When I bought this last summer it was Banana's most recent thing (ジュージュー, 2011). By the time I got around to reading it, it wasn't. She's very prolific.
In other words, the story is absolutely standard Yoshimoto Banana. Complete product. If you haven't read much Banana before, this will give you the message. If you have, this might be unnecessary. Except.
The one interesting thing about it is how completely intertwined it is with the manga. This is foregrounded in a number of ways: the cover art sports Sarami, Pyonko, and Puramuchan (another character) on the roof of the manga's steakhouse, while the obi and endpapers display cute little Asakura Sekaiichi goth cartoons; the characters in the novel are aware of the manga; and Banana's inevitable postscript thanks Asakura for inspiration. You can't miss it, even if you're like me and had never heard of the manga before.
And of course the character set-up is similar. Both the narrator and the narrator's mother have aspects of Saramichan about them. The mother b/c of her past as a model, and her being the one who, like Saramichan, first settles down in the steakhouse; the narrator herself b/c she's our p.o.v. character, like Saramichan, and like Saramichan has an absent mother. The narrator's father is like King Ema, although he's in the kitchen, rather than hell (not an un-hellish place, of course, filled smoke and the smell of roasting meat).
But it's not like this is in any way a novelization of the manga. More like a meditation on the motifs and themes of the manga, and both how they might be treated in an altogether more sentimental piece of fiction and how they might be meaningful to the characters in an altogether more sentimental piece of fiction. Inneresting.
And: it's also interesting, to me at least, how this fits into Banana's latter career. Like her work with Nara Yoshitomo and Naka Bokunen, this is a species of collaboration (if mostly one-sided) with a visual artist: again we find her decorating her words with the images of a younger hip artist. And, in particular, this lays bare what have always been the hidden but obvious manga resonances of Banana's literature. Like, in some ways she's always been shōjo manga without the illustrations. Now we see that at work.
2 comments:
The impression I get from these two posts is that you liked the manga a lot more than the book, and most of what you liked about the book is... the perspective it grants you on the manga, plus Yoshimoto's own earlier (dare I say better?) work.
The whole project strikes me as bizarre, but when I think about it that's probably just my Manga Canon bias showing. I'm sure I would absolutely eat up (with a spoon!) a novel exploring the themes of Mazinger Z or Urusei Yatsura in a melancholy metafictional way. It makes me wonder if Yoshimoto feels that Hell's Salami is a classic that will indeed enter the canon eventually, or if its non-canonical, product-of-its-time status is kind of why she likes it: she can make it hers, and no nerds will be writing letters to the editor complaining about her misinterpretation of character x in scene y, etc.
Well, I'd say I liked Jūjū for what it teaches me about Yoshimoto's recent career, not what it teaches me about the manga. Maybe I'd say I also like it because it turned me on to the manga, which I ended up liking in its own right. Did I end up liking Jūjū in its own right? Sorta. It's not one of her best.
As for why Yoshimoto chose to do this with Salami-chan, either of the readings you mention are plausible to me. I'd go you one more cynical and say that she's just trying to exploit some o' that old youth culture, now that she's no longer young.
The thing that astonishes me most about Banana's later work - and by that I mean anything post-Amrita, which was actually pretty early on - is how steadfastly she has refused to let her protagonists age along with her. Must be difficult, for one thing, to continually try to inhabit the mindset of a 20-something when you're pushing 50. But then again that only seems odd because I'm thinking about her through the frame of Literary Novelist: I never think there's anything odd about a sixty-something manga artist continuing to write for and about kids.
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