She has been quoted as saying that her work is about ‘ the exhaustion of young Japanese in contemporary Japan‘, a form of urban existentialism if you like. Fifteen years after Kitchen, she was still focused on writing about the younger generation and their experience of living in modern Japan. In 2003, Yoshimoto was in her late thirties. Their suffering is often lyrical – messy but in an aesthetically pleasing way, and their story typically ends on a poignant note….The dreamy, sometimes surreal stories explore emotionally heavy-hitting themes like life, love, death, happiness, identity, loneliness and grief, delivered with the author’s characteristic light touch. The protagonist experiences trauma or loss and tries to come to terms with it and move on. Five stories that engage you despite their simplicity.įlorentyna Leow in a 17 July 2022 article for Tokyo Express, titled ‘ Banana Yoshimoto’s ‘Dead-End Memories’ is the literary equivalent of a lo-fi playlist‘, summed up the collection perfectly with this: Which brings us to Dead-End Memories – five stories by Banana Yoshimoto originally published in 2003 but only just translated into English in 2022. I think what I was trying to articulate back then is how it is possible for a story to be written simply, in an undemanding way which can still get under your skin. I enjoyed the two stories with some reservation about how deceptively simple they appeared. Five years ago I read Banana Yoshimoto’s (1988) debut story Kitchen (which also contained the short story Moonlight Shadow).
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