The Namiya General Store sells all of the usual things you’d expect to find in a rural general store, like stationary and snacks, but the owner also dispenses advice too. Silly at first, and more serious later on as people who needed advice but had no where else to turn heard about him, Mr. Namiya gave thoughtful answers to everyone. Sometimes though, the answers had much farther reaching implications than anyone could have initially guessed….
Despite the fact that we have this categorized under “light novels,” and it’s published by Yen Press’s light novel imprint Yen On, The Miracles of the Namiya General Store is much closer to being a “regular” novel, both because of its literary fiction/magical realism genre and its length. At 314 pages, and in a trim size that’s smaller than some Yen Press manga hardbacks I own, its length might be closer to being a novella as far as English publishing norms (and various awards) are concerned, but it’s still larger than just any light novel I’ve read and its story far more “respectable” to boot (no isekai here!).
I’m not a terribly big fan of literary fiction, and generally think that magical realism is often a cop-out since authors tend to employ it more as a metaphor than as a literal force of nature, and so unsurprisingly Namiya General Store was definitely a book I didn’t like at all in the beginning and enjoyed more as I went along. For me, part of the initial issue was that the main characters of the first chapter (who thankfully aren’t as important in the other chapters) grated on my nerves, featuring aimless delinquents who I found it hard to sympathize with. Funny enough, these delinquents have found themselves writing the “advice” for several of the letters that have come to the Namiya General Store (despite the fact that the store has been closed for years), and both they and I didn’t like many of the letter-writers very much either! I just found the start of the story a little pretentious and for a work like this, where it’s a story not about “a story” but about people, having characters your audience is at least interested in is a must.
Fortunately for me, I was more interested in later characters and by the third (of five) chapters I had really gotten into the story. The biggest draw for me, and I suspect for many readers (the cover boasts 12 million worldwide sales), was figuring out how the events in the first chapter even came to be (since there is clearly some actual magic involved) and how the stories of the individual characters are revealed to be rather intertwined. I think that’s also the biggest strength of the book, as Keigo Higashino is able to pull all of the different stories together naturally in the end and wrap everything up neatly, but not in an overly-neat sort of way. I did find that some of the individual endings were a bit too cloying — most of them involve at least some degree of “I came from an unsatisfying background and pulled myself up” which I am generally un-fond of, but I also know that’s a complaint that many readers don’t share.
I must confess, while I generally enjoyed the book by the end of it, and will probably think back on Higashino’s blending of multiple character threads, my overall feelings toward this story are a bit lukewarm. In what is probably an uncommon take, to me literary fiction often feels “pandering” towards an audience that wants to read but doesn’t necessarily want anything new or stimulating. I can see why millions of people have enjoyed reading this self-contained volume of stories about people in difficult situations making their lives better, but in the end I still felt like the characters were too “distant” for me to become as invested in them as I think Higashino intended me to be. Like if I ever venture out to a post office again I might even send this copy to my mom since I think she would enjoy it, but this book just didn’t leave me feeling anything in particular in the end.