People from My Neighborhood: Stories [Paperback]

Nominated for the 2021 Shirley Jackson Award

From the author of the internationally bestselling Strange Weather in Tokyo, a collection of interlinking stories that masterfully blend the mundane and the mythical— fairy tales in the best Brothers Grimm tradition: naïf, magical, and frequently veering into the macabre (Financial Times).

A bossy child who lives under a white cloth near a tree; a schoolgirl who keeps doll's brains in a desk drawer; an old man with two shadows, one docile and one rebellious; a diplomat no one has ever seen who goes fishing at an artificial lake no one has ever heard of. These are some of the inhabitants of People from My Neighborhood.

In their lives, details of the local and everyday—the lunch menu at a tiny drinking place called the Love, the color and shape of the roof of the tax office—slip into accounts of duels, prophetic dreams, revolutions, and visitations from ghosts and gods. In twenty-six 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—Hiromi Kawakami creates a universe ruled by mystery and transformation.Nominated for the 2021 Shirley Jackson Award
An NPR Best Book of the Year

Kawakami’s style traffics in brevity, giving us images distilled to their core, sentences that go directly to the heart, and the narrative command to deliver entire lives within one sweeping breath . . . The surreal turns into something powerful in Kawakami’s hands, all the more devastating because it escapes our full understanding. —Brenda Peynado, The New York Times Book Review

Twenty-six tightly drawn narratives that feature Kawakami’s signature unsparing ls