Earlier, a female friend of the narrator has taken the unusual job of spending the night beside customers without having sex with them. They are all people who life has exhausted at some deep level, and their only need now was not to have to sleep alone.
Nights preoccupy the narrator, too. She finds she's sleeping longer and longer, until one day she meets a mysterious woman in a park who tells her that her psyche and spirit are both exhausted, and that she should get a job to give herself a sense of purpose ? and then disappears.
One of Banana Yoshimoto's attractions is that her tales are not weighed down with extended thoughts on history or politics, or indeed with confrontations or ethical choices of any kind. Instead, their lightly perfumed ambiance is soothing and palatable, without being obviously commonplace. Yoshimoto suits something in our era that doesn't want to be lectured to. She provides the illusion of sophistication without the need for very much intelligence on the reader's part. She gives a feeling of profundity by constantly hinting at meanings that are only occasionally made explicit.
Perhaps the reaction to her early stories was not all that wide of the mark. The days when major writers were seen as prophets of a kind appear to have passed. Instead, novelists like Banana Yoshimoto offer consolation tinged with vague mystery. She is the kind of author who appeals to people living routine lives and to those who find meaning for their existence in romance, people for whom friends are almost as important as lovers, and who keep violent events at arm's length.
As she writes toward the end of Asleep, "Even if all this has been nothing but the story of a few small waves that shook me when I lost my friend and wore myself out doing all the little things one does every day, even if all this was nothing but the story of a small resurrection, it still makes me feel that people are very strong."
No doubt they are. And Banana Yoshimoto's power lies in her ability to persuade people that their lives are not so terrible, and that their dreams are real, and may one day come true. The oldest fairy tales conveyed a very similar message.
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