Asleep – Banana Yoshimoto
( Translated from Japanese by Michael Emmerich)
Banana Yoshimoto is a Japanese author who has been on my
radar for a while now. Her novel Kitchen is
on my TBR and that’s how when I saw this book with her name on it, I decided to
give it a try.
First published in 1989, this slim volume of three novellas
feature young women who are afflicted by loss and exhausted both in mind and
spirit. Longing for something or someone they have lost, they have been “bewitched
into a spiritual sleep”, as the blurb proclaims.
The three stories are narrated by young Japanese women, who
are seemingly stuck in a temporary literal or psychic sleep as a result of
trauma. Each one is in mourning one for her beloved brother's death, another at
the end of a painful affair and the titular tale is about a woman deeply
involved with a man whose wife is in a coma.
In the first story, ‘Night and Night’s Travellers’ two cousins
Shibami and Mari are dealing with the loss of Yoshihiro (
brother to Shibami, lover to Mari) a year after his tragic death. The ghost-like
presences they become, especially Mari, is conveyed via the narrator’s
deceptively calm and dreamlike sequence of events. The mixing of reality,
memory and dream often interweave – forcing us to be dragged along in their
attempts to fill the void left behind by his death.
In the second tale, ‘Love Songs’, the
narrator Fumi dreams a strange dream which makes her remember an old rival in a
love triangle. When she mentions the dream to her boyfriend he tells her this
dream is quite common and it indicates someone who was dead was trying to
contact her. This leads her to investigate further about her old rival. It
turns out that she was indeed dead, and Fumi sets out to get in touch with her.
Sleep and dreams indicate an in-between state that could be used as a space for
the mingling of reality and the supernatural. The way these two intermingle
will leave us believing in the reality of the characters and also the
supernatural presence of spirits who wait to communicate in the pauses we
all take in our lives daily.
In the last tale, titled ‘Asleep’, Terako,
who is involved in a romantic affair with a married man whose wife is in a
coma, finds that she can’t seem to stay awake. She is also mourning the death
of her friend Shiori who had taken her own life. In each of the stories, the dead seem to exert
so much of a hold on the ones who are alive that a sadness overpowers their
existence. But, as they each learn to live with the darkness and the absence,
the instability of ‘now’ and the transitory aspect of life becomes all the more
striking.
At the core of each of the novellas is
a bond between two female characters, and in each tale this
relationship is realized to be the key to the understanding of their existence.
The themes of depression does strike one as a very obvious one, but it is conveyed
in a surrealistic atmosphere described by the calm and cool narrators that we
are left with an optimistic feeling for the future of the characters than an
overwhelmingly sad one.
I would definitely be picking up more of her writing. Highly recommended!
2 comments:
Oh gosh, these sound beautiful <3 especially the third one (Asleep). What a great pick! Well done! :)
@Sheree It was a most lucky find for me at my local bookstore. I am now wanting to read more by this author :) Thank you for your kind comment Sheree!
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