DEATH MEMORY: stories, by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Asa Yoneda
The five stories in Banana Yoshimoto’s collection “Dead-End Memories” – first published in Japan in 2003, it is her eleventh book to be translated into English – are strange, melancholy and beautiful. At the center of each is a woman negotiating the silent consequences of personal history.
In “House of Ghosts,” a young woman encounters, well, ghosts of an elderly couple in her new lover’s soon-to-be-demolished apartment. The ghosts go about their mundane lives, seemingly unaware that they are ghosts. They make the narrator ‘uncomfortable’, she says: ‘Ghosts probably lived in ghost time – time flowing in its own strange way, somewhere completely removed from ours. Wouldn’t it take away a bit of the vitality you need to live in this world? As the intimacy of the living couple deepens, the ghosts’ strange poignancy becomes entangled in their fear of the imminent destruction of the building, and with it their temporary relationship. After the narrator and her lover break up, their paths meander as they age in a way that makes the reader smile. “This life seemed simple at first glance,” writes Yoshimoto, “when in fact it existed in a stream much larger, as vast as the seven seas.”
In “Mommy!” – one of the most brilliant stories I’ve ever read – Mimi, a publishing house employee, is poisoned by a disgruntled colleague. Beneath the long, slow stream of her physical recovery is Mimi’s parallel spiritual transformation: “Those days—that dream—had uncovered something in me and changed it. Like a pet bird accidentally venturing out of its cage, the incident had thrown me out of the world I had known.”
The title story follows a gullible young woman who discovers that her fiancé has been cheating on her for months. On her quiet, often funny road to self-discovery, she finds a companion in Nishiyama, a desirable bartender who works for her uncle. While they share a close bond, their friendship grows into something like love. “I knew Nishiyama and I were both so lonely under our separate heavens it hurt physically,” she thinks toward the end of their time together. “And in my mind’s eye I saw again the view from the upstairs window, and the silent golden world where ginkgo leaves fell and fell to the ground forever.”
Two shorter entries move away from this warmth and tenderness and into an uncanny turmoil. “Not Warm at All” takes the form of a memory of a childhood friend who was murdered, and “Tomo-chan’s Happiness” follows a young woman who tries to love after being raped at age 16. While there may be superficial similarities between the stories—about boyfriends, family tensions, horrific incidents in the narrators’ pasts—each feels different, rich in its own distinct way.
Yoshimoto’s protagonists are lonely and short-sighted, though not in the way I’m used to from the spiky and elegantly stern fictions of writers like Rachel Cusk, Aysegul Savas or, lately, Jhumpa Lahiri, whose narrators tend to fail. or a lack of desire to integrate into society. Yoshimoto’s lonely women have more in common with the single characters of Bernard Malamud or Leonard Michaels or Haruki Murakami, for example. They also resemble, in their clumsy but striking vigor, the characters of Alice Munro’s best short stories about young femininity, alternately comic, sad and longing for connection.
The spiky fictions of Anglophone literature of the past decade – based on the idea of passivity as freedom of choice within a violent, dystopian, capitalist hellscape – are sharp and observant; but sometimes they leave the reader wondering, when can books be warm again? When can we have feelings again? Yoshimoto’s protagonists go out and act, they feel, they express, if only for themselves. Even at their loneliest, these characters are part of something, be it a relationship, a friendship, a family, a workplace, a society, a world.
These stories made me believe again that it was possible to write honestly, rigorously and morally about the material reality of characters; to write to human warmth as a reaffirmation of the bonds that bind us together. This is an extremely hopeful book, one that feels important because it shows that happiness, while not always easy, is nevertheless a subject worthy of art.
Brandon Taylor is the author, most recently, of ‘Filthy Animals’.
DEATH MEMORY: stories, by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Asa Yoneda | 221 pp. | Counterpoint | $26