デッドエンドの思い出

 Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories (Counterpoint)

We seem to be a little bit behindhand with Banana Yoshimoto in translation.

デッドエンドの思い出 was published in Japan in 2003 but only now in English, by Counterpoint who are in Berkeley, California.

I'm sure all her titles would be made available in English translation with the same urgency as Murakami's are if there was sufficient demand for them so maybe there isn't. But I'm devoutly brand loyal and find it hard to let go.

One knows what one's going to get with Banana by now. Having begun with the 'other' weirdness, it seemed at the time, of Kitchen in 1988, she either became 'mainstream' or the mainstream became her.

The first of the five stories here, House of Ghosts, uses all the usual ingredients of a Banana story in her recipe that can include, yes, ghosts and food but also young people, loneliness, intimacy, dysfunction or trauma and some kind of resolved acceptance of a happy enough ending. 

Her books may or may not be set texts on courses about New Age therapy or mindfulness but I'm not going to hold that against them. Maybe, reading it just before the outpouring of emotion for HM Queen Elizabeth II, there is a similar need to suspend irony, satire and disbelief, disarm oneself of one's instinctive critical habits and be prepared to believe. I'm almost as happy to accept Banana at her words as I was the late Mrs. Elizabeth Windsor  but woe betide them if I ever find out they were not being honest with us.

Iwakura and Secchu echo the ghosts in the house they live in, in House of Ghosts, by sharing their lives to the point of 'becoming one', or feeling like they have, as did Baucis and Philemon in Ovid and few stories are more moving than that.

In Mama!, the trauma is a case of deliberate food-poisoning in the workplace canteen by a malcontent but it serves to bring Matsuoka more 'into the world' by the care shown for her from her previous, more insular attitude,

I'd thought that people who liked to get carried away with romance were people who could afford to be careless with love - the kind of love you could let run freely and then drain away, like city water from a faucet.

Writing must surely be in some way autobiographical and it's possible to suspect that lines early in Not Warm at All might be such a thing in Dead-End Memories when they say,

at some point you reach the final prospect: the last vista of the thing, beyond which there's no further to go.

A few names, like Wittgenstein, Derrida, Nietzsche or Shakespeare might be able to claim they went a bit further than Banana Yoshimoto but they didn't always leave you feeling better about things. As with most things for her, it might be a lifestyle choice.

In the title story the narrator finds out that her fiance, working away in another town, has taken up with somebody else but even the hurt that comes with that becomes a part of her that she assimilates, lives with and makes her wiser for at least the purposes of a story about survival and the possibility of happiness.

I don't entirely trust Banana or share her consolations. I've never quite been able to decide, find out or otherwise discover if her books deserve more to be compared with Tolstoy or Jilly Cooper. I wouldn't object to either but I'd like to know. I can't help liking them, though, whether it's literature or only a readable commodity I'm enjoying.

According to the list of 'Also by' titles in the front of this, I'm only missing Argentine Hag from being a Yoshimoto-in-English completist but, although very tempted by it, it doesn't come cheap and is likely, let's face it, to be very much the same as all the others. So it can wait.

The Times questionnaire on Saturdays, My Cultural Fix, asks their celebrity guest to admit to a 'guilty pleasure'. I can't even say if that might mean something like this. I don't think it is but even if it was, as I understand it, one is innocent until proven guilty. I'll gladly admit to the pleasure but it's for somebody else to prove the guilt.