'N.P.' by Banana Yoshimoto (Review)

As we head towards the end of the third January in Japan, I've been looking back at all the posts I've written for the event over the years.  There's been a mixture of modern books, old masters and some real classics (and when I say classics...), but only two writers have featured in all three editions.  One is the father of modern J-Lit, Natsume Soseki - the other... shares a name with a yellow fruit high in potassium.

Now, how did that happen?

*****
Banana Yoshimoto's N.P. (translated by Ann Sherif) is the story of Kazami Kano, an English-language research assistant at a Tokyo university.  The start of the book sees her looking back to a relationship she had with an older man while she was at high school, a translator working on a collection of ninety-seven short stories.  The book never appeared in Japanese as the translator committed suicide soon after, just as the writer (a Japanese man living in the US) had done years before.

Years later, Kazami is reminded of this passage of her life when she reencounters Saki and Otohiko Takase, the writer's children, whom she met briefly at a partly long ago.  Falling into the orbit of the Takases, she discovers that there is more to learn about the untranslated book 'N.P.'.  Not only are there some extra stories, relating some rather personal family affairs, there's also the fact that everyone who has attempted to translate the story into Japanese has killed themselves.  The major discovery, though, is that Kazami is connected to the Takases by a woman she has yet to meet, a former girlfriend of the translator with a very close tie to Saki and Otohiko...

Over the years, my relationship with Yoshimoto's work has very much been one swinging between enjoyment and loathing (on the same page), so you might find it surprising that I've gone back for more this time.  However, N.P. is the one book continually cited whenever people put Yoshimoto forward as a favourite writer, and with its being the only one of her major works in English I hadn't read (as far as I'm aware...), I thought it was time to give it a go - and I'm glad I did.

From the very start, N.P. is a novel which is recognisably Banana(s).  As I mentioned last year, while everyone knows about Murakami Bingo, J-Lit aficionados would agree that Banana Bingo is the main game in town, and in this regard, N.P. certainly doesn't disappoint.  Lesbian tendencies?  Page 42.  Mysterious illness?  Page 17.  Eerie ability to dream the future?  Page 6.  Suicide?  Page 1, Line 4.  That's a full card, and I'd like the stuffed teddy as my prize, please ;)

Despite the almost parodical adherence to these themes (which the writer emphasises herself in the afterword), N.P. is actually a very good book, possibly the best of the ones I've been able to try.  Kazami is another of Yoshimoto's stock characters, the woman ever-so-slightly outside mainstream society.  She comes from an unconventional family, deserted by the father, with her sister living overseas and her mother a freelance translator.  This gives her a different perspective on the world, and the novel has a calming feel of a step outside the rat race, a slice of summer with perpetual sunshine and blue skies.

Otohiko and Saki, strangers in their home country, see Kazami as a kindred spirit, latching onto her in an attempt to find a foothold in Tokyo.  Kazami is quickly pulled into their lives, even though she senses the darkness beneath their charming exteriors:

"But I could do little to lessen the fatigue that had been building up in him before we even met, the weariness over the complications of his life.  I was incapable of truly understanding the darkness that made up a large part of his personality, the blackness that I found so attractive."
p.28 (Faber and Faber, 2001)

However, it isn't until the arrival of the final major character that matters really get interesting.  You see, the real focal point of the story is Sui Minowa, an intense, willowy beauty, half-sister to the Takases, inspiration for one of the secret stories - and Otohiko's lover...

It's this darkness that lifts N.P. above much of Yoshimoto's other work.  While there's still a lot of light nonsense, with the writer balancing on the tightrope between the profound and the trite at times, there's a mood hanging over the story, an acknowledgement that tragedy is in the air, and that it's unavoidable.  The incestuous strands to the story, both metaphorical (Kazami's growing attraction to all in her tight-knit group) and literal (the Takases really believe in keeping things in the family), mean that it's difficult for the reader to relax too much.

Yoshimoto balances this nicely, though, with her descriptions of the hot Tokyo summer, allowing us to soak in the sun in peace with the characters.  The story, what little there is of it, often takes a back seat as Kazami and her friends look to snatch a moment of calm:

"The three of us stood there.  Cars proceeded slowly around the plaza, and a line of buses stood at the stop.  So many things filled the space of that very ordinary, clear afternoon.  The many complications, the things that had evolved over time, the varying distances between Japan and the rest of the world.  People walked right by us, and their voices interrupted our conversations, without any of them realizing all that was going on between us.  It felt strange." (p.140)

Sadly, even in a Banana Yoshimoto novel, time can't stand still forever.  The summer has to end eventually, and when it does, the friends who met in the sun are likely to go their separate ways.  Will they make it through in one piece, or will the curse of 'N.P.' strike again...

There's a lot to like about N.P., and while Amrita (which nobody else seems to have read - or liked) was my favourite Yoshimoto book before, I have a feeling that this one might take its place.  This is a book where the writer explores all her usual themes and gets it right, creating a novel more memorable for its feel than its plot.  A good way to round off my Yoshimoto reading, then, and a book which almost leaves me wanting to go back to her other work.

Maybe next year ;)

'Hardboiled \ Hard Luck' by Banana Yoshimoto (Review)

January in Japan rolls on, and today we meet up again with an old friend - or perhaps I should say acquaintance...  You see, while I've read a fair bit of Banana Yoshimoto's work now, we haven't always seen eye to eye - I wonder if the latest encounter will be any different?

*****
hardboiled \ hard luck (translated by Michael Emmerich) is a book containing two thematically-linked novellas.  While my copy runs to 150 pages, that's a rather generous amount of paper (with large, spacious print) for two stories which you can rip through in an hour or so.  This isn't a book which is going to hold you up for too long, whether that's for better or worse :)

hardboiled, the longer of the two pieces, begins with a woman walking through some mountain woods in search of the small town where she has reserved a room for the night.  She walks past a spooky looking ring of black stones, and when she reaches her destination, she is shocked to find that one of the stones has somehow ended up accompanying her.  Finally, she arrives at the hotel, but that's just the start of her adventures - this is going to be a very long night...

The second story, hard luck, revolves around a family tragedy, with the narrator's sister lying in a hospital bed with a cerebral haemorrhage which is to end her life.  The one bright point in this dark time is when the narrator meets Sakai, the brother of her sister's (useless) fiancé, a man who is prepared to believe that death isn't necessarily the end.

*****
Let's get it out of the way immediately - sometimes Yoshimoto's writing is simply infuriating.  Some of you might recall the Murakami bingo graphic that made its way around a while back (with squares for cats, wells, jazz etc); well, playing Yoshimoto bingo would be a lot easier.  Lesbian experiences?  Dreams?  Uncanny feelings?  Fog or mist?  Ghosts?  Death of a loved one?  I think I had a full house after ten minutes of reading...  Three pages in:

"Suddenly, just as I came to a bend in the road that led back into a slightly more remote part of the mountain, beyond the reach of the streetlight, I was overcome by an extremely unpleasant sensation.  I had the illusion that space itself had bent gelatinously out of shape, so that no matter how long I walked, I would never make any progress.
  I've never had any supernatural powers.  But at a certain point I learned to sense things, even if only faintly, that my eyes can't see.
  I'm a woman.  Once, just once, I went out with another woman..."
'hardboiled', p.5 (Faber and Faber, 2005)

Bingo!

As you can imagine in two stories about death (in hardboiled, the narrator is dreaming about her dead ex-girlfriend), there is plenty of opportunity for this kind of reflection, but sometimes it's just off the scale, out of nowhere:

"Then something occurred to me: the evil person or thing or whatever it is that's responsible must have been buried alive in a cave near that shrine I saw earlier!  I can't say how I knew this, but I did.  Things were falling into place."
'hardboiled', p.33

Well, if you say so, Banana - I'm happy to trust your intuition...

*****
So why do I bother?  If I know that Yoshimoto's work is bound to be full of ridiculous coincidences, trite dialogue and awful clichés, what's the point?  And that is the enigma that is Banana Yoshimoto: when she's bad, she's horrid - but she isn't always bad.  Despite myself, I found myself becoming absorbed in the story she unravels, a calming, numbing tale that works around familiar themes.

Beneath the bland surface of the stories lie hints of desperation and suffering as her protagonists are forced to face the trauma they've been suppressing for so long.  While the supernatural features can be laughed at, everyone in the book takes them so seriously that you almost start to doubt your doubts.  It's hard to laugh too much when the characters are literally haunted by the past.

Yoshimoto is returning to her favourite theme here, the examination of the absolute nadir of your life, and the realisation that this will all soon pass, and things will get better.  In both stories, the narrator is stuck in a rut, and has been for some time, but by facing up to her fears, she is able to take the first step towards the future.  And it's in these moments that Yoshimoto's writing begins to make sense:

"And it struck me that if anything was a miracle, it was this: the lovely moments we experienced during the small, almost imperceptible periods of relief.  The instant the unbearable pain and the tears faded away, and I saw with my own eyes how vast the workings of the universe were, I would feel my sister's soul."
'hardluck', p.123

Trite or insightful?  This time, the decision is not quite so clear...

*****
Once again then, a quick tussle with Ms. Banana ends up in a split-decision, and I'm not sure which way the verdict actually falls.  I doubt it's a book I'll reread in a hurry, but it does have a lot to recommend it, especially if you haven't read too much of Yoshimoto's work.  I think I'll take a break from her books for now though; I've read virtually all of her books in English anyway.

Although, I've heard that N.P. is supposed to be a good one... ;)

'Lizard' by Banana Yoshimoto (Review)

A Happy New Year to everyone out there, and welcome to January in Japan!  I hope you're all ready to get 2013 off to the best possible start - with some great J-Lit :)

My first choice for the month is a book by an author who can polarise opinions like few other J-Lit writers.  While some adore Banana Yoshimoto's female take on late-twentieth-century angst, others dismiss her work as over-hyped pop fiction - occasionally at the same time.  Which description fits best?  I'm not sure I'll be able to answer that question in one little post...

*****
Lizard (translated by Ann Sherif) is a collection of six short stories, each of which is written in Yoshimoto's instantly recognisable style.  Once again we are taken on a tour of middle-class Tokyo to meet a group of characters who would probably be described on Twitter as having #firstworldproblems.  Despite this, the protagonists are, on the whole, interesting people, and the stories draw the reader in, time passing without your being aware of it.

The first story, Newlywed, sets up the collection nicely.  A man on a train decides not to get off at his usual station, bored with his stale marriage, and is joined in the carriage by a hobo - who suddenly turns into a beautiful woman.  This magical touch is also evident in the title story, Lizard, where a young woman with a dark secret has magical healing powers.  More than any of the other Yoshimoto books I've read, this one immediately seems to be drawing on a very familiar influence...

By the time the third story, Helix, appears, the Murakami parallels are uncanny.  In this story, a man goes on a surprise date in a café which has already closed for the night.  He ends up talking the night away with his girlfriend, discussing the concept of memory and the difficulty of deciding which memories are important.  The third story in a row with a male protagonist makes the collection seem a little different to Yoshimoto's other works, even if the themes are very similar.

The second half of the collection though returns to the familiar ground of the writer's twenty-something women struggling to cope with society's expectations.  Whether it's the heroine of Dreaming of Kimchee, who is learning to cope with her role as a scarlet woman, the main character of Blood and Water, who has run away from a benign cult to find herself in the big city, or the prospective bride of A Strange Tale from Down by the River, a woman learning secrets about her past but with plenty of her own - these are the characters readers have come to expect from Yoshimoto.  Which is not necessarily a bad thing...

If you like Yoshimoto's work, you'll definitely enjoy Lizard.  The writer is expert at creating a light, airy atmosphere in which her characters can talk about the things polite society politely ignores.  These people often stand out because of their belief in (or mastery of!) supernatural powers and alternative healing, and in a similar way to Murakami, Yoshimoto shows their struggles to find a place in a rigid, unforgiving society.

Yoshimoto likes to concentrate on the dynamics of relationships more than pushing the plot forward, and this can be successful at times:

"I liked just watching Lizard - the way she threw her coat over her shoulders, the way she bowed her head when she crouched down to tie her shoes, the way her eyes glittered in the mirror when she took a peek at herself.  I loved watching Lizard in her different poses.  The cells of her body dying and coming into being, the curve of her cheeks, the white half-moons on her fingernails.  I felt her brimming with the fluid of life, flowing with the universe.  Her every gesture, every move, brought life to me, a man who had been dormant for so long."
p.42, Lizard (Faber and Faber, 2001)

However, she can also be guilty at times of some very clunky, clumsy writing:

"In fact, we met at his father's funeral, which I attended in my boss's place.  The ritual moved me tremendously.  People had told me what a dignified, splendid man the president had been, how he had run his business innovatively and with integrity.  I had also heard that his employees loved working for him.  When I saw the many people who came to pay their last respects, I knew all these stories must be true."
p.126, A Strange Tale from Down by the River

The last couple of stories, in particular, contain far too much flat, informative prose, at odds with the mood of the rest of the collection.  As always with Yoshimoto though, you do start to wonder how good her translators are...

As to whether Yoshimoto is a hit or a miss, I'm still (and always have been) firmly in the undecided category.  Every book of hers I've read has had an indefinable something that I've enjoyed - but they've all also let me down ever so slightly at some point along the way.  Having said that, Lizard is one I would recommend.  While not all of the stories hit the mark, I enjoyed my little foray into Banana's world, polishing it off in a couple of hours.  When she gets it right, she can (just like old Haruki) hit a nerve with her views on the rigidity of Japanese society:

"It's the way society is now.  You're not supposed to be by yourself.  You get caught in the net, and you can feel it tugging at you as you try to get away from it, just as if you've walked into a spider's web.  You struggle to free yourself, but you can't.  It's in the air; there's no escape from this force, one so inferior to the life force, the energy within us.  You can pretend to ignore it, but it still obscures your vision."
p.75, Dreaming of Kimchee

Like I said - #firstworldproblems ;)

A Reflection of Society

Bloggers are lovely people.  A while back, I left a comment on a post on Banana Yoshimoto's The Lake by Lisa from ANZ Lit Lovers, in which I had a little whinge about not receiving a review copy of the book after someone from the publisher's had actually contacted me first.  Not only did I get the sympathy I was after (I'm so transparent), but she actually offered to send me her review copy to add to my little library of J-Lit tomes!

Obviously, if the book turned out to be rubbish, I was going to feel very silly indeed.  Luckily though, that's not the case.  The Lake is a very fine little novel, probably one of the best of the five Yoshimoto works I've read, and a very enjoyable way to spend New Year's Day to boot (I ran through the whole thing in a matter of hours!).  Thanks Lisa :)

The Lake (translated by Michael Emmerich) introduces us to Chihiro, a woman approaching thirty, who earns a living painting murals on walls and buildings while she thinks about what she wants to do with her life.  As we enter her world, she has just begun a relationship with a neighbour, Nakajima, a rather intelligent young man with a disturbed, and disturbing, past - one that we (and Chihiro) will learn more about as the story progresses.  Chihiro senses that Nakajima's fear of intimacy and social situations must be related to some kind of childhood trauma, but she is unwilling to push him into a confession, for fear of hurting him.  Then, one day, Nakajima asks Chihiro to accompany him on a journey into the past - a trip to visit some friends living beside a lake...

This journey to the lake is the key to understanding the novel, but Yoshimoto sensibly initially leaves things as vague and murky for the reader as the fog-bound body of water the couple first encounter.  We are gradually fed small pieces of information about Nakajima's past, with the truth not coming out until about forty pages from the end.  Even then, there are things left unsaid, memories left untouched - and the book is the better for it.

Nakajima is ostensibly the character we should be interested in, but Chihiro herself is also an intriguing creation.  While she has not been subjected to the treatment Nakajima was forced to endure, she too, in her own way, has suffered from the way a certain group of people thinks you should live.  Living in an unorthodox family unit, simply because her father's family, appalled by her mother's lifestyle, refused to allow him to marry, Chihiro and her parents were left as a perfect nuclear family without the official social sanction.

For anyone who has lived in Japan, or read anything about its customs, the idea of a homogeneous society will be nothing new, and it is this issue which Yoshimoto constantly returns to in her fiction, the way outsiders have to find a place for themselves in a society which would rather they didn't exist.  In many ways, the group that takes control of Nakajima is a microcosm of Japan itself, a community unwilling to accept difference and determined to make people conform to its own norms.  It is no coincidence that Chihiro and Nakajima are alike in their different approaches to life, or that their goal is to flee to Paris - often the only way for young Japanese to escape the constraints of family and social ties...

As for the lake itself, it's a wonderful piece of imagery and symbolism, almost certainly containing the crux of the whole work - now, if only I knew what that actually was :(  Perhaps a clue can be found in the way Mino, one of the friends living by the lake, insists that although the lake may seem still, it is in fact constantly changing with the seasons and with the activity on it - just like society itself...  Chihiro's attempt then to recreate the lake in her mural could represent an attempt to reshape society to suit her own wishes and to make a place for the two young lovers to live without fear of outside interference.  Then again, I may just have been hitting the literary theory books too hard recently...

Whether any of this makes sense or not, what I've taken from reading The Lake is a sense that this is a very good book, one which lingers in the memory (unlike certain others of Yoshimoto's works) and contains a lot more in its 188 pages than you might think.  I'm not sure that it's the kind of book which wins prizes, but it's certainly worthy of its place on the Man Asian Literary Prize long-list.  Like the body of water which gives the book its name, there's definitely more to The Lake than meets the eye.

Review Post 34 - It's a girl thing, it's a guy thing

Yin and Yang.  Two halves, connected and interspersed to create a whole.  Female and male, complementary and equal.  Which brings me to my latest reviews (I will explain later...).

*****

Banana Yoshimoto's Asleep (translated by Michael Emmerich) is a collection of three novellas which run very much along the lines of her other works.  Each story has a female protagonist caught in an awkward stage of their lives, unable to move forward and not always wanting to.  Just as in Kitchen and Amrita, there is the need to get over the loss of someone close, and this usually entails an experience which can be best described as slightly left of centre.

In the first story, Night and Night's Travellers,  Shibami, still recovering from the death of her brother, finds a draft of a letter she once sent to his American girlfriend, Sarah.  Far from being a coincidence, this event sets off a chain of occurrences leading to a chance meeting which may help provide some closure for Shibami and Mari, her brother's girlfriend.  The second, Long Songs, sees Fumi dreaming of a woman she once knew; naturally, this is another extra-sensory event, and her boyfriend takes her to see a man who will be able to connect her with her long-lost acquaintance.  The final tale, Asleep, centres on Terako, a young woman idling her way through life, who has started to need more and more sleep.  Apart from napping, she spends her time catching up with her boyfriend, a married man with a wife (not a girlfriend) in a coma.  As Terako begins to find it more difficult to stay awake, she starts to wonder whether her condition is linked to that of her boyfriend's wife...

On finishing this short collection, my first thought was that two out of three isn't perfect, but it will do.  The first and last stories were calming to read, perfect examples of the light, slow-moving entertainment Yoshimoto is known for.  Despite the usual interchangeability of the lead characters and the obvious repetition of favourite themes (low-level supernatural abilities, dealing with the loss of a loved one, undertones of secret lesbian attraction), the writing was almost flawless, and reading them was like moving effortlessly through a sea of clouds (not that I've ever done this, but I think that's how it would feel).

However, as good as the outside of the sandwich was, the filling was a stinker.  Long Songs, the shortest of the stories, managed to just about undo all of the good work of the other two novellas.  It was silly, uninteresting and left me wondering what on earth compelled her to include it with the other tales (apart from the connection of theme and the need to bring the page count up to something people would actually consider paying good money for).  Once again, I have to point out that I am not a big fan of Yoshimoto's dialogue, and it is no coincidence that the middle story, despite being half the length of the others, probably contains more direct speech than its neighbours.  Let's move on...

*****

Having devoured something by the queen of J-Lit, it was time to even things up by sitting back and relaxing with the king, and anyone who does not yet know who I'm referring to should just hang their head in shame and go and peruse some other blog instead.  Murakami's short novel, South of the Border, West of the Sun, with Philip Gabriel on translation duties, is a wistful, nostalgic tale of lost love and missed opportunities, which teases the reader with thoughts of what we would do if they came around again.

The book centres on Hajime, an only child in a thoroughly normal suburban family, and we follow him through his school days and on to adult life.  Perhaps this would have been routinely dull too had it not been for his childhood relationship with Shimamoto, a pretty only child with a deformed leg from an early bout of polio.  Despite becoming close friends (and beginning to fall for each other), the two lose touch, and Hajime grows up alone - with and without the girls by his side - until one day when, through a heavy crowd of Tokyo pedestrians, he spots a beautiful woman walking down the street, dragging her leg slightly.  Could it be...

South of the Border... is a slow-burning love story, beautifully written and a pleasure to read.  The temptation and longing Hajime feels drip from the page, and Murakami skillfully spins events out, frustrating both his hero and the reader.  With its seemingly innocent but oh-so-wrong meetings at the bar, street-level views of Tokyo life (day and night), a slight sub-text of extraordinary events happening to ordinary people...  this is classic Murakami.  It's also one of my least favourite of his books.

There, I've said it.  Good as it is, I have serious issues with this book, and they prevent me from enjoying it as much as you would expect.  You see, I find it really hard to empathise with characters who are unfaithful and hurt their partners, and Hajime, despite Murakami's best efforts to make him likeable, is... well, he's a bit of a prick in my book.

This actually extends to many facets of his character: with his expensive clothes, his successful business and his casual attitude towards his family, he is actually a very un-Murakami-like creation - the anti-Toru, if you will.  Were I a real literary analyst, I'm sure I would be able to rise above my petty prejudices and enjoy the writing in spite of my reservations, but I receive neither money nor grades for these reviews, so I'm going to go ahead and wish Hajime a life of misery and a lingering STD.

It is a very good book though...

*****
So, in closing...  what's that?  The Yin and Yang thing?  Glad you reminded me.  Something that struck me over the fevered two days I spent devouring these morsels of modern Japanese literature was the way in which Yoshimoto and Murakami complemented each other.  Their styles are fairly different, but their books can cover fairly similar themes from diametrically opposite angles, namely from the point of view of their gender.  Murakami's heroes have typical masculine traits: they're taciturn, hard drinking and fairly adventurous.  Yoshimoto's identikit female lead prototypes are consumerist chatterboxes (the Japanese preference for women to sound as if they have swallowed helium may lead me a step closer to uncovering the mystery of my Yoshimotian dialogue blues), women who seem to have no desire for, or concept of, work as a vocation (unlike Murakami's leads who, while not conforming to the salaryman ideal, do usually work hard to support themselves).  Simplistic (and possibly a little stereotypical), yes.  Wrong?  I'd welcome your thoughts.

Whatever the similarities though, I'll leave you with one major, crucial difference.  Days after reading South of the Border..., scenes still flash through my mind, and these memories of the story evoke colours, smells and emotions.  I can see Hajime's cafe, I can sense Shimamoto at my shoulder, I can see the trees shoot past in a blur on the road to Hakone.

To write the review on Asleep, I had to have the book next to me the whole time.  Now, I remember next to nothing about it.  So which do you think is the better book?

63 - 'Amrita' by Banana Yoshimoto

I am, as anyone who read my last post closely enough would know, thirty-four years old and will turn thirty-five very soon. Time for reflection, perhaps. Therefore, it was perhaps apt that I (randomly) decided to re-read 'Amrita' this week as Banana Yoshimoto's novel, a departure from the usual novellas or collections of short stories, is especially concerned with reflection and taking stock of your existence. In this tale about a young woman who loses her memory and has to reassess the way she is living her life, Yoshimoto blends elements of Buddhist theology and everyday philosophy to examine what it means to live in the present.

Sakumi, a Japanese woman in her twenties, lives at home with her mother, brother, cousin and her mother's friend, part of an informal family unit which has come together after several deaths and breakups. One winter day, she falls down a steep flight of stone steps, and, on waking up in the hospital, realises that she has lost a significant part of her memory. This loss of memory, however, is a catalyst for Sakumi to re-examine her life and relationships: she becomes closer to her little brother Yoshi, slightly more 'gifted' than your average elementary-school student; she starts to spend more time with Ryuichiro, the ex-boyfriend of her dead sister, Mayu; and she also begins to come to terms with the effect that Mayu's death has had on her.

The loss of memory enables Sakumi to look at the world around her through a new pair of eyes, and although she does regain her memory slowly, the lack of detail in her memory forces her to reconsider her relationships with people and places. The brush with mortality also brings her to consider life and death, and she comes to realise that all things - friendships, relationships, families - are transient and fleeting. While this sounds negative and depressing, in fact the opposite is true; Sakumi uses this new knowledge of the temporary nature of life to focus on the positives and especially the here and now; she is able to live for the moment and enjoy life for what it is.

The title, 'Amrita', refers to concepts present in the Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist religions and is connected to the refreshment of the human soul from drinking a liquid, like the nectar of the Greek gods, which is vital for living. Yoshimoto reinforces this allusion to Buddhism and Hinduism with frequent comparisons of characters to gods such as Shiva and Kannon. The 'thirst' for water is mirrored in the events of the novel as Sakumi finds enjoyment in swimming and then finds peace in journeys to the Japanese coast and Saipan, an island in the Pacific Ocean which appears to be a mythical place where the line between our 'real' life and the spirit world is blurred. Towards the end of the novel, Sakumi is also urged to quench her thirst by drinking in everyday occurrences - the water of life.

When I first read this book, I wasn't overly impressed; I felt that there was a lack of a structure to the novel, and it often felt as if it were a random series of events with very little to link them and move the story along. Also (as always with Banana's works), I felt that the dialogue was trite and that there was an overreliance on metaphor. I'm still not convinced on the latter point, although I am moving more and more towards the opinion that this is the fault of the translator, not the author (several typos and a couple of literal translations which even a low-level Japanese speaker like myself could pick up are swaying me in this direction), but I enjoyed the book as a whole much more this time. The idea of life circling around and people continually going through the cycle of making friends, developing relationships and moving on came through more strongly on this reading, as did the writer's focus on showing how Sakumi's loss of memory enables her to stop and look at what she actually is.

Of course, the reason why my opinion of the book this time is so different to when I read it a couple of years ago has a lot more to do with me than with the book. I'm a bit older, (hopefully) a bit wiser and more able to read things into a novel like this one (some of which probably weren't intended). Just as Sakumi needed an accident to give her the necessary distance to view her life, most of us find it difficult to get the required perspective to see our world as it really is, and being caught up in the daily grind makes it difficult to know if we're happy or not. Reflecting on the moment and ignoring both the past and the future is hard. Very hard.

And so, this morning, on the train to work, I finished 'Amrita' and looked around the busy carriage. The sun was shining brightly through the windows on a beautiful spring morning, the first of many to come. Across from me, a group of students were talking and laughing, generally being young and happy. On my i-Pod (on shuffle mode for a change), songs came and went: Motorace (a sadly defunct Australian indie band), The Stone Roses (the classic indie group from my school and university days), The Yellow Monkey (one of my favourite bands from my time in Japan - my lack of Japanese ability prevents me from finding out whether their lyrics are as clever as their Arctic simian cousins). I got off at Caulfield station and walked slowly through the campus to my office, taking a different route in order to stay in the sunlight for as long as possible. Trying to live for the moment and forget the past and future.

Of course, it's virtually impossible to always live for the moment (life has a nasty habit of getting in the way), but if you do look back, do so with joy, not regret. Life is constantly moving on; you meet people, you grow close, you have good times, and then you go your separate ways. If you are able to step outside the moment and look back on these times without wishing for their return, you will be a lot better for it. As I've recently learned (from all the Japanese books I've read), life is short enough as it is; wasting it worrying about how short it is just makes it shorter.

Time to step back into the sun...

53 - 'Kitchen' by Banana Yoshimoto

I like bananas. I take one to work with me in a lunchbox every day (the banana's in the lunchbox, I'm not; that would be weird). They are a wonderful source of potassium (which I'm sure I have a use for, even if if it eludes me at present), they give you a wonderful boost of energy when it's 3.00, and knocking-off time seems aeons away, and, most importantly, they come in their own, portable, bio-degradable wrapper. Brilliant. It really is a stupid name though.

Which leads me nicely (some might say predictably, but that's 'cause they're just mean, and I'm not listening) to Banana Yoshimoto, the exotically-named Japanese author of my latest literary delight, 'Kitchen'. Obviously, 'Banana' is not Ms. Yoshimoto's birth name (she changed it from 'Strawberry'), but that is the one she thought would best suit her personality. Which really says all you need to know about her.

Despite her rather cheery pseudonym, Yoshimoto's debut novel - actually a two-part novella followed by a short story - is really rather short on smiles. In 'Kitchen', Mikage Sakurai moves in with a casual acquaintance, Yuichi Tanabe, after the death of her grandmother, and the poor girl struggles through the loss of the last family member she had left. Both Mikage and Yuichi have to learn to get over their repective losses before their lives can start again. In 'Moonlight Shadow', Satsuki is mourning the loss of her boyfriend, Hiroshi, when a chance meeting with a strange woman, Urara, gives her the opportunity to find a way past her emotional blockage. Not happy stories.

Both tales address the big questions of life: What's it all about? What happens when you lose a loved one? How do you keep going? Both Mikage and Satsuki find it difficult to adjust to a changed world and doubt they possess the strength to continue an empty life, but both are helped to move on by the new friends they find; for the first time, the girls confront the truth that relationships can be ephemeral and that life is more a series of friendships than one life-long set of relationships.

I bet you're still not sure what I actually thought about this book (and you wouldn't be the only ones), so I'll put your minds at rest; I liked it. But. Just as I'm in two minds about bananas, at least when it comes to the name, I'm still not completely convinced by Ms. Yoshimoto's writing. For one thing, as I previously alluded to, the two stories in this book are very similar in theme, and, at times, I really couldn't feel any difference between the two characters. Mikage could have been Satsuki, and Satsuki could have been Mikage (except for the fact that Mikage did a lot more cooking); just as some people criticise Haruki Murakami for writing the same characters over and over again, Yoshimoto seems to write very one-dimensional people.

However, the biggest problem I have with our little Banana is that her writing seeems to be schizophrenic in the split between description and dialogue. Many's the time (in this book and in 'Goodbye Tsugumi' and 'Amrita') I have been lulled into a state of comfortable numb enjoyment by Yoshimoto's work, only to receive a rude awakening from her wretched, childish dialogue. This may be deliberate (many of the characters are teenagers); it may be an issue with the translator (unfortunately, my Japanese isn't good enough for me to be able to check this any time soon); it could well just be an aversion on my part to what I consider to be overly-American jargon in the dialogue. Whatever it is, it makes me cringe at times, and that's a shame because I do like the ideas behind her books.

Please don't be put off by the last couple of paragraphs; it's sometimes easier to write about the negatives than the positives, and there is a lot of good reading to be had in this short work. Give Banana a go, and I'm sure you won't regret it. Just be aware that in amongst the sumptuous yellow flesh, just as in a banana, you may find some squashy blackish bits. Yuck.