Yoshimoto Banana: Kanashii yokan (1988)

Kanashii yokan 哀しい予感:  A full-length novel written expressly for book publication, her first.  And the last of her five Banana-boom volumes of fiction that I’ve read.  It was published in book form in December, 1988.  I read the Kadokawa paperback, published in 1991;  it says it contains revisions to the original hardback text of an unspecified nature and extent.  Supposedly they’re pretty extensive.

It starts out sort of gothic, describing a dilapidated, overgrown, big old house and the strange spinster aunt who lives there.  The narrator is Yayoi, a college aged girl, and the aunt is Yukino, about ten or so years older than Yayoi.  The aunt is a school music teacher, outwardly prim but a real slob when she gets home;  nobody in the family really seems to get her but Yayoi, who has a habit of running away from home every now and then to stay with Yukino, which is what she’s done as the story begins.

Oh, yeah, and Yayoi has no memories of her childhood, but she had a ghostly encounter a few months before the story starts that triggered the beginning of the return of her memories, and among them is the realization that as a child she used to have some kind of clairvoyance.

All the makings of a good horror story, in fact, and there’s some creepiness crawling over the first few pages.  But soon enough the story takes a turn for the romantic, and the rest of the book is what readers by now would have begun to recognize as Standard Issue Banana. 

The aunt disappears, and Yayoi chases her first to Karuizawa and then to Aomori.  In the process she makes a lot of discoveries about her life and her family, chief among which is that Yukino’s not her aunt, but her sister.  Yukino and Yayoi were orphaned when Yayoi was a small girl, in a car crash from which the girls barely escaped, and they were taken in by friends of the family, the people who Yayoi now calls Mother and Father.  Yukino was old enough to insist on living alone in a house the new family’s grandfather gave her (no money problems in this world), and so they called her an aunt.  Now Yayoi discovers the truth, which explains why she’s always felt so close to Yukino.

She discovers the truth just in time, too, because she’s realizing she has a crush on her “brother,” Tetsuo, who’s a couple of years younger than her.  Turns out he’s known for a while that they’re not related, and by the end of the book he’s reciprocating Yayoi’s feelings, although they decide to keep it cool for a while so as not to freak out their parents.

Like I say, the gothic atmosphere pretty much disappears by about a quarter of the way into the book.  For example, there’s no resentment between Yayoi and her adoptive parents as one might expect in a darker version of this scenario;  instead, they’re all happy, like a family in a Spielberg movie, she says.  In fact, there’s really not much conflict at all in the story;  instead there’s just a gentle and safe period in which the narrator learns about her traumatized background in a non-traumatic way, and falls in love into the bargain.  Even the aunt’s disappearance turns out merely to be the result of a need for a little time alone to confront her own memories – no foul play, no monsters under the bed.

Standard Issue Banana.  Reasonably well done, though.  Certainly lays out some themes that the author would explore more purposefully in future books – memory loss, near-miss-incest, the subversion of horror-story motifs.

Yoshimoto Banana: Utakata/Sanctuary (1988)

Another Banana.  Thought I was done with her, but maybe not quite.  Utakata / Sanctuary うたかた／サンクテュアリ (Effervescence / Sanctuary) comprises two novellas published in that order in Kaien in May and August, 1988, and brought together in book form in August 1988.  It was one of the big noises in the Bananamania years, but hasn't been translated into English yet.  Should be, if for no other reason than to complete our picture of that period.

Effervescence:

Toriumi Ningyo (Birdsea Mermaid, but the name is explained – hippie parents) is college-aged, living alone with her mother.  Her parents aren’t married, and her father lives in the next town over (Tokyo ‘burbs) with Arashi, a boy a little older than Ningyo.  Ningyo has hardly ever met Arashi:  her mother has kept her away from him.  And her mother has told her that it’s likely that Arashi is her half-brother:  he was deposited on Ningyo’s dad’s doorstep by a woman he knew, and given his womanizing ways, Ningyo’s mother always suspected it was his.

Now Ningyo’s mom says, one day, that her dad has up and decided to move to Nepal  - and she (the mom) has decided to go with him.  To try again to make it work, evidently.  So Ningyo’s left home alone.  Almost immediately she meets Arashi, totally by chance, in Shinjuku one day.  He recognizes her from a family photo.  They begin hanging out, spending time together, and of course falling in love.  She thinks of him as a brother, but also as more.  Eventually they call Dad in Nepal, each separately, and he tells them both the same thing:  you’re not related.

But he also says that Ningyo’s mom isn’t doing so well in Nepal.  Arashi decides to go there himself, and he promises to send the mom back.  He does, but when she talks to him on the phone he’s so happy that she’s afraid.  The pain of love. 

Her mom comes back, completely depressed, and sleeps for days.  One day Arashi calls Ningyo at the coffee shop where she’s been writing a letter to him and says he had a hunch that her mother might do something dangerous, but she won’t pick up the phone.  Ningyo rushes home in time to keep her mom from slitting her wrists.

Her mom tells her that her own parents had an arranged marriage – they stayed together, but never warmed up to each other.  So she decided to give her all for love – for Ningyo’s father.  And even though they can’t be happy together – he doesn’t seem like he’s ever going to come back from Nepal – she has to accept him the way she is. And so does Ningyo.  Ningyo kind of thinks that’s nuts, but kind of understands.

Later she runs into her dad – he’s come back, and he’s going to get together with her mom.  His words of wisdom are that family’s family wherever you go, but wherever you go you’re always alone.  He also says that Arashi’s coming home.  The story ends on a note of hopefulness as Ningyo is flooded with happiness at the news.

Like everything I’ve read so far from the Bananamania years, this is a great little story.  Most of all it feels fresh, even if you’ve read many other later things of hers – maybe especially then.  You can still feel just how new it must have been to have a story like this being told in language like this.  Colloquial, direct girls’ language, but much more subtly and supply handled than most critics recognized, and a story that has a lot of elements of a girls’ romance story, but somehow ends up being just a little deeper.  Not so deep as to betray the genre entirely, but deep enough to keep up the gradual seduction of the skeptical.  At least, that’s how it seems to me.

What depths?  Well, more than in her other boom-period works, this story sets up a stark gender conflict.  The women who wait at home, tending the hearth, the men who go off wandering, lusting.  And when a woman (Ningyo’s mom) takes off wandering, hoping that will bring the man back to the hearth, it almost ends in disaster – she almost dies.  But in the end it seems to have ended in success – she lured him back after all.  Maybe her trip to Nepal was an act of primordial heroism, a Promethean journey to tame the man.

Men.  In my Banana class, most of the students seemed shocked – some pleasantly so, some not so much – at how drastically attenuated the role of men is in her work.  For the most part she just doesn't seem to have much use for them;  certainly she doesn’t have much to say about them.  (And what’s wrong with that, for a change?  How many male authors have nothing useful to say about women, but say it anyway?)

Here she does.  And if you know Banana’s ouevre you shouldn’t be surprised that when she does depict men it’s in a context of fairly essentialized gender roles.  Here the men are not only the goers-out-into-the-world (you expect them to come back from Nepal dragging woolly mammoths or something), but they’re also (especially the Dad) slobs, rough-spoken, abrasively sarcastic in their treatment of women.  Arashi maybe not so much – he’s more the Well-Mannered Young Man type of Banana male, right up until the point where he runs off to Nepal leaving Ningyo to keep the homefire burning.

But there’s also some entertaining specificity, though.  Ningyo’s parents are grown-up ex-hippies.  She doesn’t say this in so many words, but it’s clear from her name, and from the Nepal fixation.  This works perfectly in the book – it’s an excuse for some of the personal-relationship craziness – and it strikes me that in 1988 this may have been a new type in J-lit.  Banana’s a bubble-era writer, but I don’t think she was ever quite as comfortable with all that excess as contemporary crix assumed.

Sanctuary:

College student Tomoaki is at a beach resort, recovering from some unspecified grief.  Walking on the beach at night he meets a woman crying.  Every night – on the third night he stops and talks with her.  She’s Kaori.  They have tea.  She thanks him for interrupting her crying – it saves her.  They turn out to be from the same part of Tokyo.

He goes home.  Talks w/Mom about summer festival.  This sends him into a flashback of a previous summer festival, where he ran into an old high school friend, Tomoko.  It turns out that his grief is over her – they were seatmates in school, he always had a crush on her, but it was only after they met again at the festival that they became lovers.  And by then she was married.  It was her sudden suicide – he never suspected, although he knew she was desperate – that’s been haunting him.

Meanwhile he runs into Kaori in Tokyo.  They spend time together.  It turns out she was mourning the death of her husband in an accident – she’s about ten years older than Tomoaki.  They had been married for two years, dating for eight before that – a long relationship, the only one she knew.  And later in the book it turns out that she’s been mourning her baby boy, too, who died of illness while she was in the hospital with a mental breakdown over her husband’s death.  Grief surrounds her.  And it’s what binds Kaori and Tomoaki together.

Two later scenes wrap the story up.  One is with Tomoaki, Kaori, and her mother – her mother talks about how Kaori always was a weeper, and how she always let her, never told her to suck it up.  Her crying was special, cathartic, and contrasts, in Tomoaki’s mind, to how he had to repress his grief to keep his relationship with Tomoko hidden.

The other scene is a chance meeting (the story’s full of them) with Tomoko’s husband.  It’s not quite clear through this scene if he knows his wife was having an affair with Tomoaki, but he knows they were close.  And the tension sends Tomoaki into deeper reveries about Tomoko’s final despair, and her resentment of her husband.

It sounds like a depressing story, and it does have even more than the usual Banana modicum of death and mourning.  But, true to form, it’s about recovering from grief, not grief itself, so it tends toward light, if not lightness.  Given the title, one might expect it to be more or less a retelling of “Kitchen,” with somebody’s apartment creating a safe, sheltered space for healing.  But there’s no such space;  rather, I think the implication is that Kaori’s ability to cry, openly and abjectly, creates a kind of emotional sanctuary for Tomoaki, and his acquaintance with grief creates one for her.  It’s about mental space, not physical.  Still, it’s hard to see how this stakes out any new territory – something the rest of her work this year did.

What’s most interesting about it is that it’s told from the point of view of Tomoaki, the boy – her first story to center on a male protagonist.  More importantly, it’s told in the third person – a unique event in Bananaland, near as I can tell.  Although, truth be told, it’s easy to forget that as you read.  We’re completely inside Tomoaki’s head, and the quality of Banana’s prose is no different here than elsewhere.  All she does is change “I” to “he,” essentially.

As a book.  It’s two novellas, but it’s pretty clear that they were conceived of as a set, so how do they relate to each other?  They’re both love stories, after a fashion – and after Kitchen that might have been an expectation, but in fact they’re both more straightforward as love stories than most of what came after.  And they’re still not very straightforward;  the lovers in Utakata are apart for most of the story, and only tentatively together for the rest, while the pair in Sanctuary are hardly lovers at all – there’s a glimmer, but no consummation.

Yoshimoto Banana: Jūjū (2011)

As threatened.

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.

The story is about a girl in her early 20s who works in her father's steak-and-hamburger-steak shop in an older district of Tokyo.  The shop is called Jūjū ("sizzle," like a steak), after the steakhouse in the Saramichan manga, which had been the narrator's mother's favorite manga.  The narrator's mother was an ex-model who gave it up to marry the narrator's father, who ran the steakhouse.  The narrator's mother is now dead.  The story follows the narrator as she (a) works through her grief, (b) helps her father run the steakhouse, in the process reflecting on her own place in the business and the world, and (c) interacts with various other characters in her life, mostly misfits of one kind or another dealing with their own issues of love and loss.

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.

Yoshimoto Banana: There Is No Lid on the Sea (2003-2004)

This was serialized in the Yomiuri Shinbun in weekly installments from November 2003 to May 2004 as Umi no futa 海のふた, and the translation was serialized simultaneously in their English-language version, The Daily Yomiuri.  That’s a neat idea;  I don’t know if it’s ever been done before.  I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of the newspaper novel, which I always read about in the context of Sōseki and other early writers, but we don’t have such a thing in my country, and so all I could do was imagine what it would be like to read one.  If you decide to hunt down microfilms of the Daily Yomiuri for 2003 and 2004, you can have that experience.  And since, surprisingly, Emmerich’s translation has never come out in book form, and (even more surprisingly) doesn’t seem to be floating around the web, that’s what you’ll have to do if you want to read this in English. 

It’s worth doing, if you can.  Not only is this in the top tier of her translated works, but it’s kind of fun to see the story unfolding in these regular, dated installments (with breaks that don’t always correspond to where she breaks the story in the Japanese book edition), surrounded by ads (some of which have an interesting accidental resonance with the story), and with all the illustrations intact.  Each installment came with a woodcut by NakaBokunen 名嘉睦稔 (unfortunately, microfilm reduces these to murky black and white – to see them in color you have to track down the Japanese original) – beautiful things, even if Bokunen seems to have swallowed Munakata Shikō’s style whole.

It’s about a girl named Mari who, fresh out of college in Tokyo, moves back to her small hometown in Izu and opens a snow-cone shop.  The town is dying, just like the coral in the sea, and Mari wants to do her tiny part to revitalize it.  Of course Banana is drawing a parallel here between economic decay and environmental, and it hits home, if you’ve ever been to one of these disintegrating beach towns.  On that level, too, the story works as an updating of Tsugumi, revisiting the beach-resort milieu twenty years on.

The other character is Hajime, a girl Mari’s age who comes to stay with Mari’s family for the summer (their mothers are friends).  Hajime’s grandmother, to whom she was very close, just died, and Hajime is here to both deal with her grief and escape the family debates about how to carve up her grandmother’s considerable estate.  Hajime also has terrible burns over half her face.  Here, too, there’s a parallel with Tsugumi:  here the disfigurement is physical rather than emotional. 

There’s very little plot, even for Banana.  Somewhat self-consciously, the novel takes the form of the quintessential Japanese summer coming-of-age story.  Lots of swimming, eating snow cones, walking on the beach, staring at sunsets, and thinking nostalgic thoughts.  No romance, though:  very late in the story a couple of boys are introduced, but they can’t hope to compete with the tight relationship Mari has with Hajime.  In fact in one passage the two of them agree that Mari is the man and Hajime is the woman in their relationship – emotionally, although not physically, they’re presented as a couple, and there’s a lot more dwelling on essentialized gender roles than usual here.

Partly that’s because Banana is intent here on creating an elemental world, in evoking Izu as a sort of Age of the Gods primeval paradise, on the edge of extinction, and in painting Hajime and Mari as unconscious shamanesses channeling this paradise.  It’s not as explicitly magical as Taguchi Randy’s work by any means, or even as Banana’s own Hardboiled and Hard Luck, but there’s definitely an overtone of worship here (enhanced by Bokunen’s luminous prints – Munakata’s folk-religion style is quite appropriate here).  In the end Hajime even goes into business making seashell fetishes – she’s starting her own religion, even if she doesn’t realize it.

The problem for me with this story is the nostalgia.  As in her other work from this period, Banana has settled on employing narrators/p.o.v. characters who are the age she was when she first started writing and found an audience of people her age.  Her experiment in letting her characters age with her and her initial audience seems to have ended, and she now (okay, this is ten years old:  but still) seems to be writing for girls, as a girl.  But Mari’s nostalgia is patently that of a 40-year-old, not a 22-year-old.  She describes events of her childhood with far too much distance – and far too many details describing actual changes in the world – for these things to have happened a mere seven or eight years ago.  On the other hand they make perfect sense as the observations of an author remembering things from twenty-five or thirty years ago. 

Of course nostalgia has always been a central theme of Banana’s, but as better analysts than me have pointed out, when she was young it was nostalgia for things she hadn’t experienced, or things that she was experiencing in the moment;  either way it wasn’t true nostalgia, if you will, but rather the anticipation of nostalgia.  Feeling the present moment so intensely that you can imagine a moment twenty years from now when you’ll look back on this moment with nostalgia:  a kind of vision of the future as radiated from the present moment.

Now she’s old enough to experience real nostalgia – that is, to look back on her life and realize that things really have changed, that modern society is working its ravages on the world in ways that she can bear witness to, rather than just imagine.  And those feelings inform this book in a powerful way – it contains some of her most evocative writing.  But the book is weakened by insisting that we imagine these views as proceeding from these characters.  Banana’s got hold of some good stuff here, but she can’t let go her schtick long enough to figure out exactly what to do with it.

The Argentine Hag (film version), 2007

Am I being obsessive, or just thorough?  Either way:  boring, right?

So there's a film version of this, released in 2007 and also called Aruzenchin babā (The Argentine Hag).  It was directed by Nagao Naoki 長尾直樹, and it's the only film of his I've seen.

The best thing about this film is the decision to cast Yakusho Kōji 役所広司 as the dad. It works on a meta level, since the character already seems to echo Yakusho's character in Shall We Dance.  And more importantly, casting Yakusho almost saves the movie.  He's so damn handsome, so damn charismatic, and such a good actor:  his part here is drastically underwritten, and the characters he's interacting with are so tongue-tied, but the body language and speech mannerisms he gives his character make any scene he's in at least watchable.  With almost no help from the script or director he creates a character who's somehow both a working-class Japanese dad and a hippie, both impetuous and stolid. 

Otherwise the film is too disappointing, and on too many fronts, to even bother exploring.  Among its crimes are:  failing to capture any of the spirit of Nara Yoshitomo in the visuals;  reducing the typically thoughtful, smart Banana narrator to a standard-issue J-film pouty-cute teenager (but without the difficult resonances of Nara Yoshitomo's pouty-cutesiness);  and rejecting, at the end, the novel's message of acceptance of the town cat-lady and all she represents about living.  (In the film, the Hag tells the dad that he has to go back to his daughter.  Rather than letting the daughter come to them.)

Yoshimoto Banana: Argentine Hag (2002)

There’s one other novel by Banana that’s been published in English, although this is so scarce as to almost not count.  Her 2002 novel Aruzenchin babā アルゼンチンババア was translated by Sawa Fumiya 澤文也 as Argentine Hag.  I don’t know anything about Sawa except that he studied at SOAS;  that probably explains the Britishisms that pepper this translation;  that’s fine.

This was the third of Yoshimoto’s highly-visible collaborations with Nara Yoshitomo.  I suspect it’s the most elaborate (Hard-boiled was just a normal hardback with some illustrations) but I haven’t seen the original/deluxe edition of the second yet, Hinagiku no jinsei ひな菊の人生.  I understand it’s pretty serious.

This one, if you get the deluxe hardback, is a pretty serious production.  Nara contributes illustrations and/or photographs for nearly every single page, and the whole thing is presented in a very sturdy case.  Impressive.  And part of this package is that the story is presented bilingually with a facing-page English translation by Sawa.

With all these fireworks, one might reasonably expect the story itself to be the least of the attractions, but in fact the Banana rises to the occasion.  The story starts out as Typical Yoshimoto Plot #1-C, “girl narrator loses mother, bonds with father, forms atypical family unit.”  That is, the narrator’s mother dies, and her father takes up with the local cat lady, an old lady in town who used to teach tango (this is only a few years after Shall We Dance, remember) and who, partly as a result of this, is nicknamed the Argentine Hag, living in the Argentine Building.  (Like Happy Together, this really doesn’t have all that much to do with Argentina itself.)  Narrator is freaked out at first, but comes to discover that said Hag is actually a really interesting, engaging, and spiritually uplifting person.  Epiphany.

But it’s handled extremely well this time.  Yoshimoto combines these familiar elements with some of her late-‘90s interest in spirituality, and unlike in Amrita the results here are quite fascinating.  The father, an ex-stonemason who had specialized in tombstones, moves in with the Hag and becomes fascinated by mandalas, eventually constructing a huge one on the roof of the Argentine Building.  With the Hag represented as the center of the universe.  This motif resonates beautifully with Nara’s art, which doesn’t use any mandala motifs per se, but which includes not only his usual pouty girls but also semi-abstract photos of plants, starry skies, luminously mundane suburbscapes, etc., enough to make you feel like you’re getting, in bits and pieces, a mandala of sorts…

So the story is worthy of the presentation, and the presentation enhances the story.  The design of the book is very careful in this regard to make sure that images match up with the text;  colored type and colored paper are also employed to give you the feeling that each page is its own world, its own new experience.

Which raises the question, however, of:  why the English?  I don’t believe this was designed for export.  It was probably available in a few museum shops or boutiques in Portland or Williamsburg, but even then I suspect the thing was meant to be experienced as an objet, rather than as a story.  I say this because the care that was put into making sure the text and the images match up was only given to the Japanese text, not the facing English translation, which typically lags two or three pages behind the Japanese.  If all you’re reading is the English, the careful balance is utterly destroyed, and you may find yourself wondering how indeed the images are meant to relate to the text.

More importantly for my purposes, the translation is mediocre at best.  It’s fairly accurate, in that it’s clear that the translator understood the original Japanese – since the translator is a native speaker, that’s to be expected.  What he lacks is much sense of colloquial English – even though a few Britishisms are thrown in to suggests naturalness, the prose still feels stiff and textbookish.  And, furthermore, doesn’t pay much attention to paragraph breaks in the original.  It reads, in other words, like a translation that was prepared as part of a package aimed Japanese readers, not English readers.  It’s a translation to be looked at, not read.

Yoshimoto Banana: Amrita (1994)

Published in 1994 as Amurita アムリタ, translated 1997 by Russell F. Wasden as Amrita. But that ain’t the half of it. The genesis of the novel was a short story called “Melancholia メランコリア,” published in Kaien in 1990. This is reprinted as the first part of Amrita, and in the original Japanese edition it’s just put there, under the title “Melancholia,” and it’s the first thing in the book, and then you turn the page and Amrita proper starts. In other words, it’s not presented as part of the novel per se, but as a clearly related piece that, of course, no reader is going to skip. In the English translation the title “Melancholia” is eliminated and the story is incorporated into the novel proper as the “Prologue.” Which isn’t quite right. When you start reading Chapter 1 (and that’s another thing: in Japanese the chapters are all given titles, but these are dropped from the translation for some reason) you find her introducing characters and situations that you already know about from the “Prologue,” and you wonder if the author has lost her mind (or the narrator, and of course that's not inappropriate in the latter case). No, she hasn’t: it’s merely that she’s decided not to tinker with the short story that contained the germ of the novel. If you understand the publishing history and the relationship between short story and novel, you’re not confused, but because this information is missing from the translation, you are. (What is it with publishers of translations in English anyway that they’re allergic to this kind of metatextual info being included? Are they so paranoid that they think potential readers are going to be scared off if they see fine print saying “This novel was originally serialized in the magazine Kaien in 1992 and 1993”? Any reader who would be scared off by that isn’t going to be reading the fine print anyway. Dudes.) 

Anyway. The “Prologue” was written as a standalone short story, and then a couple of years later (in 1992 and 1993!) she decided to serialize a long, long novel based on – continuing – that short story. If you know your ‘90s J-lit you may be thinking of Murakami Haruki and his Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the first volume of which was serialized in 1992 and 1993 (the second and third volumes were written for book publication, and of course all three volumes are in one set of covers in translation), but which incorporated and continued from a short story written several years before called “The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday’s Women” (translated in The Elephant Vanishes). So, hey, was Banana following Haruki’s lead? But dig: she started serializing Amrita in January 1992, while Murakami didn’t start Wind-Up Bird until October... 

Amrita is a very long book, the longest she’s ever written, as far as I can tell. The English translation comes to 460 pages. Its heft marks it as her attempt at a magnum opus. In English J-lit still seems to have a reputation for brevity, for haiku-like conciseness (how often have you read that in a jacket blurb?), but in fact Japan has historically produced some of the most massive works of literature in the world, and even today, for every slim, handsome volume of lapidary prose that makes it into English there’s a doorstop of labyrinthine storytelling that no translator wants to touch. More to the point, even for serious writers, length is important. Most literary writers start out with novellas – Akutagawa-Prize standard length, is how I like to think of it – but it seems that most novelists with any ambition for literary immortality produce something massive sooner or later. Take Haruki: his first two works, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 1973, were short, but then he unleashed A Wild Sheep Chase. Take Ryū: his first two works, Almost Transparent Blue and Umi no mukō de sensō ga hajimaru 海の向こうで戦争が始まる(untranslated, but it deserves it: War Breaks Out Overseas), were short, but ten he dropped Coin Locker Babies. 

In other words Yoshimoto Banana, in 1992, probably felt like if she was going to make a career out of this novel-writing thing, if she was going to be taken seriously as a writer and not just a social phenomenon, then it was time she produced something substantial. Thus: Amrita. Her bid for immortality, for serious Serious Writer status. 

It’s a mess. God, it’s a mess. The first time I read it, right after it was translated, it convinced me to give up on Banana for a good ten years, I was so disappointed. This time around my reaction wasn’t nearly so extreme – in fact I enjoyed it a lot more than I had expected to – but I still have to say it’s a mess. What’s changed in the interim is me, clearly: I now have a fascination, which I didn’t have before, with big glorious messes of novels. An ambitious failure is often more interesting to me than a perfectly-realized book of modest proportions. 

The story is told by a 28 year old woman named Sakumi who, let’s get this all down: has a celebrity younger sister who kills herself; lives with her twice-married, once-widowed, once-divorced mother, her grade-school-aged half-brother, her mother’s best friend Junko, and a college-aged cousin named Mikiko; falls down some stairs and has to have brain surgery; loses then gradually (then suddenly) regains her memory; discovers her half-brother sees dead people and can predict UFOs; gets into a relationship with her dead sister’s ex-boyfriend, a novelist named Ryūichirō; visits Saipan where she, along with her boyfriend and a strange Japanese couple she meets there (an albino man and his ex-prostitute wife), feel the presence of all the Japanese soldiers who died there in the war; meets and almost falls in love with a woman whose powers echo her brother’s; meets and is traumatized by, but ultimately becomes picnic-friends with, the ex-boyfriend of said clairvoyant woman, a hypnotist... 

As I said, it’s a mess. It’s pretty clear that she’s making the story up as she goes along, and for long stretches she doesn’t seem to have any idea where she wants to take it. Then when she does get an idea and runs with it, it ends up having precious little to do with anything that came before. Like the Saipan episode: halfway through the novel it just appears, out of the blue, takes up a good hundred pages, builds to a nice climax, and then ends, leaving the author trying to figure out what to do next... 

The fact that there are so many characters and relationships is, I think, something else that marks this as her attempt at a magnum opus. It’s as if she’s trying to recapitulate elements of all her work so far. There’s a foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, but cute minor character who echoes Tsugumi; there’s the haunted writer figure, echoing N/P; there are passages reflecting on the place of kitchens in women’s lives that clearly reach back to Kitchen; there’s the dead sibling and the sibling’s lover motif, right out of Asleep; I could go on. It’s a trick that Endō Shūsaku, for example, employed in his grand-summation novel, Deep River: reintroducing all your favorite characters and their problems in one masterful narrative.

So the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink idea isn’t itself evidence of incompetence – it’s an honorable literary technique – but in this case Banana doesn’t seem to know what to do with all these people once she introduces them. The cousin Mikiko, for example: she’s always there, but in the end she doesn’t do much of anything. I imagine Banana had intended for her to have her own arc, but never got around to thinking it up... 

Part of what we’re seeing here is, I think, one of the potential pitfalls of serialized fiction. In a commentary contained in Honjitsu no, Yoshimoto Banana 本日の、吉本ばなな – banana yoshimoto at work, 2001 (a “mook,” i.e. magazine-book, i.e. magazine-format coffee-table book), she mentions how tough it was for her to think up each installment, and how much pressure she put on herself to end each installment with a bang. Amrita’s problems make a lot of sense if you imagine a harried writer, with lots of other projects demanding her time, realizing early on that she’s committed to telling a big story, but has no big story to tell. She has some idea of where she wants to end up, but she doesn’t have the whole thing plotted, much less written, ahead of time, and so she has to improvise month after month. 

Some writers can do this brilliantly, and keep the whole thing building naturally toward a climax that feels organically related to where the whole thing started. Others can make the serial format work for them, exploiting the imperative toward self-contained episodes to create a pleasant sense of disjointedness in the work – that’s how I think of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. He may be improvising, but since that’s the unique flava of a Murakami work anyway, it doesn’t matter. In some ways I like him best when he’s just spinning his wheels. 

Banana isn’t quite in that league, it appears, or at least she wasn’t back in 1992 and 1993, and she doesn’t seem to have attempted anything like this since. What she came up with feels episodic in a bad way: epiphanies are repeated, the narrator seems to discover the meaning of life and her place in the world a good half-dozen times, and never seems to realize she already knew it. The tension peaks in the middle, at the end of the Saipan sequence, but about fifty pages from the end she decides to introduce two more new characters and make them the catalyst for the plot’s resolution. Structurally, narratively, it’s a mess. 

But, strangely, that didn’t bother me this time. It’s all an interesting mess: there’s lots of business, more than in the usual Banana novel. You know, one damn thing after another. Sometimes it’s puzzling, but sometimes it clicks, and this time around I had fun watching Banana wrestling with this unwieldy plot she was spinning. She gives it the old college try, she really does, and that made the book a lot more interesting to me than some of her more polished works. Ambition I find attractive, and this book has it. 

It has thematic ambition, too, but in a way that I found to be a weakness of the book, not a strength. She may well have been, in the Saipan sequence, trying to come to terms with Japan’s WWII experience, but if so the result is just maddening: she has endless reserves of pity for the Japanese who died there, but no awareness whatsoever that there might have been other people on Saipan at one point who might not have wished the Japanese to be there... 

Luckily (!) she seems mostly uninterested in political and historical questions; mainly she’s after the Meaning of the Universe. At this point it’s going to be helpful to explain the title: amrita is Sanskrit. As one of the characters in the novel explains it (p. 445), it was “a divine nectar, something the gods indulged in by guzzling the stuff down. They say that when you let the liquid gush through you, you’ve actually achieved life...” This is the narrator’s boyfriend the novelist speaking, because he’s decided to call his new novel – which is based on the life of the narrator herself – Amrita. (No, it’s not suggested that this novel-within-the-novel is in fact the novel we hold in our hands. She’s not that cute.) 

In other words, this nectar of the gods, this elixir of life, this liquid euphoria and divine communion wine, is the subject of the book. And on this level I really do think Amrita works as Banana’s magnum opus, the fullest statement of her biggest theme. 

Part of what marks her as a shōjo writer – John Treat enunciated this in a famous article – is the intensity of the emotions she depicts. They’re intense, and yet that intensity seems to come from something other than hard-earned experience. They feel like the romantic imaginings of poetic youth – it’s an intensity that can only come from the imagination. And so at her worst Banana’s works can feel awfully glib about their emotional content – I think that’s what so turned me off of her in my late 20s, when I came to feel that my experience wasn’t bearing out the descriptions on life that her youthful imagination had led her to make, if that makes any sense. That is, I’ve always thought that Banana works best for readers in their teens or early twenties, readers who still share her combination of shallow experience and deep feeling. 

Some of her translated work bears the marks of a maturing sensibility: Lizard doesn’t gush. Hardboiled doesn’t gush. The Lake doesn’t gush. In these works she’s still trying to speak from a place of unfiltered, unprocessed emotion, of cherished innocence, but there’s a calmness and a hint of restraint there that separate the works from her early shōjo writing. 

Amrita does a different thing. Here she’s not yet ready to surrender the idea of girlish emotional intensity (and I’m sorry if I sound sexist putting it in these terms: I’m actually using terms that are already part of the discourse on Banana; I’d be open to seeing them interrogated, but I do find persuasive the argument that this is how she sees her work). Even though her narrator is 28. And why does she make her 28? She could have made her younger. But she makes her 28 – no longer a girl – and then she turns around and makes her lose her memory. Actually this happens between the prologue story and the novel proper – so for almost the entire novel, until she recovers her proper memories in a rush at the end, she has an excellent excuse for reacting to the world like a schoolgirl. She was born yesterday, so to speak. She’s seeing the world with fresh eyes, feeling it with a newness and intensity more common to 18 than 28 (lemmetellya). The age thing isn’t commented on explicitly in the story, but I think there’s some strategy at work here. 

But it goes farther. The epiphanies that are so much a part of Banana’s prose style and narrative technique are everywhere here (the serialization thing), and she claims much more on their behalf. From the very beginning there was a strain of mysticism in Banana’s writing, but in her earlier works it’s easy to write off as merely a kind of magical-realist decoration, a function of her romance-fantasy underpinnings. In Amrita, as the title suggests, it takes on metaphysical dimensions. It’s a novel about spiritual awakening, about religious experience. Not organized or codified religion, God no; rather, it’s about religious ecstasy, about euphoric apprehension of God, or God-in-nature, or the Universe. That’s the kind of epiphany Sakumi gets. 

I’m not sure if Banana realized that was where she was going with this (although if she chose the title ahead of time, she must have at least had an inkling). To what I think is her credit, she never breaks character, so to speak, never comes out and preaches a religious philosophy. But it’s there. The book is taking this irresponsibly exuberant emotion that has been a hallmark of her fiction all along and elevating it past an aesthetic into an ethic. 

Now you may, like me, decide that this religious ecstasy it itself a mark of youth – and indeed it’s not something that’s there in the two later works that have been translated (now I really want to explore her untranslated stuff). But at the very least this shows ambition – there’s that word again. She’s really trying something with this book. 

Which is why I recommend it. It’s flawed, boy is it flawed, and in places it can be downright annoying. But there’s something there.

EDITED on May 8, 2012 to add:
One thing that I didn't address in my initial review of this book was the quality of the translation.  I'm still a little shy about commenting on translations, especially negatively, since I do some myself, but this has to be said.  Wasden's translation is one of the worst I've read of a Japanese novel.  I'm checking it pretty closely against the original this time through, and it's clear that in many, many instances he just plain doesn't understand the original.  Not all, by any means, but certainly some of the disjointedness you get when you read Amrita in English comes from this simple fact:  the translator got it wrong.

Let's just take a passage at random - the last one I reread, at the end of Chapter 7.  Wasden gives us:
 

..."You know, there are quite a few people in the world who've said that once you've recognized your own limitations you've raised yourself to a higher level of being, since you're closer to the real you.  Let's see, Yūmi [sic] Matsutoya said it, Ayrton Senna said it, John C. Lilly said it..."

"I've heard about Yūmin, she's a singer.  But who are the rest of the people you're talking about?" my brother inquired.

"That's something you'll have to learn later," I said, knowing full well that a popular singer, a Brazilian grand prix winner, and an American neurologist had nothing to do with one another.  I figured they'd give more persuasion to my argument, so I tried to fool my brother by dropping their names.

Because I've always thought the best catch in the world is one that passes right underneath you.

The original of this is:

「自分の限界を知る、ということは新しいレベルの真実の領域を見つけるということだって、ユーミンもセナもジョン・C・リリーも言ってるよ。」

「その人たち誰？ユーミンは知ってるけど。」

「そういうこともこれから知っていくのよ。」

ジャンルがばらばらなので説得力に欠けると思い、そう言ってごまかした。

いいのだ。

何でもかんでも自分で潜って取ってくるのがいちばん生々しい獲物なのだから。

The first thing you'll notice is that Wasden explicitates.  He fills in information - sometimes background info, sometimes the connections between thoughts - that he thinks Banana should have given us.  In this case, he's afraid we, the readers, aren't going to be able to identify Yūmin, Senna, and John C. Lilly, so he gives that info to us.  This is a problem, but still, it's within the range of potentially acceptable stylistic choices - he's an extreme case, but arguably not completely beyond the pale when you compare him to other translators working.

The real problem here is what comes after the explicitation:  a misunderstanding.  The best way to show this is to retranslate it, so here's my version:

"To learn your own limits is to discover new territory, a new level of truth.  Yūmin, Senna, and John C. Lily all say so."

"Who are they?  Well, I know who Yūmin is, but..."

"You'll learn that, too."

I dodged the question, knowing such a motley bunch of sources wasn't very persuasive.

But that's okay.

Because in absolutely everything, the freshest catch is the one you dive for and grab yourself.

The narrator isn't dropping names in order to impress her brother.  She's just mentioning people who've all said the same thing.  And then when her brother pursues it, she realizes that these names wouldn't impress him - so she refuses to tell him, instead challenging him to figure it out for himself.  In the process, Banana the writer is telling her readers to do the same.  Something that, incidentally, the translator refuses to allow the English language reader to do.  

The last line is what sinks it.  In the published translation, it's hard to figure out what it has to do with anything.  But in the original it's clear that it's a reference to the act of tracking down these references yourself:  learning for yourself, rather than having someone tell you.  

This kind of misunderstanding is everywhere in the published translation. 

Yoshimoto Banana's The Lake (2005)

Published in 2005 as Mizuumi みずうみ, translated 2011 by Michael Emmerich.

Yoshimoto Banana is a penname.  Her real name is no big secret:  it’s Yoshimoto Mahoko.  But in fact her penname is no longer Yoshimoto Banana.  It’s Yoshimoto Banana.  That is, it’s no longer 吉本ばなな, but よしもとばなな.  Let’s break it down.  Banana is of course a loanword (and I’ve got a whole riff that I give my students on what’s behind it:  not just her professed love for the banana flower, and her obvious affinity with the fruit’s pop qualities – bright-yellow-cheerfulness, an innocent phallaciousness, but also, I suspect, a canny reference to Andy Warhol’s famous image for the Velvet Underground &Nico album, an image that basically defined pop art for her generation and mine), and as such it’s usually written in katakana, like so:  バナナ.  She wrote it in hiragana, giving it a softer, friendlier vibe;  her choice of this as a penname already put her in the same league as TV entertainers and manga author/artists, the kind of people who routinely took (and take) this kind of pseudonym.  What happened about ten years ago was that she changed the writing of her surname from kanji to hiragana.  The official explanation (you can find it on her website, under Q&A) is superstition:  that the total number of strokes was unlucky.  However, it can’t be a coincidence that this all-hiragana style is something used by, as far as I can tell, basically kids, mostly girls, and the manga writers who try to appeal to them.  In short, it can be seen as another attempt to remain relevant.

If you wanna be cynical about it.

This is the most recent book of hers translated into English, as of this writing.  Whatever else I may think of her writing I’m glad so much has been translated – English, strangely, lags behind German, French, and Italian when it comes to translating J-lit, so it’s kind of rare to have so much translated by one author.  A rare opportunity for the non-Japanese-reader to take the measure, or begin to, of a Japanese author’s career.

So, almost twenty years into her career, six years on from Hardboiled, eleven from Amrita, what’s changed?  At first blush, almost nothing.  Her concerns are still love and loss, her narrative strategy is still one of near-constant epiphany, her prose is still straightforward and conversational to the point, almost, of pain.  Her narrator is still enmeshed in a difficult family situation marked by death and instability, and a romantic relationship that is anything but normal.

She’s in her comfort zone here, in other words, and it’s a little disappointing to find that, I have to admit.  There are some differences, however. 

The narrator is a mural artist, living on her own.  We explore, mostly through flashbacks and reminiscences, her relationship with her dead mother and her father, who wasn’t married to her mother, but who acknowledges his daughter and tries to do right by her.  At the same time we follow the narrator as she falls in love with the guy whose apartment is just opposite hers in the neighboring building. Their windows look directly into each other and so they get to know each other that way – looking before they speak.  Kind of Rear Window-ish, but not done creepily.  As she gets to know the guy, she gradually realizes that his dysfunctional upbringing has given him a lot of baggage.  He was, we learn in the big revelation at the end (which is by way of a trela reliops), kidnapped as a child by a bizarro religious cult that brainwashed him and, it’s implied, sexually abused him.

Introducing the religious cult makes it sound like she’s ready, eleven years after Amrita, to engage with social issues again.  The jacket-flap copy on the English hardback certainly wants us to think so:  it invokes Aum.  But, just as with Amrita, if you go in expecting social commentary or historical analysis, you’ll be disappointed.  The cult is here mainly, I think, to give a plausible origin-story for the kind of savant that Banana seems to be fascinated by, periodically.  Not only do we have the narrator’s boyfriend, whose haunted past shows up in the present as a striking gentleness of character, but we have two of his childhood friends from the cult, fellow survivors, who we meet twice and who are presented as prophet- or god-type people, removed from the dust of mortality and the hurly-burly of the world. 

In short, her main interest here seems to be the idea of a childlike purity that not only survives the most hellish upbringing, but that paradoxically seems to survive precisely because that hellish upbringing arrested the children’s development.  So, okay.  We’re still within the precincts of the territory she marked early on – this purity has its echoes as far back as “Moonlight Shadow.” Still, this might be its fullest expression in her fiction.

And there is something new (-ish) about the way she’s presenting it.  The narrator is the narrator, a fairly typical Banana speaker, a shōjo grown up.  But for a change it’s not her epiphany, her enunciation of self, that’s the object of the story.  Rather, the climax of the story is her boyfriend’s story-within-a-story, and once it’s told, the book more or less ends. The focus is on his troubles, his development, his heart.  I think it’s less significant that the book is focusing on a boy than it is that it’s focusing on someone other than the narrator.  She’s talking about other people.  At least, so it seems.

Yoshimoto Banana's Hardboiled & Hard Luck (1999)

Published in 1999 as Hādoboirudo/Hādo rakku ハードボイルド／ハードラック (note that the two elements are linked with a backslash, not an ampersand), translated 2005 by Michael Emmerich.

Two short stories (“Hardboiled” and “Hard Luck”), written especially for this volume. It was published by a publisher named ロッキング・オン, which comes out to Rocking On in English (but they mercifully [?] romanize it Rockin’on). Yes, it’s a music mag; in this case, the book-publishing arm of it. This is one of several publishers Banana seems to maintain relationships with, and given her penchant for name-checking her favorite bands (in the after-material to Lizard she mentions Sonic Youth and Kurt Cobain), it’s not an inappropriate one.

I could go farther. Banana’s initial burst of popularity was partly a factor of the way she confounded the categories of pop and pure lit – writing at times like a gushy romance novelist, but often refusing to write stories that resolved themselves like that. Part of what confounded the categories was the venues she wrote for – Marie Claire marked her as pop, but Kaien marked her as pure. By that token, Rockin’on seems to represent a decisive step in the pop direction – pop in two senses here. Which is interesting because these two stories are, I’d say, on the pure-lit side of Banana’s output.

Another thing: the English translation sports a cover illustration by Nara Yoshitomo 奈良美智. This isn’t just a rare bit of appropriate trendiness on the part of the American publisher: it reflects the fact that this book was a collaboration with Nara: it featured four color illustrations plus one for the dust jacket. (The cover of the American edition is one of the interior illustrations from the Japanese edition.) This was the first, I believe, of Banana’s collaborations with Nara, and not the last. I haven’t yet teased out all the nuances of this pairing – in some ways I think Nara’s pouty, sociopathic girls are perfect for Banana’s work, and in some ways I think they couldn’t be more wrong.

“Hardboiled” is the first and longer story, and I like it quite a bit. The narrator is walking along a road in the mountains; she encounters a foreboding roadside shrine; she spends the night at a haunted hotel; she thinks about the woman she just broke up with.

Two things to me seem worth remarking on in this story. First is the fact that it takes the motif of romantic/sexual love between women, a theme that Banana had been flirting with (pun intended) for some time, and makes it explicit. As far back as Asleep female homoeroticism had a place in Banana’s world, but it was never really the theme like it is here. (It may be in something yet untranslated: I haven’t started to delve into her deeper oeuvre yet.) I’m not sure what to think yet of the place of lesbian love in her fiction; in some ways it’s the utterly normalcy with which she depicts it that is most striking.

Second is the tone. The supernatural motifs – ghosts, eerie shrines, etc. – are by no means new in her work. But all these motifs seem to be deployed with much more care here than previously, and they work together with setting and the measure way with which the narrator’s reminiscences are doled out to create a genuinely haunting tone. The deserted mountain-road setting reminds me of the barking dog sequence in Kurosawa’s Dreams, and this is just about as vividly done. There is, I guess I’d say, a control on display here that puts this up with her best work.

“Hard Luck” isn’t quite as memorable. The narrator is falling for the brother of the fiancee of her brain-dead sister. The general pattern – love feeling its way around the obstacle of a dead sister – echoes the relationship between Sakumi and Ryūichirō in Amrita. This is a neater rendition of that pattern – more satisfying, but less ambitious. More perfect, but less interesting.

By this point Banana was 35. No longer a shōjo, and old enough that it had to be sinking in. This would have been a big challenge for someone so identified with an aesthetic of youthfulness. Maybe allying with a rock magazine and a pop-art phenom were forms of overcompensation, ways to reassert her relevance to a new generation of youth at the end of the century. But in other ways she seems to be trying to grow up. The narrator of “Hardboiled” especially strikes me as an adult, and the sober tone of the story strikes me as aimed at adults.