Yoshimoto, Banana

▪ 2002

      “Banana mania” was not an enthusiasm triggered by potassium deprivation but rather the way journalists around the world referred in 2001 to the wild popularity of Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto. Her stories were light, their action slight, and their characters unusual. They were not entirely evanescent; they briefly budded, flowered, and faded, leaving behind a lingering scent of great beauty and loss.

      Born in Tokyo on July 24, 1964, Mahoko Yoshimoto appeared to have a genetic predilection for both writing and nonconformity; her father, Takaaki (“Ryumei”) Yoshimoto, was an intellectual, critic, and leader in the radical student movement in the late 1960s. Reared in a much freer environment than that of most Japanese children, Yoshimoto entered the College of Art at Nihon University, Tokyo. There her graduation story, Moonlight Shadow (1986), was an immediate hit and earned her the Izumi Kyoka Prize from the faculty. About this time, by her own account, she chose the pen name Banana Yoshimoto because it was both cute and androgynous. While working as a waitress, she wrote the novella Kitchin (Kitchen), published in 1988. Two more books—Kanashii yokan (“Sad Foreboding”) and Utakata/Sankuchuari (“Bubble/Sanctuary”)—were published in Japan that year. Yoshimoto never looked back.

      The Chinese were the first to catch Banana mania, translating and publishing Kitchin in 1989. A translation of Tsugumi (1989) appeared the following year in South Korea. Her first English-language book, which contained both Moonlight Shadow and Kitchen, was published as Kitchen in 1993, and her reputation spread to readers throughout the United States and England. Soon her work had also been translated into German, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, and Albanian. Two Japanese directors, Jun Ishikawa (Tsugumi, 1990) and Yoshimitsu Morita (Kitchin, 1990), adapted her novels to the large screen, and in 1997 Hong Kong director Ho Yim made a Cantonese-language version of Kitchin. While her name spread, Yoshimoto continued to write, producing the novels NP (1990; N.P.) and Amurita (1994; Amrita) and several volumes of essays (Painatsupurin [1989; “Pinenuts Pudding”], Songs from Banana Note [1991], Yume ni tsuite [1994; “About a Dream”], and Painappuru heddo [1995; “Pineapple Head”]) and short stories (Shirakawa yofune [1989; Asleep] and Tokage [1993; Lizard]). In 2000–01 a one-volume author's selection came out, and four volumes of collected works were published. Yoshimoto was just 36.

      Her Japanese fans continued to respond to elements in her writing that were both old and new. Though her characters, settings, and titles were modern and influenced by American culture, they were unmistakably Japanese at the core. Some cited the Japanese sensibility known as mono no aware, usually translated as “the pathos of things,” as the essence of her style. The phenomenal appeal of her work was not always evident to English-language critics, some of whom called her writing superficial and simplistic and her characters unbelievable. Her appeal appeared to lie deep in her identity and her personal response to life, in a biography that was as quirky as her writing.

Kathleen Kuiper

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