could be dismissed as incomplete, but doing so misses the point. Kawakami's choice to end each story when she does heightens the mystery and intrigue of these sphinxlike neighbors. Though there is a fairy tale quality to the stories, their endings can be sharp and subversive.

Kawakami leverages the way our opinions about people change over time to create friction between what's true and not. While the reliability of our narrator isn't in question, circumstances are debatable—or, more often, mutable. In "Grandma," the narrator befriends an older woman, who they prefer spending time with over their school-aged friends. However, by the end of the story, the grandmother has become a "normal old woman." In "The Juvenile Delinquent," the narrator's friend Kanae, a central character in the collection, becomes a juvenile delinquent. One of the neighborhood women tells the narrator how Kanae is engaging in "impure relations with the opposite sex," but when Kanae returns home after becoming a fashion designer in France, the same woman calls her "the pride of our hometown." Kawakami uses these shifting beliefs and perceptions as a vehicle for the surreal. Because nothing is certain or fixed, circumstances become malleable.

Typically, situations are simply odd, rather than supernatural, such as in "The Hachirō Lottery." We learn immediately there aren't winners for the Hachirō lottery, but losers, and the narrator's family loses it twice. Before we're given context on who Hachirō is, the narrator explains, "Each loss was good for three months. Hachirō would live in your home during that time, and it was your family's responsibility to feed him and make sure he attended school regularly." It turns out Hachirō is the fifteenth child of a family, and the neighborhood decides since the family can't look after so many kids, Hachirō should "rotate among the families in the neighborhood." Such social collectivity offers a nice opposition to the distance between the neighbors—this sense of community, despite feelings of remoteness, offers texture and depth. After explaining why losing the lottery was such a hardship for a family, the narrator offers, "I've been listing Hachirō's defects, but he had his good points, too." Again, we're shown one side, then reminded there are other angles to consider. This tension between the seen and unseen perserveres throughout the collection. 

One of the things that makes People from My Neighborhood so rich, almost novel-like, is Kawakami's playful use of time and reoccurring characters. "The Hachirō Lottery" isn't the last we hear of Hachirō or the lottery, and after learning about Kanae's eventual success, we then revisit her as a young girl in "The Magic Spell" and "Torture." Since we've already learned about her as an adult, this gives an added layer of richness to how we see her again as a child. And having knowledge of Kanae's future makes the stories' events even more satisfying—like in nonlinear novels, there is a distinct pleasure when we follow characters through time, knowing their fates. 

The further we move into the collection, the more peculiar the stories become. While other fiction establishes surrealism early, Kawakami builds it slowly, throughout the collection, which creates a lulling effect, as if we're children being told a bedtime story—and reality gets suspended. Local phenomena are explored, such as a highly contagious illness called pigeonitis, in which the inflicted "sounds like a pigeon when they talk. In severe cases, their body also begins to take on pigeon-like characteristics." Because such oddity is layered in gradually, and the characters themselves are skeptical, such conditions feel more plausible. Characters often question the credibility of the stories they hear. For example, in "Bass Fishing," a diplomat comes to town, but rides in a cab—surely, Kanae insists, if he was an actual diplomat, he'd have his own chauffeur. Several stories are about attempts to confirm a rumor as well as the narrator's search for the truth. This occurs in "Eye Medicine," when the narrator notes: "I began paying more attention to the people in our neighborhood. I roamed the streets, studying their behavior and their faces, their tendencies and their favorite foods, before coming to a decision about who had and who hadn't hatched from eggs." Because the narrator scrutinizes their neighborhood, they solve the mystery—mostly, at least. Nothing is wrapped up neatly or understood completely, which makes these stories so delightful, even magical. 

As in any collection, some stories are stronger than others. While some offer more intriguing premises, mysteries run throughout all of these weird, sometimes macabre, tales. What makes People from My Neighborhood so notable is how Kawakami uses the absurd to offer us a deeper understanding of how puzzling and unknowable a person is. Our narrator's doubt and quest to know those in the neighborhood brings to light a gap that likely echoes our own relationship to our neighbors—and, for that matter, our acquaintances on social media. When we only see one slice, one angle, how well do we recognize what's real? The truth, as Kawakami shows us, again and again, is we don't.