Banana Yoshimoto's touch: Japan in the everyday
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Loading... - Chiaki Makino
- 21 Sep 2022
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In ‘Mama!’, the second story in Dead-End Memories, the latest collection of her short stories just out in English translation, Banana Yoshimoto’s narrator recalls the texture of what she thought was a routine visit to the staff cafeteria in her publishing office: “I remember thinking to myself how comforting it felt to do things step by step like this. The satisfaction of a meal coming together, one element at a time. That’s the joy of lunchtime, I was thinking, without a care in the world, practically ready to start humming a tune.”
The next thing Matsuoka, the narrator, knows, she is violently ill; as it turns out the vegetable curry she had ordered was poisoned by a disgruntled former colleague, though it had nothing to do with her. The rest of this remarkable story is a record of recovery, with Matsuoka negotiating her way through this freak celebrityhood, to find her way back to a measure of equilibrium where she can resume going through her day step by step. It involves gauging her sudden recognition of mortality, as well as coming to terms with her past traumas.
We are, in other words, and comfortingly so, firmly in Yoshimoto territory. In it, Matsuoka gains what Haruki Murakami summed up about another Yoshimoto short story “a clearer, more externalized view of herself in the context of her daily life in Japan” (from his introduction to The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, 2018).
Indeed, in a vivid example of her quest for deeper self-awareness, Matsuoka watches herself fall apart when she visits an author to pick up his manuscript and he bombards her with questions about the poisoning. She fumbles for answers, till she is “besieged by an indescribable annoyance,” frustrated to the point of wanting to “walk out of my own body.” Read More...
