Stories Anchored in Place, From Japan to the U.S.-Mexican Border

PEOPLE FROM MY NEIGHBORHOOD
Stories
By Hiromi Kawakami
Translated by Ted Goossen
159 pp. Soft Skull. Paper, $15.95.

In this stunning series of 36 flash stories, Kawakami uses one unnamed neighborhood in Japan and its recurring characters to show us a particular vision of humanity — one filled with equal parts fable and the everyday. It’s a vision that astounds even as it shrugs, the stories soaring to the grandness of princesses and world domination, but also descending to children squabbling inside a sandbox and the simple powerlessness of the neighborhood dog. In this community, a sister can speak to the dead, a karaoke bar turns drug den turns haven for the master of the world, some babies never age, doppelgängers steal each other’s husbands, and gods and aliens visit. The children at the book’s center turn out strange, fierce, whimsical.

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. Her characters leap off the page. The clarity of her prose only serves to deepen the real mysteries, the hidden detritus of human life. In “The Magic Spell,” when two friends overhear a girl who recently returned from America say the word “oops” again and again, they interpret the unfamiliar word as a chant they can use to curse or to bless. When another narrator asks a possibly supernatural child why he followed her home one day and stayed for decades, he replies, “It’s a secret.” The surreal turns into something powerful in Kawakami’s hands, all the more devastating because it escapes our full understanding.

Here, horror and hope are intertwined so deftly that they become the same thing. Ghosts traipse through the town like living citizens. A hand reaches for a child’s foot during a festival, striking a bargain to let it cling to her forever. A child is replaced by a counterfeit of himself. Yet even in the more horrific stories, there is a brightness, a kind of love and familiarity. Monsters dance to make humans laugh; when rid of their monsters, characters miss them; the ghosts, counterfeits and doubles are as welcome in the community as their originals.

WHAT IF WE WERE SOMEWHERE ELSE
Stories
By Wendy J. Fox
183 pp. Santa Fe Writers Project. Paper, $15.95.

This heartfelt linked collection follows a constellation of co-workers at a small company in Denver through the start of their employment, their eventual layoffs during a market downturn, and beyond. These are far from your typical corporate straights. An artist lies her way into a job, looking for a stable paycheck and independence from her exploitative boyfriend. A hippie leaves her family and commune to join capitalist, bureaucratic society. A spreadsheet-loving data analyst tries to chart the limits of her courage and her happiness. A workaholic manager traces her lost marriage alongside her company’s decline.

In this book, Fox asks what makes a life meaningful. Each story tunes into a crisis moment when the characters are caught between their current life and a risky outward trajectory. The data analyst has to choose between her husband and a man she met at a party, setting off a delicious affair. The young artist must choose between her artist boyfriend and a co-worker, between someone who projects his importance and someone who simply enjoys the pleasure of her company. The hippie must choose between a safe, conventional corporate life and the gravitational pull of home, where people live in hollowed-out buses, host nightly drum circles and subsistence farm for survival.

Fox’s prose is laced with tenderness, exploring lives measured in acceptance, kindness and connection. Even while moving insightfully through the more alienating facets of office culture — networking parties, breakroom concerns — Fox invests most of all in what makes us people over workers: those closely held moments pregnant with change, when a new life could break open if we just reach for the person next to us. This wide-ranging collection even travels to a future moon colony in “The Human,” where two of the former co-workers cling together, feeling content though they are literally burning up and turning to ash. In one of the most moving stories, “The Center of the Circle,” the hippie shaves all her hair in an act of transformation, and her childhood love anoints her body with oil, trying to persuade her to stay in the commune, the gentleness between them laying bare their lives and what they have to offer each other.

THE BOUNDARIES OF THEIR DWELLING
Stories
By Blake Sanz
204 pp. University of Iowa. Paper, $16.

This engaging debut collection observes wrongdoers trying to make things right, and those wronged learning to forgive. While Part I, “The Lives of Saints,” follows disparate characters — an addict trying to regain the straight path his father wanted for him, a burlesque teacher holding class in a church — the book’s more powerful stories arrive in Part II, “Manuel and Tommy,” which follows one family as it breaks apart and then puts itself back together. The adult son, Tomás, a literature-loving college basketball player turned journalist, still resents his father, Manuel — once a young political artist in Mexico and then a failed screen-print maker in Louisiana, pulled through life by discontent and naïveté — for abandoning him when he was a child. Emi, Manuel’s teenage daughter from another crumbled marriage, tries to create a new family for herself with her best friend, Frida.

Unfolding on either side of the U.S.-Mexican border, the characters’ actions are tied to the places they come from and are journeying toward. In “Mysteries of the 19th Olympiad,” Manuel attends an antigovernment protest in 1968 Mexico City that quickly turns into a massacre. In “A Family, With Death Snakes,” Tomás plays in a basketball championship in his father’s homeland amid violent political upheaval. In “¡Hablamos!” Emi and Frida travel from Mexico City to Miami to appear on a reality TV show.

Together these voices create a searing portrait of redemption as they reach for healing and reunion with lost family. Though Emi and Tómas’s father left them and their mothers, Tomás yearns to reconnect with his severed family. Satellite characters — Frida, Tomás’s teammates — also present opportunities for the characters to discover that love can flourish in the act of compassion and healing. In “Cazones, 2016,” a brilliant crescendo of the book’s themes, the father and son find each other again, and Manuel, homeless and dying and trying to make up for lost time, helps Tomás track down and conduct an interview with a farmer who was involved in the 1968 massacre in Mexico City, which Tomás is writing about as a journalist. As the farmer, who may have even killed Manuel’s friends, tells his story, Manuel listens with compassion and looks at his son as if to say, “This is for you.”