The weirdly exciting message of ‘PEOPLE FROM MY NEIGHBOURHOOD’ - Hiromi Kawakami
The idea of centralised theme for story is something oddly unfamiliar to what makes a book great. Believe me, the world is filled with great books who follow a great storyline that embarks on emotions and adventures that emit the supreme novels to glory. Yet, in the senses of what makes a story great, there is a small subgroup of novels — and especially novellas — that have no centralised theme. They are ideas and themes without particularly sense of what those ideas and themes realize onto real life. I have been obsessing over this niche genre of novellas for the past couple months, and ‘People from my neighbourhood’ was THE book that caught my attention to this era of books (yet the novel that does the best job at it probably would be Crapalachia, by Scott McClanahan). There is a lot of ways such novels do that, what we will explore here is what I coin as 'sense of existence’. Desire to uphold an object’s identity and existence, for the sake of surviving - regardless of how confusing and unimaginable they become in comparison to what a reader would connect it to real life.
The humanisation of abstract objects is hard to capture when those said objects cannot forsake beliefs, attention and realness for the sake of the story. What makes a great character astounding is the characters ability to forgo its own ability to be a character and become a sense of representation in the minds of readers. What makes Percy Jackson such loveable from the attention of a reader is the representation of what a fun and exciting life would be for a demigod who is trying to navigate this new world of gods he stumbled upon (and I assume in the similar sense to Harry potter - even though I haven’t read harry potter :(, ) . This is not the same as when a real life human being is considered great. A historical or modern figure is assumed to be great because of that person’s existence and actions in the said existence. Regardless of what the person became known to represent (from an activist to a freedom fighter), they are great for the actions they have done. A character is great for the sense of connection and idea the reader forsakes the character’s identity for. A humans identity is not forsaken from them to be remembered, but a characters' is.
However when you have a novel which has no characters that are able to do that, but the abstract objects of the story that does it, you get a book like 'People from my neighbourhood'. The abstract object in this novel is the neighbourhood itself. The novel is a collection of a dozen short stories that all are somehow interconnect to each other, more or less through the neighbourhood all the stories take place in. There is not one character you really remember as some idea, as such no character in the novel is good (from a traditional sense). The neighbourhood, on the other hand, brings out an idea of constant-ness. The novel goes through upheavals of dictatorship, alien invasion and natural disasters (and if I remember correctly, a fight with a god? What was this book???) yet each story still ends with the neighbourhood ending up in its peacefulness. It's as if the abstract object is retaining its own identity after the end of each bizarre story. In the same sense how wildlife reclaims abandoned cities and towns, the neighbourhood is reclaimed its own character at the end of a short story. But how is this an idea of the object forsaking it's identity? It's not - kinda. That's what makes such novels like these very interesting to observe. They are objects that have one idea (here the neighbourhood desire to fall back to its peacefulness) which is being taken apart by inhabitants - the characters that utilize the abstract object. In the mind of the readers, there is a large group of individuals who are taking apart the neighbourhood, while the neighbourhood tries to, by themselves, somehow hold onto itself. The novel forces the neighbourhood to become a representation of some idea (such as the inhabitants desire to create new festivals and traditions that are vastly different to neighbourhood historical existence/identity). Abstract objects have the ability to fight the urge for a representation, and not be a lab rat to becoming a 'great' character, they don't need that. The very sense of fighting the characters themselves is what allows the novel to be human. The act of going against what we should be is what is human about them. People might not love seeing this in novels, and it is hard, believe me, to connect in anyway to a novel that does this, but it is very exciting to watch a novel attempt such an unknown area of writing.
Going further away from the traditional sense of a good story, the attempt to instead go against the idea of representation the reader wants to sort the novel into, 'People from my neighbourhood' is upholding its own character and pushing away meaning outside other people's choice. It has its own meaning that it is holding onto, and will not allow the reader to forsake that for an idea - it's not trying to trade the ability to be a great character for its own existence. It will stay as its own existence. It is existence. Like how real living beings are up here in the real world fighting for its own existence and trying to ensure they don't fall into an idea of what the said world is trying to push for. The neighbourhood is fighting to uphold it's oneself. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood go through such bizarre mini stories is because of the neighbourhood attempt to ensure the inhabitants desire to change the abstract object does not happen. Regardless of how much confusing and outlandish the stories become (and believe me when I say that the story became confusing to understand midway through), the neighbourhood will hold onto itself. By relegating a proper story to a lower tier and catching onto sense of confusion, the neighbourhood is preventing the reader from assigning meaning to what they are reading. You can argue that this abstract object is not fighting its own inhabitants in the stories, but the reader. We are fighting with the neighbourhood to assign a sense of representation from our own real world to the book.
But either way what do I know. I read the book like only once, and you never know what the author intended. Bye.
