People in my neighborhood

I started reading Hiromi Kawakami’s collection of stories People from my Neighborhood. I’ve been missing the draw fiction (especially short fiction) had on me when I was in college, or just after college. I’ve been looking for a way to reconnect to the idea of reading fiction again. Bogged down by the other things I consume in a day I lost the drive to read anything other than nonfiction books or long articles on the never-ending gloom that is the world. These micro stories were a great way for my computer-addled brain to get back into reading again.The opening few stories focus on the people we know, forget, and find again. Like all of the stories in this collection, they’re presented matter-of-factly as a consequence of living. First, you know someone deeply and then one day you don’t.1 Perhaps through no fault of your own, or their fault, or simply timing, two people can grow separate from each other, living their lives in parallel and only intersecting oddly on city streets or hospital rooms.

Perhaps you’ll remember them the way they were, or the fascination they held on you. In Grandmother, Hiromi Kawakami writes that “...she suddenly became a normal old woman, puttering about in her garden, sweeping the road in front of her house, and fussing over the neighborhood children.”

Sometimes that’s what I hope people remember me: as a close and wondrous figure now simply fussing about. Other times I hope the opposite: that the people I’ve diverged from are so fascinated by me they would write an entire book of our meager encounters.

But the past is empty, it seldom holds significance. There was a period when I believed if I could only revisit each memory, I could decipher what they meant, and where each problem originated. But memory is flimsy and impossible to validate. Were you ever once outside in the northwest, on a foggy day in December wondering what would happen if you got your MFA? Did you ever sit on a blanket in the summer, the hottest day of the year during a pandemic, making small talk with someone who you’d later live with? 

Hiromi Kawakami’s stories show the complex way we all interact. How we don’t get to opt out of the community we’re in, even if we’re solitary by nature. The middle of the book shifts focuses just a bit, focusing on stories of how characters interact and discussing the legacy they leave on each other.

By the end, the tone has shifted from the ordinary to the legendary. Women turn into swarms of flies, children bury memories deep in the ground, and a town is transformed into people with “eyes…big and round” and “movements…all herky-jerky” from pigeonitis. Hiromi Kawakami’s focus seems to be on the way memory and legend shape a community. The past events are always fuzzy, and a bit fantastical. Juxtaposed next to the opening ordinariness it’s hard not to wonder how much is true and how much is false.

That’s one of the appeals of magical realism.2 It’s something that draws me deeply to that genre. I remember particularly the first book that helped me understand the power of the genre. Swamplandia by Karen Russel focuses on the story of a young girl and her family of alligator wrestlers. Already the story is whimsical and adventurous, but towards the end of the book the main narrator, Ava, seeks out her missing sister with the help of a seemingly mystical man in a row boat.Russell follows Ava as she boards a boat and heads out to find her sister who she believes ran away to be with a ghost. With the help of a Bird Man, Ava inches closer and closer to the mouth of the underworld until the realization dawns on Ava that this Bird Man is not magical at all.  At the same time, the magic of the moment is broken to the audience. I remember sitting in San Antonio, outside a class waiting for it to start. I was heartbroken. I wanted this story to be true, for Ava to find an entrance to the underworld and seek out the mystical realm where her sister resides. But magic isn’t real, there are no underworlds or spiritual guides in the real world and the Bird Men who claim to help will always take something from you that you can never get back.

Magical realism betrays this core assumption. It starts us in the domestic realm, hyper-aware of the banality of life. Then, it transforms us all at once. It creates talking animals and human hybrids. Magicians and spells are brought to life. Our world returns to the state it was when we were children: anything could be possible because so many things were still unknown.

Each of the stories in this collection is short. The longest one lasted only 5 pages. This is helpful if you’re someone like me who is unable to finish a book after mainlining TikTok videos and tweet threads. But while each story is short, the world feels realized and the characters feel fully formed. Hiromi Kawakami packs such fantastic characterization in each story. With only a few lines of observation, you’re able to see clearly the life of a character. 

They also weave the world together by focusing on the community in short bursts, not long descriptions. You’ll read about one character and how they’re perceived by the narrator, then in a second story see that name again as one of the voices in a chorus. You’ll read a description of a failing business like Loves and read in another story how it’s expanded to open up a new location. Characters come and go in each other’s stories, just like a real community. Lives and legends are interwoven, even by accident.

I sometimes like to think about which lives intersect with mine by accident. Which people go home and think of me the way I think of them. A bad encounter at a grocery store. A summer’s afternoon spent at a public pool. A karaoke party where I don’t sing. I suppose if you could trace the lines of those you met, following their path from morning to night, your paths would cross in more ways than you think. Just the same I think you would realize that those you forgot about or left behind never go too far from you. They stay in your community, on the periphery, tales of them leeching into your own life.

I suppose a neighborhood is more than just its geography or its people. Perhaps it’s legend and myth and memory combined.