When Banana Yoshimoto's stories first began to appear in English in 1993, five years after their first appearance in Japanese, they were considered very strange. It was as if someone who was writing dreamy romantic novels, with an exclusively female readership in mind, dropped in short passages reminiscent of Proust. The effect was distinctly disorienting.
Nowadays the contours of her imaginative world are clearer. She very much represents the mind-frame of the new Japanese young, people who have known neither war nor hunger nor any serious need, and for whom androgynous fashion and a relaxed, unmoralistic attitude to love and life generally prevail.
She is almost exclusively a writer of love stories, albeit unusual ones. Weather is very important to her heroines -- their love of clear skies, both by day and by night, is strong, and they're especially fond of snow. These scenic effects, usually observed from cities, form the route into deeper understandings of relationships, and escape from personal difficulties.
Banana Yoshimoto is in some ways the literary equivalent of the Japanese female pop-singers who are currently so fashionable with the young in Taiwan. One of the key figures in modern Japanese culture is the bishonen, an androgynous but actually male teenager, with large eyes beneath long eyelashes, and the teenage male fans of these singers, imitation bishonen every one, can currently be seen, with their emaciated bodies, pale faces and dyed hair, in abundance on any Taipei street.
There is a strong sense in the books of a Japanese urban world in which men go off to work and the women settle down to chat together over coffee in cozy, well-heated rooms. But stranger things are in store -- sudden deaths (which her characters take in their stride after just a few tears), conversations with ghosts, and people who have changed sex, or speculate on the possible implications of doing so.
Her stories appear whimsical, but achieve their effects by including bizarre events as if they were everyday occurrences. Her forte is the novella. ASLEEP consists of three such tales, with the title story coming last.
Yoshihiro in the first story in this new book, Night and Night's Travelers, is one of these bishonen, and doomed to die young. He is the narrator's brother. The plot features a triangle between him and two girls, one Japanese and one American. Before his death he goes to live with the American girl in the USA. Later she comes back to Japan, in the company of her American husband and her half-Japanese son. It's a variation on Puccini's Madame Butterfly, with the sexes reversed.
The middle story, Love Songs, tells of a similar triangle. This time it is the narrator who has been the rival of another woman, Haru, for the love of a man. Eventually they decided to share him. Haru has since died, but the narrator's current boyfriend takes her to a medium, and she has an encounter with Haru's spirit during a seance.
Ghosts of the dead young are as common as snowy nights in Banana Yoshimoto's work. But they don't arouse fear. They are as benign, and also as drifting, as they were in their earthly lives.
What makes Love Songs unusual is not so much the spiritualism as the linking in the everyday world of lesbian stirrings with chronic alcoholism.
The final story, Asleep, is about a tiredness that envelops all the characters. Again, the story contains many descriptions of the weather, a death, and hints of love between women. The young female narrator has a lover whose wife is in a coma in hospital following a car accident. He is exhausted by the strain of his endless visits to her bedside to keep up the appearance of concern.
RSS