People from My Neighborhood: Stories

About

A bossy child lives under a white cloth near a tree. A schoolteacher turns into a fox. A neighborhood god grants wishes that come true in unsettling ways. Hiromi Kawakami's interlocking stories create a single community where the mundane and the mythical coexist without friction — a place that feels simultaneously like a real Tokyo neighborhood and a Brothers Grimm village. Nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, these miniature stories — most just a few pages long — accumulate into a portrait of a neighborhood defined by its eccentrics, its rituals, and its casual relationship with the supernatural. Kawakami's prose is deceptively simple; each story contains more strangeness than its length should allow. A neighborhood where magic is as ordinary as a trip to the convenience store — and where the strangest thing of all might be how normal it all feels.