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Banana Yoshimoto (author), Michael Emmerich (translator), Asleep, Grove Atlantic, 2001. 171 pgs.
If you’ve read Banana Yoshimoto’s celebrated novella Kitchen, there won’t be much surprise in Asleep for you. The book consists of three thematically connected short stories (“Night and Night’s Travellers”, “Love Songs”, and “Asleep”). They each share a similar plotline in which a young woman recounts her story of loss, grief, and regeneration through female communion. The reader-friendly language and the first-person perspective of the stories create an effect of intimate conversation putting the reader in the position of an eager listener whom the narrator confides in. Yoshimoto employs a non-linear form of storytelling corresponding to the nature of unresolved memories that her protagonists grapple with. Such a form also amplifies the speech-like/digressive intimacy of the narration.
Yoshimoto’s writing resembles Yasujirō Ozu’s style in cinema in terms of its simplicity and recurrent motifs. Her stories can be viewed as variations of the same plot: someone dies, another grieves and there’s light at the end of the tunnel. These “retellings” are, in certain regards, comparable to the ancient practice of oral storytelling. But I think the more proficient artificial intelligence becomes in emulating formulaic texts, the less promising the future of such stories seems in their man-made versions. Self-repetition also burdens the writer with the pressure of keeping up with the same quality since similitude facilitates closer scrutiny on the reader’s end. Notwithstanding the criticism, this style might attract readers due to it generating a sense of familiarity with the author. Come to think of it, most of our lives we are exposed to the same old words in infinitely non-identical configurations. One might as well stop obsessing over originality and find beauty in the mundane. Yet, for the seekers of novelty, both the style and narrative of Asleep can feel quite predictable.
The language of the trilogy tends to be hackneyed. At times, the narrators’ attempts at introspection comes across as trivial. The repetitive expression of sadness and other emotions breaks the good old “show, don’t tell” rule for no apparent reason while overused similes add little to the stories. Similes might embellish prose with a poetic quality when solidifying a profound moment. Otherwise, they tend to overload the text with excessive decoration. It might be that the naive immediacy of Yoshimoto’s stories is informed. At the end of the day, you would expect an adolescent to think and speak in such a sincere manner, right? But like you know, I felt so tired and sad like the sky about to burst out raining after reading so many self-evident expressions of tiredness, melancholy, and alike.
I remember attending a popular kabuki play Yotsuya Kaidan in Kyoto a few years ago. The story made me rethink the trope of feminine danger and how it can be written outside the realm of male fantasy. In traditional ghost stories like Yotsuya Kaidan, female ghosts represent active agency challenging the status quo. Daring to assume the role of a moral judge, they haunt those complicit in their death. There is a certain ghost motif in Yoshimoto’s stories as well but her characters are innocuous and apolitical. They tend to live in a bubble of the “receptive” feminine acting cute and looking “perfectly white” [sic] as it’s expected from them. Unlike grudging yurei, Yoshimoto’s female ghosts don’t confront, they console. That’s the apparition of late capitalism for you!
On the other hand, female companionship is a recurring theme in Asleep. To an extent that we rarely get to know the names of male characters, let alone their inner struggles. It’s especially the case with “Love Songs”, which explores a thin line between female rivalry and desire. Fumi the narrator, who has lately been suffering from alcoholism, experiences transformation as her conflicting memories of a woman called Haru resolve themselves after communicating with the latter’s ghost. Fumi and Haru used to compete ferociously for a man they both loved. The name of “the man” is never mentioned—he’s anonymous and ephemeral. What stayed with Fumi from the love affair was her strange bond with Haru and their common loneliness while living with “the man”.
In “Night and Night’s Travellers”, Shibumi, who lost her brother Yoshihiro in a road accident, shares her memories of him after stumbling upon a letter she sent to his ex-girlfriend Sarah. One could argue that despite having a name, Yoshihiro isn’t integral to the story. The spotlight falls on the common struggle of Shibumi and Mari (his last girlfriend and cousin) in dealing with the absurdity of his death. The past associated with Yoshihiro serves as a channel for their cathartic coexistence.
The same gynophile sentiment is more explicit in “Asleep”:
“There were times when I was with Shiori when it would occur to me that I really liked women a whole lot more than I liked men. I don’t mean this in a lesbian sense, but it’s something I felt very strongly. That’s how good a person she was, and how much fun it was living with her.”
That’s how Terako reminisces about the times she spent with her friend Shiori who was working as a “sleep prostitute”. After Shiori’s suicide, Terako develops an unusual habit of falling asleep involuntarily. The narrative gains a progressively hazy state in which reality and dreams blur until Terako’s spiritual and moral dilemmas concerning other women, namely Shiori and her boyfriend’s wife, are resolved. Terako refers to her boyfriend, whom she met at her office job by his surname (Mr Iwanaga) and associates him with winter. Their love affair is in stark contrast with the heartfelt depiction of the relationship between Terako and Shiori.
One of the hallmarks of Banana Yoshimoto’s prose also present in Asleep is her juxtaposition of the narrator’s voice with snapshots of natural/urban landscape. Thus the impermanence of the “outside” world accompanies the vicissitudes of individual lives. Her stories are character-driven and rather slowly paced. In each of them, the protagonist affected by traumatic events falls behind the ordinary rhythm of life as she retreats into her shell. Still, there is a sense that both the inner world of the narrator and her surroundings are in the process of becoming. Fleeting sentiments engendered by the transience of an object or mono no aware (the pathos of things) emphasise this sense of perpetual movement, however stuck the characters may feel.
It’s the view from Shiori’s window that serves as a cue for the passage of time when she wakes up from her long sleeping sessions, whereas her recovery is attached to the image of fireworks that she watches with her boyfriend. The common gaze at the fireworks synchronises her with the collective time she used to lag behind. That is a perfect example of mono no aware, where the inner and the outer merge into one through a sentiment corresponding to the scenery.
In “Night and Night’s Travellers”, the spiritual isolation of Shibumi and Mari from the outside world is set against the backdrop of snowy winter encircling them with its metaphoric blanket. However, they’re both aware that it too shall pass. Theirs is a grief that knows itself and looks beyond, accepting the impermanence of all things:
“Listen, Mari. This has been a strange year for the two of us. It’s like we’ve been living in a space different from the rest of our lives, like we’ve been moving at a different speed. We’ve been sealed off—it’s been very quiet. I’m sure that if we look back on all this later it’ll have its own unique colouring, it’ll be a single separate block.”
Similarly, the image of garden trees washed by the street light functions as an object of fleeting beauty in “Love Songs”. It’s something that Fumi notices every time she gets drunk followed by a singing voice that lulls her into sleep. After contacting Haru’s ghost, Fumi realises that she won’t ever be able to elicit the same sort of experience from the illuminated trees. From now on, they were doomed to become “the tale of that soft melody” at some corners of remembrance and eventually fall into oblivion.
Genre-wise, Asleep can be located somewhere at the intersection of literary fiction and self-help literature. The focus of the trilogy on the inner troubles of the protagonists, its non-linear narration and open-ended denouement render it more akin to literary fiction. On the other hand, Yoshimoto’s treatment of death and existential crisis with its New Age flavour shares more in common with inspirational fiction. I embarked on reading the book with the expectation of a unique insight into the said topics. After failing to find what I was looking for, I was reminded that not all stories are meant to stimulate intellectually—they can also evoke different moods and inspire change. That’s what Asleep does. If you’re into slow-paced, unflashy stories that are also a light read, this book is a good choice for you. To those new to the author, I’d suggest starting with Kitchen, which offers the same combination in arguably higher quality. As for me, my conversation with Banana Yoshimoto probably ends here.
How to cite: Huseynova, Elnura. “The Art of Retelling, Benign Ghosts and Mono no Aware in Banana Yoshimoto’s Asleep.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 14 Aug. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/08/14/asleep.
Elnura Huseynova is a poet and historian from Baku, Azerbaijan. She graduated from the History in the Public Sphere program which involved Tokyo University of Foreign Studies as one of its host universities. Elnura is the author of a poetry collection Vujudnameh (Embodiment) in Azerbaijani. Her first English poems appeared in experimental poetry journals such as Dadakuku, Ranger Magazine, and Berkeley Poetry Review.
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