Called Hitomi, our heroine and narrator not so much drifts through life as life drifts through her, as Kawakami’s small cast of characters – Mr Nakano, the roguish womanising thrift shop owner Masayo, his artistic, doll-making, older sister Sakiko, Mr Nakano’s sensual and beautiful lover and the awkwardly shy Takeo -all gently impinge on Hitomi’s consciousness. In The Nakano Thrift Shop, Hiromi’s narrator is again a young woman, this time one who kind of hesitantly -tentatively, possibly – falls in love with the twenty-something Takeo, her co-worker at Mr Nakano’s thrift shop. The Nakano Thrift Shop treads a similar path. Hiromi Kawakami’s first English language book was called Strange Weather in Tokyo and published in 2014 (in Japan it was titled The Teacher’s Briefcase), and was a gentle, touching, almost surreal and dreamlike story of a thirty-something woman slowly falling in love with an unassuming retired school teacher in his seventies who she sees in a café where she eats regularly.
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