The Nakano Thrift Shop | Granta

  • Published: 01/06/2017
  • ISBN: 9781846276026
  • 129x20mm
  • 256 pages

The Nakano Thrift Shop

Hiromi Kawakami

Translated by Allison Markin Powell

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.

Subtle, graceful, wise and threaded on a quirky humour, this exploration of the connections and disconnections between people kept me smiling long after the last page

Julia Rochester, author, The House at the Edge of the World

One for the holiday suitcase

Vogue.co.uk

Charming

Cathy Rentzenbrink, Stylist.co.uk

The Author

Born in 1958 in Tokyo, HIROMI KAWAKAMI is one of Japan’s most popular contemporary novelists. She is the recipient of the Pascal Short Story Prize for New Writers and the Akutagawa Prize. Her novel Drowning won both the Ito Sei Literature Award and Joryu Bungaku Sho (Women Writers’ Prize) in 2000. Her novel Manazuru won the 2011 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize. Strange Weather in Tokyo (Sensei no kaban) won the Tanizaki prize in 2001 and was shortlisted for both the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

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The Translator

Allison Markin Powell has been awarded grants from English PEN and the NEA, and the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. Her other translations include works by Osamu Dazai, Kanako Nishi, and Kaoru Takamura. She was the co-organizer and co-host of the Translating the Future conference, served as co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee and currently represents the committee on PEN’s Board of Trustees, and as part of the collective, Strong Women, Soft Power, is curating JFNY’s online literary series.

More about the translator →

From the Same Author

Hiromi Kawakami on Granta.com

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I Won’t Let You Go

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‘I have no idea why I felt so drawn to the mermaid, but the pull was irresistible.’

Fiction by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Allison Markin Powell.

Fiction | The Online Edition

People From My Neighbourhood

Hiromi Kawakami

‘First prize went to the dog school principal, who of course had submitted a cartoon dog.’ Translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen.

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Parfait

Hiromi Kawakami

‘He comes all the way here after he died and the two of you are making small talk?’ New fiction by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell