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.

Ordinary people making their way in the world

A tradition in Japanese fiction is the "I-novel," sort of  a fctionalized autobiography or memoir. Hiromi Kawakami's The Nakano Thrift Shop reads like an I-novel. The narrator, Hitomi Suganuma tells her story of working in the shop, her attraction to a younger co-worker Takeo, the advice she receives from her boss's older sister Masayo, the idiosyncrasies of the boss/owner Mr. Nakano, and the stories of certain of the shop's customers.

Mr. Nakano is a wheeler-dealer. He buys used items—not antiques—and sells them from the shop in a western Tokyo suburb where there are a lot of students. A man in his early fifties, he's on his third wife. He has a college-student son by the first wife, an elementary-school daughter by the second, and a six-month-old son by the third. Plus he has a mistress. When he says he's going to the bank in the afternoon, he's as likely to be meeting his mistress at a love hotel.

Hitomi, who seems to have no parents, no siblings, no friends, is attracted to Takeo, who is Mr. Reticent. At one point Hitomi asks Masayo for advice. Masayo is a woman in her early 50s, single, with a regular lover.

     "How does one go about having a carefree conversation with a boy?" I decided to ask Masayo one afternoon when Takeo wasn't around. Masayo was in the process of going over the receipt book, but she looked up and thought about it for a moment.
     "If you can get them into bed, they tend to relax a bit."
     I see, I said in response.

Hitomi manages to invite Takeo to her apartment for pizza and beer. After they chatted about the shop, eaten the pizza, and drank the beer Takeo smoked a cigarette:

     I didn't know you smoked, I said. Every once in a while, he replied. Without saying much to say, we just sat facing each other. We esch drank another can of beer. Takeo looked at the clock twice. I looked three times.
     Well, then, Takeo said and stood up. At the front door, he brought his lips near my ear. I thought he was going to kiss me, but I was wrong. With his lips close, he said, "I, uh, I'm not one for sex and all. Sorry."
     While I was standing there astonished, Takeo closed the door behind him as he left. After a few moments I snapped out of it. Thinking about it while I washed the glasses and plates, it occurred to me that Takeo had chosen to eat the pieces with the least amount of anchovies on them. I couldn't decide whether I should be angry or sad about it, or just laugh.

These two citations give you a sense of Allison Markin Powell's translation (with I presume the original's use or lack of quotation marks) and the tenor of the text. The Nakano Thrift Shop is a novel in which nothing very dramatic happens. Rather, individual Japanese act and interact on one another. One has a sense that the author has not attempted to heighten the reality to engage the reader but to use the minutia of daily life to convey the reality of these individuals. It is a love story, but it's not a romance. It's the story of ordinary people trying to make their way in the world, and in this case the world is contemporary Tokyo and a shop filled with used goods.