The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami

Something akin to this autofictional turn is apparent in Hiromi Kawakami’s The Nakano Thrift Shop, which appeared earlier this year in a translation by Allison Markin Powell.

The contemporary strain of autofiction is remarkable for its obsession with the mundane, the minutiae of everyday life, to the point that the term Twitterlature has even graced the lips of our more serious critics. In Knausgaard’s novels, the Karl Ove character is constantly lighting cigarettes, drinking cups of coffee, and describing each step of cooking dinner for his family, while the Elena of Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels is continually sweeping the floors of her family’s apartment. Literary critics and scholars have yet to come together around a new set of terms, but the novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, and Ben Lerner suggest that an important part of the current literature is a return to autofiction, or writing that blends elements of autobiography and fiction. Thus, it shouldn’t be surprising that by the time postmodernism marked its 40th birthday, somewhere around the turn of the millennium, the race was on to define the next “cultural dominant,” to borrow a concept from Fredric Jameson. ARTISTS AND WRITERS have long tried to understand how their era is new or different.

The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami