I have decided that
Banana Yoshimoto is my new favourite living author. And no, not just because
she writes under the name ‘Banana’, although that is pretty cool. It is because
her books are absolutely and incredibly amazing. Fear not, Kazou Ishiguro and
Diane Setterfield; I still love you both, but Banana Yoshimoto is simply
soaring up into the heights of my absolute favourite authors ever, joining Jane
Austen, Anthony Powell and good old Charles Dickens.
I read and reviewed her two novellas, ‘Kitchen’ and ‘Moonlight Shadow’ back in
February, and read her short story collection Asleep last month. I’ve now just finished her novel Goodbye Tsugumi, and it so, so good. It
tells the story of Maria, a nineteen-year-old student, and her relationship
with her cousin, the vicious, self-centred and constantly ill Tsugumi. Maria
returns from university in Tokyo to the seaside inn where she grew up, to spend
one last summer with Tusugmi and her sister Yōko. Tsugumi’s frail and
constantly fluctuating state of health casts a shadow over the story, but it’s
more a novel about growing up and about friendship.
It’s also a love
story, though a strange one. The book is told from Maria’s perspective, but in
many ways it’s much more about Tsugumi than her. The relationships central to
the book are those between Maria and Tsugumi, and Tsugumi and her boyfriend Kyōichi.
Throughout the book there is this intensely powerful and maybe doomed love going
on – doomed by Tsugumi’s illness, doomed by the fact she’ll soon be moving away
– but we only glimpse it through Maria’s eyes. It’s quite touching in that way,
because we get the sense of something big and emotional happening that the
reader is one step removed from. It would have been very easy, I think, to write
this story as a love triangle, to have Maria jealous, but in fact the
friendship Yoshimoto depicts between Maria and Kyōichi is really lovely and touching.
They’re bound together by the fact that both of them know exactly just how
unpleasant and cruel Tsugumi can be – and love her regardless.
Yoshimoto has a very
deft way of capturing female friendships, especially those friendships that
swing between hate and love. I found the same in her short story collection Asleep, and in Goodbye Tsugumi it’s more powerful than ever. Tsugumi, as the
very first line in the book announces, is ‘an unpleasant young woman’, but we can’t
help feeling towards her as Maria does: we don’t approve of her behaviour, but
we do like her, and we at least half understand her. Yoshimoto shows us Maria’s
weary yet constant affection for Tsugumi, of Tsugumi’s teasing and cruel love
of her. The portrait of their friendship is spot on, and feels so real.
This probably comes
down to just how strong the characters are. Maria and Tsugumi are fascinating and
complete, and Kyōichi too is complicated but believable. Yōko is possibly my
favourite character. Living as she does in the shadow of her young sister’s
massive personality, Yōko could be boring – and yet in fact Yoshimoto creates a
character as fascinating as Tsugumi, if in a quieter way. Maria’s friendship
with Yōko, if a little less tempestuous than hers with Tsugumi, is truly moving
and really interesting. I also like the presentation of Maria’s parents. Her
family situation could almost be a book on its own, but instead it lies in the
background of the novel; it feels whole and real, but is never dwelt upon. Even
though they only appear from time to time, her father and mother, and their
relationship with one another, feel so real that you get a sense of Maria’s
life outside of the book itself.
What I really love
about Banana Yoshimoto is the sheer beauty of her writing and imagery. Obviously
when reading in translation, it’s hard to know how much the writing style is
down to Yoshimoto or to her translators, but I have read works of hers done by
different translators, which read with a similar style. I love that there are
motifs running through several of her books: one is the significance of and
sheer enjoyment in good food, and the other is the beauty and power of the night.
Both are strong powerful motifs, and it’s nice to trace them through Kitchen, Asleep and Goodbye Tsugumi.
Also, I love the
balance Yoshimoto gets between the story and Maria’s philosophical reflections.
In contemporary Western literature, there’s been a big move away from narrative
reflective; we tend to favour “showing” over “telling” to put it one way. But Yoshimoto
manages in Goodbye Tsugumi to comment
directly on broader feelings and issues, in a way that never feels moralising
or out of place. She creates a narrative voice and a world in which it’s fine
and beautiful for her narrator to say things like:
‘Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self
we’ve ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good
and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we
live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support
the weight of ourselves.’
She makes reflections
like this work in a way I think few could. It’s both fascinating and powerful.
Indeed, the whole of Goodbye Tsugumi is
one of those books where I kept wanting to cry as I read it, not only because
it’s an incredibly moving story, but simply because the writing is so utterly
beautiful and incredible.
This is an amazing
book. My copy is littered with post-it notes because there are hundreds or
quotes or passages that are so beautiful I want to keep track of them. It’s a
deep, moving and beautifully-written story, a portrait of one summer in the
lives of four teenagers on the cusp of adulthood. I heartily recommend this
book, and pretty anything written by Banana Yoshimoto. In fact, half way
through Goodbye Tsugumi (which I read
in two days), I took a short break from reading – in order to buy all the rest
of her novels second hand off Amazon.
Greatest
strength: The
writing and the characters, especially Tsugumi, Maria and Yōko.
Greatest
weakness: Perhaps
the ending. I haven’t mentioned this yet as I’m undecided on it. I didn’t feel
that the ending was quite as superb as the rest of the book – but saying that,
I’m not sure that a different ending would have felt any more right either, so
this remains a very tentative comment.
Let’s
finish on a quote (or two):
‘I never
get sick of being with him, and every time I look into his eyes I just want to
take the ice cream or whatever I’ve got in my hand and rub it into his face.
That’s how much I like him.’
‘It wasn’t narcissism. And it wasn’t
exactly an aesthetic. Deep down inside, Tsugumi had this perfectly polished
mirror, and she only believed in the things she saw reflected there. She never
even considered anything else.’
Next week: The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins
More Reviews:
I would like to recommend reading the book The Girl on the Train: A Novel.
ReplyDeleteI just finished reading it today, and I think its a very good book.
I brought mine from Amazon and I got it in just two days.
Here is the link for the book on Amazon:
The Girl on the Train: A Novel