People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice: Stories
By Ao Omae
translated by Emily Balistrieri
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Thank you to HarperVia for gifting me the Nomad Edition of this one, it's such a cute pocket-sized format.
Ao Omae was born in 1992 in Hyogo Prefecture and has become one of the names to know in gender-conscious Japanese fiction. He debuted in 2016, and the title novella here was popular enough in Japan to get its own film adaptation in 2023. Emily Balistrieri, the translator, is an American based in Tokyo whose translation of Tomihiko Morimi's The Tatami Galaxy was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. He's also the translator behind Kiki's Delivery Service.
This collection is one novella plus three short stories, and what connects all four is people finding some way to cope that may look strange to some but makes complete sense once you're inside their head.
The title story gave me strong Convenience Store Woman vibes, that same awkward, doesn't-quite-fit energy. Nanamori is in college, watching everyone around him pair off while he's still figuring out who he even is. His answer, along with a handful of other students, is a club where members talk to their stuffed animals, an actual space for working through what they're feeling, and everyone in it takes it seriously.
He's always been closer to girls than with the guys around him, actually enjoying their company instead of performing an interest in it. That closeness put him at odds with his male friends more than once, especially in middle and high school, when their talk about girls turned crude or cruel. He never went along with it, and it made him hard to be a part of either group.
He does end up dating a girl he thinks is cute, more because she's there than because he feels much more than friendship for her. But his best friend Mugito is the person he's actually closest to throughout the book, and for most of it, he can't quite tell what that closeness is, friendship or something more.
The three short stories that round out the collection are just as sharp. In one, a young woman talks to a bottle of water her future mother-in-law swears by, going through the motions of a ritual she doesn't believe in to keep the peace. In another, a woman copes by putting a towel over her head, her own quiet way of shutting the world out when it gets to be too much. The last story is the heaviest of the four: a girl supports her brother, who struggles with mental illness, by playing along with him, and it builds toward something that goes terribly wrong.
I really enjoyed this one. If awkward, doesn't-fit-the-mold characters are your thing, add it to your stack. Definitely worth the read.
