Strange Neighbors
People From My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Ted Goossen. Exteriors by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie.
In Nagaro, Japan, the artist Tsukina Ayamo replaces her disappearing neighbors with life-size fabric dolls. Each doll is handmade. Imagine soft-sculptured Cabbage Patch Kids at different stages of life -- adolescents, adults, and old people -- performing everyday tasks around a small Japanese village. Doll children fill the desks at the closed school. Adult dolls work in the fields. Elderly dolls nap on a porch. The New York Times published an article on Nagaro in 2019, and James May visited in an episode from his 2020 Netflix series James May: Our Man in Japan. The Nagaro Doll Village has become a tourist attraction, home to approximately two dozen humans and three hundred and fifty dolls.
Of course, Ayamo's neighbors didn’t mysteriously vanish. Young people moved away to big cities. The elderly died. It’s now common knowledge that Japan is considered a "super-aged" society, with 28.7% of the population over 65. Much of the current literature coming out of the country, by authors like Yoko Ogawa, Minae Mizumura, and Yoko Tawada, grapples with how this trend affects Japan’s language and culture. There is often a dystopian emphasis on loss. In Ogawa’s The Memory Police, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2020 International Booker Prize, specific objects, their names, and all memories of their existence disappear en mass -- both physically and from the collective consciousness. Imagine a Rapture of birds or roses. Those who can’t forget are taken by the titular Memory Police and never seen again. In Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, which won the 2018 National Book Award for Translation, an entire generation is relocated to work in factories, leaving the elderly to care for their increasingly frail grand and great-grandchildren. In her 2022 novel, Scattered All Over the Earth, things turn even darker. Japan is gone -- remembered as the mythical land of sushi -- and the Japanese language has disappeared. Minae Mizumura also grapples with a disappearing language in her nonfiction treatise, The Fall of Language in the Age of English. What does it mean to be a Japanese author in a publishing world where the English language drowns out all others?
In a less obvious way, Hiromi Kawakami's People of My Neighborhood, translated by Ted Goossen and published by Soft Skull Press, is also preoccupied with a changing society. The linked short stories feature a first-person narrator talking about her childhood and the village where she grew up. A place like Nagara once was. She frequently uses the collective pronoun “we,” identifying herself as a member of the community, not unlike the townspeople who form the Greek chorus in Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily. But the gossip she shares is about the adventures of a pair of sisters she played with as a child and what happened to a boy she once knew and his mean dog. Noticeably absent is the loneliness and restless longing we encounter in Kawakami’s earlier novels, say The Nakano Thrift Shop and Strange Weather in Tokyo.
Like the dolls of Nagaro – Kawakami’s neighbors are colorful and fashioned from memory. If they are a little too picturesque, the situations too artfully arranged, and the overall tone a bit twee, Kawakami cuts through the cloying with a hefty dose of weirdness. Key elements are intentionally placed askew. At a local festival, a disembodied hand grants good fortune to the child whose ankle it grips. Students cut school and swing through the trees during a day of no gravity. The lady who runs the local bar is granted three wishes and chooses to become Empress of the World. Each of these occurrences is noted and then accepted.
“Hey, you guys!” someone called out behind me. I was so startled, I almost lost my grip. Kiyoshi Akai had appeared out of nowhere. Right behind him, Kanae’s big sister was glaring at us with her usual baleful expression. Then, before we knew it, she was off, swinging from tree to tree, leaving only that baleful look behind.
“She’s a real master at this,” Kiyoshi said in admiration.
As we progress, the stories become more surreal, and the characters’ reactions increasingly blasé.
The idea of community is a fraught one. As immortalized by Jane Jacobs, the perfect neighborhood enclave encourages pedestrian traffic while simultaneously confining the residents' daily activities to a few city blocks. Greenwich Village-esque utopias have become the pinnacle of urban planning within some circles, aspirationally if not always practically. But these neighborhoods are few and far between. When they exist, it is in such a radically altered form that Jacobs, herself, would not recognize them. Too much of modern-day life must be edited out – like smartphones, suburban sprawl, and social media, -- to conform to the ideal Jacobs set in the 1960s. They require a militant level of curation available only to the affluent. Kawakami’s descriptions of childhood are shaped by a similar nostalgia for tight-knit communities and a longing for the simpler past that never existed, and her use of fanciful/supernatural elements only highlights how far removed her narrator’s memories are from actual experience. The resulting stories are lighthearted but also gently probing.
In contrast, the French writer Annie Ernaux* describes a landscape readers will immediately recognize, for better or worse. Her 1993 book of essays, Exteriors (translated into English by Tanya Leslie and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021), is an unlikely companion to Kawakami's stories. But she, too, dissects the prevailing notions of community and congregation – in her case, set against the brutalist backdrop of the Parisian suburbs rather than a quaint country village. The nonfiction essays collected in this slim volume are cobbled together journal entries from a specific period of Ernaux’s life when she moved from the French provinces to “a new town forty kilometers outside of Paris… a place suddenly sprung up from nowhere”. The “wind-swept esplanades, the concrete facades, pink or blue, and the empty residential avenues” she encounters inspire no flights of imagination. Nothing is intentionally left askew. Instead, Ernaux conjures the final decade of the 20th century in the hard-edged concrete color palette of a Le Corbusier building.
The supermarket becomes a central part of her routine. Repetition, frequency, and familiarity replace intimacy. Work, schools, parks, houses of worship, gyms – all the places where people traditionally run up against strangers outside of the home are not represented. Instead, it is within the confines of the walls and parking lot of a chain supermarket in France where the local community congregates. A consummate observer, Ernaux identifies as a consumer who shops at the Franprix and Super-M. Not altogether dissimilar to how Kawakami's narrator sees herself as a member of her village. Does it matter that the people Ernaux repeatedly encounters – fellow shoppers- play only transient roles in her life? They are touchstones simply because she recognizes (though never approaches) them from previous visits.
It is the same on the trains Ernaux takes to and from Paris. She is a passenger, a regular traveler on one line. One day the route changes, and she can no longer disembark at the Saint-Lazare station; instead, the train continues into the Paris underground. The exterior landscape she watches through her window shifts, as do the people with whom she shares the carriage compartment. “Nine years of my life will come to an end because the train route between Cergy and Paris has been altered. From now on there will be the days of the Cergy-Saint-Lazare train and the days of the RER A line.” Small moments of transition between long stretches of routine. With fewer and more fleeting examples of authentic human connection.
Saint-Lazare station, on a Saturday: a couple are waiting in line for a taxi. She looks lost and leans on him for support. He keeps repeating: ‘You’ll see when I’m dead.’ Then: ‘I want to be burned, you know, I want to be burned from head to toe. I don’t want to go into that thing. It’s horrible, that thing.’ He clutches her to his chest; she is panicked.
I am visited by people and their lives – like a whore.
Kawakami and Ernaux make for strange neighbors. But something interesting happens in juxtaposing these two very different books – an overlapping of two distinctive ways of viewing the world. Literature contains underlying currents, which the reader often generates. Riptides of thought we don’t realize we’ve been caught up in until we find ourselves dragged out to sea. Kawakami’s world is patently and playfully false, while Ernaux’s is (to the reader’s mind) brutally real. Both books are written in the first person, yet Goossen’s translation of Kawakami’s narrative voice has the warm simplicity of expression often found in Young Adult writing. Contrast this to the clinical perfection of Tanya Leslie’s translation of Ernaux’s prose. One book is set in the world most of us feel we inhabit. The other in the unattainable geography of childhood imagination.
Ernaux is an observer, like Kawakami’s fictional narrator, but she is also an isolated presence moving through the landscape. Unlike People from My Neighborhood, there is no familiar “we” in Exteriors. Ernaux’ “we” is an anonymous crowd. The internal landscape of contemporary life is empty. Her exteriors -- underpopulated. We can almost imagine the Nagaro dolls wandering into the frame and making themselves at home, glimpsed from the window of a moving train; technicolor pops amongst the monochrome prose, brightly painted animation cels superimposed over washes of gray terrain. A valiant (if desperate) attempt at creating the illusion of community and companionship, which only highlights its absence.
Ernaux’s work is a different kind of fantasy from Kawakami’s, but still fantasy. Her world is curated but more aligned with the current obsession with minimalism, nihilism, and how we perceive the turn of the 21st century. But common sense demands we acknowledge Annie Ernaux was not always isolated. The sky wasn’t always gray. Her neighbors are perhaps not as unfriendly as she initially perceived. She hints at this in her introductory note: “I began to enjoy living there, in a cosmopolitan district, in the midst of lives started elsewhere – in Vietnam, the Maghreb, Cote d’Ivoire, the French provinces or, as was mine, in Normandy.” But that is not the world conveyed by the fragments presented in Exteriors. Proving the truth is always more complicated than the narratives we create around it.
*I wrote this essay before Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. This was also before Look at the Lights, My Love, her book about French supermarkets and modern consumerism, was available in English.