Nakano Thrift Shop
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4.3 • 7 Ratings
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Among the jumble of paperweights, plates, typewriters and general bric-a-brac in Mr Nakano's thrift store, there are treasures to be found. Each piece carries its own story of love and loss - or so it seems to Hitomi, when she takes a job there working behind the till. Nor are her fellow employees any less curious or weatherworn than the items they sell. There's the store's owner, Mr Nakano, an enigmatic ladies' man with several ex-wives; Sakiko, his sensuous, unreadable lover; his sister, Masayo, an artist whose free-spirited creations mask hidden sorrows. And finally there's Hitomi's fellow employee, Takeo, whose abrupt and taciturn manner Hitomi finds, to her consternation, increasingly disarming.
A beguiling story of love found amid odds and ends, The Nakano Thrift Shop is a heart-warming and utterly charming novel from one of Japan's most celebrated contemporary novelists.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gentle novel, Kawakami uses a series of vignettes to chronicle a girl's time working at Mr. Nakano's secondhand store in Tokyo. Soon after she's hired, Hitomi begins dating Takeo, a coworker who proudly describes himself as "just simple." Hitomi wonders how to have a carefree conversation with him to overcome the awkwardness that leads him to respond to her messages with: "I'm fine. Hope you are too." Despite this struggle to navigate their shared inexperience, frank sexuality is inescapable at the shop. One customer brings in photographs of "a man and a woman, naked and intertwined," and Mr. Nakano asks Hitomi to read the "totally pornographic" novel his mistress has written to help answer his question: "Are all women really so damned erotic?" Even at their strangest, these interactions are rendered calmly by Kawakami in pleasant, leisurely prose. The progression of events is hardly dynamic, and those quotidian rhythms are reflected in Hitomi's emotional life. Her relationship with Takeo remains forever "out of sync," leaving her to conclude that "love is idiotic, anyway." Rather than describing an awakening, Kawakami is interested in the experience of working an incidental job, and that allows each moment to stand on its own without having to shoulder greater meaning. "The hourly wage wasn't much," Hitomi muses, "but it was consistent with the amount of effort required."
