The Nakano Thrift Shop: A Novel

A series of vignettes which together tell the story of four main characters at an offbeat store in Japan. The stories are well told and often bittersweet. The customers are just as quirky as the main characters, but all of them are unforgettable. An extremely enjoyable read.

Nakano's, a shop filled with ordinary everyday items and the occasional astounding work of art. The people working and shopping there are portrayed as sensitively and objectively as the items for sale in the shop would be examined by an experienced dealer. Everyday people, flawed and funny, handled gently in masterful language by Ms Kawakami, sensitively translate by Ms Powell. The narrative pace mirrors the pace of sales at the shop, at times slow and thoughtful, and at other times swift and eventful. A novel to be savored like fine wine.

There's a recent sub genre coming out of Asia (mostly Japan and S. Korea from what I've read) that I call "Flat-Affect" literature. It's comprised of characters to whom things happen, rather than characters who make things happen. The characters seem, also, on the verge of emotion, but never quite seem to get there, and any sense of plot is peripheral to the overall meaning of the novel. Sayaka Murata, Cho Nam-Joo, and Banana Yashimoto are all very good at this (I strongly recommend Murata's Convenience Store Woman). I find The Nakano Thrift Shop to be a poorer example. The characters weren't quite as interesting as I'd hoped for, the events and relationships are overly bland (even for Flat-Affect), and the items in the store around which the chapters revolve aren't really metaphorically meaningful. It's okay, but not great, especially compared to other authors' similarly themed novels.

Sweet characters, gentle inter action and micro life. The development of characters is precisely Japanese in composition, but the content is universal.

I read this book in a day, I was glued. It is a romance-coming of age kind of story. I didn't know what to expect but I'm happy to have purchased this novel.

This was a book club pick, but what I'm hearing so far from the others is that we (Japanese and American) are not enamored with it. If you need plot-driven stories, this is not for you. This is a slowly moving, character-driven story of a couple of young people who don't seem to have much character. They are quirky, for sure, and don't know how to communicate with or relate to each other or anyone else. Hiromi narrates her thoughts, wondering if she actually loves co-worker Takeo, a shy loner with little personality. I came away thinking he is just conveniently there all the time so she thinks she might be in love - a concept she doesn't understand well, and she doesn't treat Takeo very well either. The most interesting characters are the shop owner, philandering Mr. Nakano, and his single, artist sister, Masayo. The two of them bring some energy to the story. In the end, I was surprised that Hiromi and Takeo take a little control of their lives. I don't mind slow stories with no plot, but this is a really slow story of minute details, not for everyone. If you look carefully, there are literary devices at work every once in a while. "Somewhere I heard the sound of an engine starting, and then it quickly stopped." Some readers may relate to the bit about the frustrated bee buzzing around.

I read the entire book and I'm still not sure what it was about exactly. It just seemed to be a book about nothing. None of the characters were particularly interesting in the least, there was nothing much to care about and there doesn't seem to be much a point to the book. It just ended.

I confess that I really loved Hiromi Kawakami’s Strange Weather in Tokyo. Kawakami is truly a major artist. In this book, she once again paints with a gentle and warm brush but her portraits of the deliciously offbeat and quirky characters that people the world of The Nakano Thrift Shop are wonderfully knowing. At the conclusion you are left with something profound about love and relationships.

Loved this book!

Arrived super fast and in good shape!

I guess there is the temptation to somehow label Kawakami's books 'love stories'. I don't think they are. They are more narratives about how the characters time and again struggle to bridge those vertiginous distances that sometimes exist between human beings, whether that is mother-daughter, brother-sister, teacher-student, lovers, friends or others. They are also about the distances that not just others, but we ourselves, create towards them and build upon. Without going into the plot details, for the whole length of the book we are most of the time in the thrift shop of the title, run by Mr Nakano. Never boring, never slow, never repetitive. More difficult to achieve than it seems. Two of his employees are young people (one of which is our female narrator) and the last central character is Mr Nakano' sister. All the little wonderful, superbly simple yet deeply complex tales of people and their mysteries will spin out of this place. I don't remember now that much about this title, but Ernst Lubitsch's film "The Shop around the Corner" suddenly came back to me when I was reading "The Nakano Thrift Shop". Something about the humour, the compassion and the stubbornness of characters trying to find and reach each other. In the case of this book, a thrift shop is such a perfect set-up for the unfolding of story. There is not even the need to move the characters out of the receptacle of the shop. Objects arrive to the shop, and then they leave the shop. People -with their own private stories- bring or buy those objects. Objects, ultimately, cause story, push story, motivate story. They arrive to Mr Nakano's shop full of little narratives, carrying stories within them and intersecting in strange ways. They are a bit like the silent characters in the book. I can't stop imagining Mr Nakano as a slightly younger Hayao Miyazaki, wearing his apron, full of quirk and mischievious oddities, devilish. So refreshing to see a writer create such individual and inspired male middle-age, unconventional characters. As to Hitomi, our main character and narrator, everyone that crosses her path in the little microcosmos of the thrift shop remains unreadable, inscrutable and un-understantable to her as if they kept on going in and out of focus. In other instances, Mr Nakano will express a similar impossibility to understand his lover and this theme runs through the story and through many characters. Beautiful simplicity and a lot more than quirky charm. Kawakami is an exquisite observer of human behaviour and the delightful dance of approximations between people, then the restored distances, as all closeness and intimacy is essentially ephemeral and uncertain. Only at the very end did I fear a slight danger of sentimentality, but no, the author managed to rein in just at the right time and I am so tempted to call Hiromi Kawakami a genius.

Acheté après des romans formidables d'autres auteurs modernes japonais ( Les Délices de Tokyo; La Papeterie Tsubaki; la République du bonheur). Mais là j'ai calé, rythme trop lent sans la poésie des romans cités. Je n'ai pas pu m'attacher aux personnages, surtout le manager de la brocante, un peu vulgaire.

feedback about the receipt of the book: excellent condition, it is the edition that I wanted, fast delivery . Looks (even smells) like new.