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.

Yoshimoto Banana's Asleep (1989)

Translated by Michael Emmerich in 2000 as Asleep.

Three stories linked by the motif of sleep. The stories were first published in late 1988 and early 1989 in Kaien, where she had published the Kitchen stories, then the book came out in mid-’89. So, it was part of her first rush of popularity, those miracle years of 1988-1992 or so. The fact that in English it came out after Lizard is just one of those vagaries of the lit-in-translation game.

Incidentally, the only Japanese edition I have at hand (and there have been, evidently, a few) has the stories in a different order. Emmerich’s translation gives us “Night and Night’s Travelers” (in J. Yoru to yoru no tabibito 夜と夜の旅人) first, followed by “Love Songs” (Aru taiken ある体験, “An experience”), and then “Asleep” (Shirakawa yofune 白河夜船 – see below for explanation). In the paperback I have (Kadokawa), the order is “Asleep,” “Night and Night’s Travelers,” and “Love Songs.” I don’t know if this was Emmerich’s decision, his editor’s, or what; maybe the hardback had a different order. Worth checking out… In any case, I think I like Emmerich’s order well enough.

The title of the book in Japanese is Shirakawa yofune – same as the third story in the English; the translation makes it “Asleep” both times. That’s what you might call a barely sufficient choice. It’s an idiom that does mean, basically, “fast asleep,” with an emphasis on “dead to the world” – oblivious. But it’s where this idiom comes from that makes it so interesting.

A literal translation would be something like “white river night boat.” Which doesn’t make any sense. The key is that the “white river” in question is actually a district of Kyoto – Shirakawa. It does have a waterway involved, and that waterway is called White River, Shirakawa, but from at least as far back as the beginning of the Edo period the river seems to have been so much less prominent in the public imagination than the district was that the following joke was possible.

A guy is boasting about a recent trip to Kyoto. Only, he didn’t actually go. Somebody asks him what he thought of Shirakawa, and the ignorant bragger-dude, afraid he’ll be caught out, makes up a clever lie on the spot. “I was on the night boat, so I slept right through it.” Rimshot. See, the joke is that Shirakawa isn’t a river that you float down on a boat, night or day, but a part of town that you walk to, or take a sedan-chair. If you know that, you know the guy is lying and has never been to Kyoto. The joke is about braggarts, wannabe sophisticates, the prideful brought low. If the modern idiom is usually used to mean, as the dictionaries say, just “fast asleep,” then there’s at the very least a nuance, there to be gleaned if you want to, of obliviousness not just to the waking world but to the world one imagines, wrongly, to be beyond one’s eyelids – obliviousness to one’s own obliviousness, really.

(Incidentally, I imagine there’s a locus classicus for this joke but I don’t know what it is. Dictionaries that I’ve consulted show the idiom in circulation by the early-mid 17^th century, but don’t give a source for the joke behind the idiom. Right about now I’m expecting – hoping, even – that No-sword-san will chime in with the info.)

Anyway, it’s no wonder Grove and/or Emmerich decided not to open that can of antiquarian worms to whoop English readers’ asses. And so “Asleep” is okay. But given the psychological and spiritual dimensions of the slumbers in this book, I think the original title is very apt – all its nuances are applicable – and so I hate to see it vanish like a dream in the morning (if you will).

So, the stories: more than N/P, this book is the true successor to Kitchen, I think. Three more stories of love and loss, with hints of magical realism and moments of everyday epiphany.

“Night and Night’s Travelers” is about a woman whose older brother died after having ended a relationship with an American girl, a one-time foreign exchange student, who he’d followed back to Boston; the real emotional journey is that of Mari, the narrator’s cousin, who had been in love with the narrator’s brother (after the American girl). Bereft, she’s now taken to sleepwalking in the snow.

“Love Songs” is about a woman who’s drinking herself to sleep every night. She’s in a good relationship now, but she just got out of a bad relationship with a guy who was stringing along two women, the narrator and her rival Haru. The narrator and Haru were at each other’s throats at the time, but strangely never really blamed the guy; now the narrator’s sleep is haunted, and through a medium she realizes it’s Haru. They meet and make peace – they admit that there was actually a homoerotic tension between them that they had never acknowledged.

The title story is about a woman who is the mistress of a married man whose wife is in a coma. He’s kind of stuck because he doesn’t want to leave his wife – he wants to be the kind of noble guy who will stick with her – but at the same time he’s in love with the narrator. His solution is to keep the narrator removed from the world – she quits her job and lives on money he gives her, all alone in her own apartment. It’s a peachy arrangement, she thinks at first, but gradually she starts sleeping more and more until finally she can hardly wake up. Only the intervention of the wife’s ghost saves her from totally slipping away.

Dig: the issues are those of complicated relationships, and how young women respond to them. Sleep takes on different meanings at different points in each story – an escape, a mystical conduit to the world of the dead, but also a reaction to depression, a symbol of emotional numbness. In the third story it’s working as an evocation of the narrator’s total envelopment in the will of her lover – she’s allowed her identity, her being, to become a mere extension of his, and it’s destroying her.

Thus, there’s something here. The writing is standard Banana – not terribly distinguished, but very accessible – and as stories they’re almost on the same level as those in Kitchen. Well evoked. Well epiphanized. Not bad at all.

Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys at the Oregon Zoo, July 24

We saw Los Lobos in concert on Sunday (July 24), at the Oregon Zoo amphitheater in Portland. Los Lonely Boys opened. I didn't know any Los Lonely Boys beyond their hits, but even from them I could tell it was a natural pairing. Not only is there the Latino rock thing (they kinda look like Los Lobos Jr.), but more importantly there's a lot of musical compatibility there, too. And in that respect we weren't disappointed: it was a great bill. If anything, we were disappointed in the headliners.

It was our first show at the Zoo, and it proved to be a surprisingly good place to see a show. The amphitheater is right by the elephant house, right next to the lion compound and a tropical bird dome. All that sounds like it should feel pretty hokey, but they've arranged it so that you can't actually see or hear any of the animals from the lawn, so it's pretty easy to forget you're in a zoo. (They flew some zoo birds over the audience before the show, though, which was cool: a red-tailed hawk, an ibis, a bald eagle. Made me wonder if the boys were going to play "Down On The Riverbed" in response)(they didn't.) Basically you feel like you're just on a fir-lined hilltop on the edge of Portland, with the sun setting beautifully just to the right of the stage, on a hot summer day in July. Can't go wrong, really.

Los Lonely Boys opened, and while they did play "Heaven," otherwise they seemed to be pushing their new album pretty hard. Which meant it was mostly songs we'd never heard, but that didn't matter. Within minutes we were fans. "Heaven," it turns out, while a great song, isn't all that representative of their stuff; mostly they were playing classic Texas blues trio stuff, ZZ Top by way of Stevie Ray, with any Latin flavor coming in mostly through the way their vocals sound like a younger Los Lobos, and the way they'd occasionally quote a Santana lick. That's a pretty sweet spot to hit - and the rest of the audience, most of them at least as old as me (meaning they had at least a good ten years on any of the Garza boys) seemed to think so too.

Really tight stuff, and in some ways it gave me a new appreciation for the power trio idea. I've been listening to Cream, Jimi, Rush, the Who all my life, so the concept is, shall we say, familiar to me, but all of those acts did extensive overdubbing in the studio - and live recordings aren't the same as being there. Watching Henry, Jojo, and Ringo go at it, I felt like a light went on: this is why trios work. In this kind of setting, at this volume, two guitars can sound like overkill anyway, and if your one guitarist has the goods, that's all you need.

Henry has the goods. He can blueswank with the best of them, and he looks the part, with his rock-star long hair. All three of them were just a lot of fun to watch on stage: energy, great licks, great look. Best song: a new one, actually, "16 Monkeys," funky stoner lyrics that could have been written in 1969, and ending in a long jam that passed through "Third Stone From The Sun" and ended with a quote from "Gypsy Queen."

Los Lobos. David Hidalgo sat in on drums for one song in the Lonely Boys' set, then on guitar for another couple - Cesar Rosas came out too and they all jammed on "Rip It Up." Classic rockabilly bruiser. Boded well for the main set.

But, hey, it was not to be. It was apparent from the first song that there were problems: David's mike didn't seem to be working, and his guitar was buried in the mix. They fixed the guitar problem after about three songs, but the voice thing turned out not to be a mix thing, but the simple fact that his voice was shot. That beautiful, soulful instrument was just gone - he couldn't sing for shit. It was painful to hear. After the first song Cesar (who seemed to be having some vocal problems too) joked that they'd been partying too much. Maybe that was the problem.

But I kind of doubt it. Bassist Conrad Lozano wasn't there, and when David introduced his replacement (David's son Vincent), he explained that Conrad had had a health scare the night before. He didn't say what, but said it had scared the hell out of them, and that he'd flown home, and Vincent had come up to fill in. We guessed that the health scare was somehow connected to the voice thing - like maybe they'd been up all night worried. Anyway, that's what we'd prefer to think. ...No word on the band's website about Conrad, but they don't seem to have canceled any dates, so I guess he's okay.

But between the bassist being gone and the vocalists being subpar at best, there wasn't much they could really do. They soldiered through a few songs, but about halfway through they seem to have decided to just, as the saying goes, shut up and play their guitars. A tortuous rendition of "Dream In Blue" turned beautiful as David took (finally) a gorgeous extended solo, and Steve Berlin followed it with a flute solo that took the jam someplace else entirely.

Then the Lonely Boys came out for what was no doubt a scheduled guest spot, and provided the highlight of the night. Henry, David, and Cesar trading licks on a long, blues-drenched "Little Wing." Hendrix's music - this is true - sounds better, less interred in the '60s, and just plain more alive with each passing year, and they did a good thing in bringing this out that night, under the stars.

But, Deadhead that I am, my favorite moment was during the inevitable "La Bamba" encore, which they extended by jamming their way into "Good Lovin'" in the middle and then back into "La Bamba." Which was - had to be - a wink in the direction of the fact that, in autumn '87, when Los Lobos were burning up the charts with "La Bamba," the Dead interpolated it into the middle of their classic take on "Good Lovin'" in several East Coast shows. The Dead and the Wolves had a well-known mutual admiration society going by that time, and of course the two songs are a natural fit. I don't know when Los Lobos started returning the favor, but anyway: I appreciated the wit of it. As well as the music, which was authoritative.

But I do want to see Los Lobos sometime when they're on their game.

Yoshimoto Banana: Lizard (1993)

Published in Japanese as Tokage とかげ in 1993, translated in 1995 by Ann Sherif as Lizard.

Six short stories, published in a variety of venues between 1991 and 1993, published in book form in 1993. What’s interesting is that Lizard in English consists of the collection Tokage in Japanese, translated straight. It’s extremely rare for a short story collection by a Japanese writer, no matter how carefully sequenced and selected, to be published in English as-is. This didn’t happen for Murakami Haruki, for example, until after the quake. His earlier English collection The Elephant Vanishes was drawn from several different collections in Japanese, as was the more recent Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. That Banana’s Tokage made it into English as-is, preserving the contours of the original, is probably a measure of her huge popularity abroad in the early ‘90s.

That, or maybe it was just the translator’s call. I can't be sure. Either way, it’s nice to see.

The first story, “Newlywed” (新婚さん in the original), has the most interesting provenance. It was serialized in early 1991 on ads hanging from the ceilings of train cars in Tokyo. If you’ve been on trains and subways in Tokyo you know that every surface that can take an ad has an ad; the ones hanging from the ceilings, over the aisles, are called "center-hanging ads" or nakazuri kôkoku 中吊り広告, and back in 1990 and 1991 JR East ran a PR campaign in which they had a number of noted writers serialize stories on these ads, calling them "center-hanging stories" or nakazuri shôsetsu 中吊り小説. Banana was one of them; “Newlywed” was her entry.

Here’s a random coincidence: a few weeks ago I was in my local used book maze, Smith Family, and happened to be looking through their exceedingly random selection of Japanese-language books (basically whatever exchange students bring over from Japan and don’t want to take back), and lo, there was a copy of the Shinchô paperback collection of stories from this campaign, Nakazuri shôsetsu 中吊り小説. What’s cute about this is that it retains the format of the stories as they were displayed on the ads (I can remember seeing some of these on trains – that’s how old I am), complete with illustrations. What’s cool about that is that it ends up preserving the installment divisions within each story – each installment had to fit on one sheet of paper, so it was really short.

Banana’s, for example, ends up being 16 pages as reprinted in Tokage (18 in the translation), but that was stretched out over 10 numbered installments (weekly, I think) in the train ads. Those divisions are eliminated in the story as reprinted Tokage, and as translated in Lizard, and maybe they’re not important – but maybe they are. In any case, it’s interesting to think about, in terms of structure: that’s 9 mini-cliffhangers in one short story. Did Banana think about this while writing it? Did that influence the way she told the story?

What’s “Newlywed” about? It’s about a strange encounter on a train: a newlywed man on his way home from work misses his stop, intentionally, and then encounters a strange, shape-shifting spirit that rides the train observing the people. First it appears as a homeless old guy, then as an alluring woman; in the latter guise it converses with him and helps him work through his anxiety issues over his marriage. Okay, not the most interesting story – but appropriate, surely, for the venue. Cute.

The first three stories in the volume are told from a male perspective. That’s interesting. I’m not sure what else to say about it at this point, though, because I don’t see her making much of an effort to simulate a male voice – no boku or ore here. Maybe that’s interesting in itself, I don’t know. But it is unexpected to get halfway through the book before you encounter the kind of young, female narrator that Banana is known for.

And even when you get female narrators they’re not quite the college girls that she started out with. They’re married, or on the verge of marriage; not mothers, not quite housewives, but women at a slightly more advanced stage of life than the girls in Kitchen and Tsugumi. I guess Banana’s characters are aging along with her (and, presumably, her initial audience).

I have some of the same reservations about this that I did about N/P: I’m not sure the emotional intensity her narrators claim is earned by the events the author depicts. Banana’s method, I think is to have each of her stories work up to some kind of epiphany, which the narrators not only experience but explain to us. But often, to me, it all feels a bit glib – the life-lessons learned seem a bit facile, the emotional intensity a bit too out-of-the-blue. In her best stories, these contrived epiphanies are attributed to characters whose youthfulness allows me, as a reader, to write off their unbelievability as a function of the character, not a deficiency in the writer; and they’re embedded in narratives that provide other pleasures. N/P didn’t give me any of that, and these stories don’t give me much. …That may be my problem, not Banana’s. But there it is.

The last story, “A Strange Tale from Down by the River” 大川端奇譚 sounds like it should be inspired by Nagai Kafû (and I half suspect it was), but in her afterword she claims it was inspired by British punk band The Tights. Lately I’ve started to assume, without much justification I guess, that Banana’s “all I read are manga and punk lyrics” deal is mostly a pose; I find that her career makes just as much and perhaps more sense if we think of her as a canny self-presenter perfectly aware of the po-mo concepts she’s trying to embody. But I could be wrong.

In any case, this is the most interesting story in the book. It’s told by a young woman who spent her early twenties as a sexual adventuress, doing anything and everything she could think of with anybody she could; a (non-sex-related) illness took her out of the game, and now she’s settling down with a guy. Partly the story is about the past coming back to haunt one – in some ways predictably (yes, there’s an envelope with some photos) and in some ways not so much (no, her guy doesn’t particularly care) – and in this respect the story benefits from some uncharacteristically careful positioning in the immediate post-Bubble adult world. That is, in a period in which everybody is trying to forget the excesses of a few years before, so is this character.

But the story is also about finding one’s place in the world, a place that is perhaps destined to be related to things deep inside oneself that one has no memory of – gawd, that sounds like a Yoshimoto Banana sentence. Here’s the deal: she falls in love with her fiancé as much for his apartment as for his personality: he has a great view of a river out his window. Much later she learns that her mother dropped her into a river when she was a newborn, and that her father rescued her. So on a subconscious level we’re meant to see that her attraction to the river as an adult was dictated by events in her childhood, and that in the present it represents a kind of thanatos. I’m not saying it’s handled all that elegantly, but it’s there. And it’s at least a little more developed than most of her themes.

Yoshimoto Banana: Tsugumi (1989)

In English the title of this book has been rendered Goodbye Tsugumi. The “Goodbye” has no basis in the original title; presumably it’s been added to tip the reader of the English off to the fact that “Tsugumi” is a person’s name. In Japanese the title is simply Tsugumi – actually TUGUMI, in Japanese school romanization, which in standard romanization would be Tsugumi.

It was serialized in the now-defunct Japanese edition of Marie Claire in 1988 and 1989 before being published as a hardcover in 1989. Mrs. Sgt. T suggests that this is important: we should it expect it to be a light, youth-oriented love story. And indeed it is, sort of. It’s a classic seishun story – it hits hard the themes of youth passing away, fleeting summer as a symbol of youth passing away, love and loss as rites of the passage-away of youth, and the picturesquely dilapidated beach towns in which these stories always seem to take place. It’s a great example of the genre.

And it might be the best novel of Yoshimoto’s I’ve read so far. That is, it displays a novelistic craft I hadn’t suspected she possessed: rounded, varied characters (not just the narrator); interesting story, tightly told; vivid evocation of place and season; and a pleasing tone, ranging from bittersweet comedy to tragedy narrowly averted.

The narrator’s name is Maria – she was, she says, named after the Virgin – and she’s the daughter of a woman whose lover is a married man in Tokyo. Maria and her mother live in an unnamed beach resort town, with her mother’s sister, whose family runs a ryokan. Maria’s mother helps out, and lives for the day when her lover (Maria’s father) will divorce his wife and marry her.

You think that’ll never happen, but this isn’t that kind of cynical love story: in fact, it happens early on, and they move to Tokyo. That’s what sets up the action: right after moving to Tokyo they get news that the sister’s family is selling the ryokan and moving out of the beach town to run a B&B in the mountains, so Maria goes back to spend one last idyllic summer at the ryokan. She’s 19 and just finished her first year in college: cue nostalgia.

Maria has two cousins roughly her age, living in the ryokan: Yôko, a year older than her, and Tsugumi, a year younger. Tsugumi is a problem child: physically weak since infancy, plagued with a number of unnamed, vaguely described ailments – in this she seems, no doubt on purpose, like a character from a 19th century novel, and you’d be justified in suspecting that she’s Not Long For This World. (But you’d be wrong: it’s not that kind of book.)

Tsugumi’s weak, all but an invalid; she’s also (as is the way of these things) startlingly, ethereally beautiful; she’s also (and this is where the comedy comes in) a bratty, bitchy pain in the ass. Tsugumi compensates for her physical helplessness by verbally abusing everybody around her. But they all love her anyway – Maria and Yoko and the rest of the bunch know the score, and are never seriously hurt by Tsugumi’s excoriations. That’s the kind of book it is.

So, during this final summer Tsugumi falls in love with a young man named Kyôichi, the scion of the family that’s building the big modern hotel in town that’s displacing the ryokan business and driving Tsugumi’s family out of town. So there’s some classic rivalry potential here, but it’s really soft-pedaled in favor of the cute love story. Tsugumi doesn’t spare Kyôichi her shrewish tongue (not that the story is about the taming of her), but he quickly becomes devoted to her.

Part of the charm of the story is that because it’s narrated by a third character, we don’t get an inside view of Tsugumi and Kyôichi’s courtship: Maria is present for some of it, but not all of it. The actual nature and development of their love is a mystery, as love always is. This is nicely handled.

Along the way there’s some business with some neighborhood bullies and Kyôichi’s dog, and Tsugumi’s revenge (digging a pit to trap a bully in – and the discourse on the pit and Tsugumi’s feelings while digging it seems to resonate with some other famous pits in modern J-lit, such as Ôe’s in The Silent Cry and Murakami Haruki’s in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – discuss). This, too, is nicely handled: it’s a fictional device, well deployed to reveal character and move the plot along. Precisely the kind of craft that, I confess, I don’t always look for in serious literature, particularly in Japanese, and precisely where the Marie Claire audience-expectations influence may come in.

In other words, I’m prepared to theorize that writing for Marie Claire allowed Yoshimoto to give herself license to write something that employs genre formula (romantic comedy, seishun story) more thoroughly than is usual for her. And as far as I’m concerned it was good for her. This is a much more satisfying book than N/P. It’s less original, less experimental – but I’m not sure it’s less deep, because I’m not sure that N/P had any depths.

It’s a great read. And translator Michael Emmerich, who took over the Banana desk in 2000, deserves a shout-out: this reads better in English than any Banana I’ve yet looked at. It’s accurate, but more than that (Sherif is accurate too) it has a sense of style. I particularly like his creative solutions to the problem of how to make Tsugumi’s speech sound suitably rude, given that rudeness in Japanese consists of very different things than rudeness in English.