Online Lectures

Doctor Machizawa Shizuo, a psychiatrist in Tokyo, said in a recent interview that professionally he is troubled by the darkness of much of modern Japanese prose narrative. He reports that often suicidal individuals come into his office clutching copies of Dazai Osamu's novels, and say, "This is exactly how I feel. I'm sorry that I was born." In addition to the high incidence of suicide among Japanese novelists, the novels themselves, Machizawa asserts, glorify suffering, negativism, and death. Machizawa points out as an exception the writings of Yoshimoto Banana (B. 1964), such as Kitchen, NP, and Lizard. Even his depressed and troubled patients feel encouraged by Yoshimoto's novels, and find in them an optimism and brightness absent in their own lives. In most of her writings, Yoshimoto Banana exhibits an interest in troubled people, individuals whose lives have been nearly devastated by acts of random violence, insanity, troubled families, and so on. Yet, her works do not harbor the darkness of other modern Japanese novels, because much of her narrative concerns the process of grieving, healing, and a belief in the possibility of the connectedness of people. The sense innocence in Banana's works also relates to what John Treat has called the "playful celebration of female adolescence," and the construction of that stage of life as full of wonder.

Still in her early thirties, Yoshimoto Banana has won numerous literary prizes, and her novels, essays, and short stories have sold many millions of copies in Japan. In addition, some of her fiction has been translated into English, Italian, and other languages, and have sold exceedingly well outside of Japan. Her father Yoshimoto Takaaki is a renowned poet, Marxist literary critic, and an influential intellectual.

Some people snub Banana's novels as top forty mass-culture consumer objects, and clamor instead to the likes of Murakami Haruki, another best selling contemporary novelist, as a palatable, aethetically and ideologically acceptable last resort in an era when Japanese literature has become yet another fatality of the critics' and scholars' pens. I would concur with the opinion that Murakami is a more mature, experienced, and accomplished crafter of narratives than Yoshimoto, but we should also take into account the fact that Haruki is fifteen years her senior. At the same time, Haruki's works have a very pop, light, name-brand dropping aspect to them (he loves the Beatles!) that Banana's fiction is perceived as having, but in fact does not. While Haruki is interested in the possibilities of politics, and the uses of allegory in narrative, Banana remains in the Japanese literary mainstream as a novel writer who depicts private worlds and personal visions. Her popular reputation to the contrary, Ms. Yoshimoto writes about weighty topics such as death, suicide, transsexuality, grief, and mourning.

Today, I would like to explore several binarism that influence our reading and criticism of Yoshimoto's texts, and their place in contemporary Japan. One of the binarisms that I would like to consider is that of Nihonjinron vs. kokusaika, that is the discourse on Japanese uniqueness vs. that of internationalization. I am also interested in looking at the contrast between the erotic and the mundane, the marginaland the orthodox, in Yoshimoto's works. Specifically, I will look at Yoshimoto's 1989 novel. NP.

The novel NP concerns grief, loss and recovery. One summer, the narrator Kazami meets three people whole all have a connection to her old boyfriend Shoji, and to the novel that Shoji was translating (also called NP). Two of them, Saki and Otohiko, are the children of the author of the novel NP, Takase Sarao. Sui, whom they met only as adults, is their stepsister.

Through new friendships with these three, Kazami comes to understand some of the events and relationships that led her boyfriend Shoji to commit suicide while he was translating NP, as well as those surrounding Takase, the original author of NP. Takase, a Japanese, had written the novel in English when he was living in the US. He too had taken his own life. Kazami, as well as Takase's three children, manage to distance themselves from the powerful--indeed, lethal--text, and to carry own with their own lives.

The novel NP by Yoshimoto promotes an essentialist view of Japanese national identity. By essentialist, I mean that it expresses the view that there exists an inborn, natural uniqueness to Japan, its culture, people and language. (Contrast this to a constructivist outlook that emphasizes the role, culture, and language as means of constructing or forming a myth or belief in uniqueness). In short, Yoshimoto espouses the Nihonjinron school of belief that Japan is essentially different, and unique. Her novels may seem fresh and new to readers, but at the core is a profound conservatism. Japan is a nation that does not share borders with other countries, yet the world is growing closer. This results in constant attempts to define national identity.

In NP, contact with the world outside Japan is seen as corrupting. In other words, morality is suspended outside of Japan for the Japanese characters in the text. When people in the novel leave the comfort of the womb that is Japanese culture, they abandon their family roles, and the family dissolves.

Examples of this abound in NP:
1)Many of the characters who leave Japan go to hell. The novelist Takese, for example, leads a dissolute life--sleeping with a Japanese woman who could be his daughter (and who turns out to be). Once out of Japan, these people forget--or pretend not to know--their proper roles in the family, and indeed what constitutes a family. Sui later has an affair with her step brother Otohiko. Families that are not biologically based frequently appear in Yoshimoto's works, but here we have blood-related people who don't know or pretend not to know.

2)The narrator Kazami and her sister are exempt from this discourse of contamination because their contact with the "Other," the alien, is tempered by their mother's teaching of the "pleasures of English." The mother herself has reason to be distraught and desperate--her husband abandoned her--but she leads a straight and disciplined life, and sheuses the foreign tongue as a tool to make a living. Kazami's sister is safe, even though she lives in London with her British husband, because she too has been trained well by her mother in the "pleasures of English."

Only Kazami is able to make Sui and Otohiko understand that their incestuous behavior is taboo. Rather than giving up their relationship, they had previously attempted to assuage their guilt by going to Boston to live a "normal life."

3)Linguistically, everything goes awry when the novelist Takase, a Japanese, writes prose in a foreign language. He loses his minds and kills himself. Shoji and two other translators commit suicide as well, presumably as a result of their attempt to violate linguistic borders. What examples from the text can you find that illustrate this linguistic and cultural rupture caused by a Japanese person trying to write in a language other than Japanese, in a place other than Japan. This is reminiscent of the notion of kotodama, or language filled with limitless power.

There is irony in this writer, who readers perceive as modern, or even postmodern, and her espousal of myths of uniqueness of the Japanese language and the land itself, and the inescapability of these forces.

At the same time, another reason for the appeal of Yoshimoto's novels lies in their evocation of taboo subjects in a comforting manner--masked by innocence, the innocence of the adolescent female, and the comic pen name, Banana. She treats occurrences such as suicide with complete nonchalance. For example, when Mikage, the narrator of Yoshimoto's novel Kitchen, meets the transsexual mother of her friend Yuichi, she is struck by her beauty, and does not react with surprise at the fact that the mother was once a man. Yoshimoto thus naturalizes the marginal and the unorthodox. She places her narrators in the comfortable position of being friends with troubled people. The spatial dimensions of her texts are rather narrow, and the narratives are never sensational. In fact, sex and violence are rarely described in the narratives themselves.

Yoshimoto's texts make the mundane into objects of desire. In the novel Kitchen, for example, the narrator Mikage finds solace in her kitchen after she has become orphaned. Her heroines tend to have control over their lives, and few men appear prominently in the narratives. The author always includes pivotal male characters but they do not figure much in the action of the story. They are either dead, or, like Eriko in Kitchen, men who have become women.

Professor Miyagawa asked me to comment on my role as one of Yoshimoto Banana's translators. Although I love to translate literature, I find it very challenging. I chose to work on Yoshimoto's works at the beginning because I thought I had a good sense of the tone of the works and also the nature of the narrative voice(s). In translating between two languages as different as Japanese and English, it is often futile to attempt to be "faithful" to the original text, because it oftenresults in a wooden and unreadable translation. It is therefore especially important to preserve the sense of tone and voice in the translation.

When I was doing the translation, I never met Yoshimoto Banana, but I was able to correspond with her and ask her questions about the novels, which was very exciting.