Miracles of the Namiya General Store by Keigo Higashino

There are times when people ask for advice, and there are those who are willing to give it. Sometimes it's related to fairly harmless things, other times much more serious matters. Questions arise. Does the person asking for advice really want it or do they just want someone to tell them they're on the right path? What about the person giving the advice? Are they even qualified to lend a hand? What winds up happening to the person asking for help when they finally take action? There are the sort of things that The Miracles of Namiya General Store by Keigo Higashino explores.

Looking at many of the online descriptions of this novel, they can be a bit misleading. They often simply say that this is a book about a bunch of young thieves answering letters that keep mysteriously appearing at their hideout after a robbery. This is only partially true. There is much more to the story than that.

Namiya General Store was a small shop in a sleepy rural town about a two hour drive outside Tokyo. The place was run by a man named Yuji Namiya until his death in 1980. When his wife passed away, he became rather melancholic for a time until he started a little service at his shop for fun. Often times kids would ask him for advice. It was nothing special, just fun questions to pass the time like how to get good marks at school without studying. Yuji started a system where they could write questions for him, then he'd post the original question with an answer written underneath on one of the walls in his store. It was a hit, and there were a bunch of kids who would write their silly questions.

However, as Mr. Namiya became more popular for his advice, more serious questions started to emerge, like children asking why their parents were always arguing, catching a parent in an affair, or some other situation of that caliber. This lead to him developing a system where people could drop off their letter in the mail slot of his shop after he closed for the day, and he would leave an answer in the milk crate out back by the next morning. These were matters that demanded discretion. This became a regular pastime for Yuji throughout the 1970s, and he had a new lease on life, as he was very kind-hearted and wanted to help people as much as possible. He was even featured in a magazine article describing what he was doing.

Fast forward to 2012 and we have where the book starts off: the thieves. The place they chose to lay low in after their robbery is none other than Namiya General Store. It's been 33 years since the death of its owner, the paint outside is faded, and the interior is covered with dust, but the store is still standing. While they're hunkered down planning to wait until sunrise before making their escape, they hear the creak of the mail shutter and a letter quietly slides into the shop. They look at it and see that it is someone looking for advice. At first, they're confused, but then they find the magazine article laying around the house connected to the shop. As unbelievable of a hypothesis as it may be, the three thieves can only assume that these letters are traveling through time. More amazingly, when they write a response to the letter and place it in the milk crate, it disappears, returning to 1980. What transpires is that the thieves wind up writing some of the final recommendations of the Namiya General Store, as these are letters that were sent toward the end of Yuji's life when he was too old and frail to respond.

This winds up being about multiple people asking for and giving out advice. There are a lot of genuinely concerning problems that arise, and others that almost seem childish but have unexpected ramifications later. The book becomes an examination of how people try to give advice during the first half. The three thieves actually wind up taking the task surprisingly seriously. They're clearly spooked that they're communicating through time, but slowly feel they have a responsibility to do their best to help. It makes for an interesting correspondence, as, given their rough back ground, they are extremely blunt in how they communicate. They don't beat around the bush at all, and their responses are often the written equivalent to a punch to the gut. That isn't to say they aren't thinking over what they will say, as they deliberate quite a bit of that, and some of the situations that they deal with are quite daunting.

By comparison, we later see how Mr. Namiya handled his advice when he still ran the shop. He had a much gentler touch than the thieves did, but handled each situation with a deep level of seriousness as well. At one point, his son is visiting while he's trying to give advice to someone. It makes for a nice contrast how someone with little investment or interest will give basically superficial, useless advice compared to someone like Yuji who will put everything he has into a response, considering what must be going through the person's head, what people around the person must be going through, and how to tailor his response to not only give the best answer he can, but do so in as diplomatic and sincere way as possible.

Meanwhile, the second half of the book is more concentrated on how some of the people asking for help dealt with the advice they were given. Many of these are people who were corresponding with the thieves, but a few were exchanging letters with Mr. Namiya.

It helped to show that people can interpret advice in just as many ways as it can be given out. Some people just want to be told that they're making the right choice, while others need a swift kick in the backside (metaphorically speaking) to set them on the straight and narrow.

Settings shift throughout the book, going between the early 2010s and 1980. Some of this is to create a deliberate sense of nostalgia for a simpler time in Japan, but it does help to really flesh out everything that the kids in need were going through rather than it just being words written on a piece of paper. Even when they got advice, the paths ahead of them would not be easy, and some of them would go down some very dark roads as they made their way to adulthood.

What was an interesting touch was that Yuji made his son put out an announcement in 2012 for the 33rd anniversary of his death, asking those he gave advice to write once more and let him know how they were doing. Towards the end of his life, Yuji worried if had done the right thing by giving out that advice. What if he ruined people's lives, or even inadvertently ended them? This weighed on him immensely.

This in turn plays once more into the time traveling aspect of the book because Yuji's great grandson is the one who puts out the announcement asking people to write to Yuji once more. He does this by making a small website that some of the people who Yuji (as well as the thieves) helped stumble across. Of course, none of them could forget the advice they received, so they return once more to the small, dilapidated shop, sliding their letter through the mail slot. This time, the letters travel back in time for Yuji to read, and he's relieved to see that things by and large worked out for people. Of course, the question remains as to how honest they were being. Were they sugar coating their answers? By and large, these people sorted their problems out, but often in unexpected, and sometimes bittersweet ways.

As such, readers are able to see much more of the lives of the people who needed help. If the book simply focused on their immediate situation and what Yuji or the thieves told them, we would have only had a brief snapshot of what these people were like. However, with things culminating in them writing Mr. Namiya once more over 30 years after his death, the book winds up revisiting many of the characters at various stages of their lives, 5 years later, 10 years later, 20 years later. It allows them to develop much more as they grow after initially making a decision about what they would do with the advice that was given.

About the only thing that was a bit off putting about the story was that it wound up having an orphanage as something that tied almost everyone together and helped explain the whole time travel thing. It makes sense and adds a little something extra in how all of the characters are related, but it also felt a little bit tacked on. Simply going with a less explained, mysterious reason for the time travel would have been just fine as well. It isn't the end of the world, though. The point of the story is how people navigate difficult times in their lives and how others my try to help them. Everything else is more tools to help that along.

On the whole, Namiya General Store was really good. It's not a feel good story even though it can feel that way early on. There's a somber undertone with a lot of bittersweet moments throughout. I was surprised how often I would lose track of time while reading this, suddenly realizing it had gotten late and I really needed to get some sleep so I wouldn't be a wreck at work the next day. There were times when I almost missed my stop on the train as well. It's not often that a book pulls me in to that extent, but this one did.

Pennywhether

pennywhether@posteo.net

May 3, 2021