Delightful stories that evoke a Japanese neighborhood

The twenty-six stories this slim paperback (159 pages) are all short, most no more than four or at most five printed pages. The jacket describes them as “palm-of-the-hand” stories, “fictions small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand and brief enough to allow for dipping in and out.”

Perhaps the most famous author of palm-of-the-hand stories is Yasunari Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize, and who first experimented with the form in 1923, and included thirty-five of the stories in his first book.

The difference between a palm-of-the-hand story and flash fiction is not clear to me. According to my extensive research (two minutes on the web) flash fiction is a story of less than 1000 words that emphasizes plot. It not a vignette or reflection but a story. So what’s a story?

According to E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel, a story “can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. ‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story” but it has no plot. “A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”

I still cannot tell whether the short works in Kawabata’s wonderful Palm-of-the-Hand Stories (translated by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman) or Hiromi Kawakami’s People from My Neighborhood (translated by Ted Goossen) are vignettes, plotless stories, or flash fiction. I don’t think it matters. Both books are chockablock with brief small gems.

Kawakami’s stories all involve—what else?—people in the narrator’s neighborhood. (The English title is a literal translation of the Japanese, or “people from around here.”) Some of the stories are fairly straightforward and take place in a recognizable if curious reality:

In “The Office” child sits most days in a gazebo in the park that he calls his office; he says only three things: “Shall I sign here?” “Final balance, please,” and “It’s raining hard today.” 

In “Brains,” the older sister of a friend shows the narrator a box of doll brains. “Doll brains looked dark and somehow unclean around the edges—they weren’t pure white at all.”

In “Sports Day,” a bank takes over sponsorship and events would include “competitions for best loan evaluation, best anti-fraud strategy for direct deposits, best marketing of financial products, best check-clearance procedure, and best cartoon for their bank ads.”

But the neighborhood is not all sports days and playmates. There are mysteries and uncanny events.

In “The Secret,” the narrator discovers a child under a white cloth that was lying at the foot of a zelkova tree. The child, who may be a boy or a girl claims to live under the cloth, but one day follows the narrator home and moves in with her. Thirty years later he has not changed, and “I’ve come to realize that he can’t be human after all.” 

“The Tenement” is the home of an old cab driver. He still has a cab which he takes out for a drive around the local district but does not apparently pick up fares. He disappears at night, and one time when asked where he goes, he replies, “I go driving with the girls”—three women who lived in the tenement and who all died before the Meiji Restoration in 1868. 

Characters in one story appear in another, but People from My Neighborhood is not a novel of linked stories. As I indicated above, I’m not sure what to call the book, only that the stories are delightful and evoke a Japanese neighborhood I am willing to be convinced exists even with the touches of the mysterious and the supernatural.