The Nakano Thrift Shop
First reviewed November 2018
I don’t remember this book at all, and since I don’t use star ratings on my website this review is fully unmoored from current reality.
I did close out wondering how much I would remember, and the answer is zero. Prescient.
book by Hiromi Kawakami,
translated by Allison Markin Powell
Having to worry about whether someone is healthy enough to tolerate my fierce hatred or criticism before I decide to blame them—that’s what I call getting old. Masayo gave a somewhat serious sigh. But she had a smile on her face. I would never understand her.
The scale of One-to-Five stars is always a problem. One star makes sense, right? Lowest; worst; nonsense; terrible; don’t read; didn’t finish. Five, equally fine: best; landmark; life-changing; superlative.
Then things get strained. Three, to me, connotes a perfect average but I often see used as a sort of low threshold for “I didn’t like it but I don’t want to be mean.” Which makes me think Two has been relegated to, I dunno, shorthand for impartiality for a one-star-bad book towards which a reviewer doesn’t want to look like they are being unfair.
Twos though, I think they should be pretty frequent. My ratings should not create a perfect bell curve, because I’m picking things I am pretty sure I am going to like, not selecting the books I read blindly. Two Stars should be common, right? Decent books, just sort of there and gone. It’s very clear that my concept of Two stars is not Two stars for everyone:
‘What do you think of that customer?’ I asked him.
Takeo thought about it for a moment and then finally, all he said was, ‘Doesn’t smell too bad.’
What do you mean, doesn’t smell? When I asked him, Takeo just dropped his gaze and fell silent. While he was watering down the area in front of the shop, I thought about what he meant by smell. I thought maybe I understood, but then again, it was entirely possible that Takeo’s idea of smell and my idea of smell were not at all similar.
The Nakano Thrift Shop is an odd book in a way that continues to put me off-balance. It sort of just happens, one of those plotless narratives that I always think is going to be the next big thing in my enjoyment of fiction but fizzles out under the weight of literary expectation. No coincidence, no story and all that, as much as I like to think I’m part of the post-millennial Dadaist milieu. Contrary to my point, Hitomi, the narrator, says to herself, “Wow, meeting you here is such absurd romantic-comedy-style serendipity, I feel like I’m in a soap opera!” but it doesn’t land with any impact as the three-year separation of the characters is elided to the interstices of a handful of pages.
There’s something real about the aimlessness within Nakano that intrigues without leaving impact. It captures the haziness of being underemployed with few responsibilities and very little direction; I wonder how much of this book I’ll remember in a few weeks.