Taking photographs of oneself might seem like a new idea but I took one with my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, with my first roll of black and white film circa 1969. It's only in recent years that such narcissism has become mainstream and apparently acceptable.
The point of the exercise this time was to send a picture to Japan. I've been a keen reader of Banana Yoshimoto since finding Kitchen in a feature on cult fiction in which it was the only title, among the likes of The Naked Lunch, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the like to be awarded every available icon that denoted horror, drugs, sex to each book as they qualified for those categories.
I was soon to be disappointed to discover that her real name was Mahoko rather than Banana but the short stories in Lizard were immensely satisfying until I started to wonder if subsequent books weren't just serving up this brand of intense, confessional fiction with deceptive facility.
Eventually I found myself at a conference in Oxford at dinner, sitting next to an academic whose specialism was Japanese literature so I disingenuously asked whether Banana Yoshimoto was really 'chick-lit'. I'm afraid I demur at any such neologism that has been invented since I learnt the language, which is why I didn't say 'selfie' earlier, but sometimes there's no alternative.
The lady's reply was, 'one minute you're talking to him about the football results and now you want to know if Banana Yoshimoto is 'chick-lit'.
Yes.
But I didn't get an answer, not even as much as that it was a stupid question, which was the impression I was left with.
So I still don't know.
MoshiMoshi is an American edition, published in 2016 by Counterpoint, Berkeley, and translated into that language by Asa Yoneda but first appeared in Japanese in 2010. Although I haven't seen new Banana books in English for some time, there appears to have been no shortage of Japanese titles so perhaps not everything is being translated which is more reason to wonder if she isn't more than a purveyor of a Mills & Boon-type genre fiction but in ultra-cool contemporary Japanese terms.
Food is always a sensual experience. Characters are at once private but capable of profound attachments and take themselves seriously in a touchingly unironic way,
the awareness of someone's presence in a space - that was what family meant.
The narrator's father, who somehow inevitably was a musician, in a band called Sprout (and Paddy McAloon is mentioned), has died in a suicide pact with a mysterious woman who has apparently unsuccessfully tried to lure previous men into the same demise. Her mother is incorrigibly fashionable despite her years and the neighbourhood of Shimokitazawa is suitably bohemian, like the low-key, conversational idiom of the language.
It is immensely readable and even more likeable than most of the Banana books I've read, with deep if precious thoughts like,
that day is etched into the time within my body, but also into the town itself. That memory will last forever, because the town was a witness.
But I can't see Virginia Woolf or James Joyce writing anything quite so New Age.
Having embarked on a tentative relationship with a regular in the cafe where she works, the inecitable consequence is quite laudibly that, firstly,
I'd never experienced anything like it
but immediately that,
Even so, somewhere inside, I knew we didn't have much of a future together.
I knew they wouldn't because I've read enough of her books before but that's what I like about them.
Getting married, having two kids and living happily ever after wouldn't be much of a story to put in a book.
I still have 40 pages to go but doubt if the ending will matter much, although I may be wrong. There's been enough to enjoy already and I remain a big admirer, of some things Japanese even if I still don't know if Banana Yoshimoto is likely to beat Murakami to the Nobel Prize or if she's writing stories that belong in teenage girls' magazines. That is the glamour and fascination of the cultural divide. I once read Bonjour Tristesse in French and enjoyed it because it was French.
I'm going to lend this to a mate that has read Murakami and ask what he thinks and the point of sending the photo to Japan is to ask my friend there what she thinks. Perhaps then I'll get the sort of useful answer that a conference at Oxford University was unwilling to provide.
