Takeshi Murase’s linked short story collection The God of Nishi-YuigahamaStation is about four people who lost members of their family in a tragic train derailment. For a year after the accident, the ghost train still makes its fatal run at midnight, giving those who grieve its passengers an opportunity to speak to the loved ones they lost.
The God of Nishi-YuigahamaStation is meant to make the reader cry, and it does so primarily through its improbably melodramatic situations. This short book is relatively light reading, and the level of catharsis it allows you to experience will depend on your tolerance for sentimentality.
Still, as far as this type of fiction goes, I enjoyed The God of Nishi-YuigahamaStation much more than similar titles (such as Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold). Murase’s stories are grounded in the social realities of contemporary Japan, and the characters are messy and complicated enough to be interesting.
My favorite story is “To My Father, I Say,” which is about a young man named Sakamoto who leaves his rural hometown to work at a large finance corporation after graduating from a prestigious university in Tokyo. Sakamoto is forced to attend mandatory drinking sessions after work, and he’s bullied by his supervisor. He’s tired all the time, and his relationship with his girlfriend has gone stale. Meanwhile, he’s ignoring the calls from his father, who comes from a humble background.
Sakamoto finally snaps and quits his job, but he can’t bring himself to tell his family as his living conditions grow more precarious. Thankfully, he gets a second chance to talk to his father on the ghost train, which is the exact opportunity he needs to reevaluate his life and goals.
Like a lot of contemporary Japanese popular fiction aimed at young adults in their twenties, The God of Nishi-YuigahamaStation is brutally honest about the emotional damage caused by bullying, which can extend far beyond grade school. Like other authors, Murase doesn’t shy away from stating that the main problem lies with the people who tolerate this behavior, while the solution is for one brave person to step up and offer support to the target.
This is an important and wholesome message, of course, but it’s a little depressing to me that this support can only exist in the form of a magical ghost train. Then again, the purpose of The God of Nishi-YuigahamaStation is not to offer deep insights and critique, but rather to make the reader cry and feel gratitude for their own family and friends. And who knows? This might just be the support you need.
Atsuhiro Yoshida’s 2018 linked short story collection おやすみ、東京 chronicles the adventures of a cast of slightly odd characters with subtle connections to one another. Each of the stories begins at precisely 1:00am. Far from being scary or dangerous, the nighttime urban space of Tokyo is gentle and welcoming.
Four women run a small restaurant that’s only open in the early hours of the morning. A taxi driver listens patiently to his passengers so that he can take them exactly where they need to go. Other characters have highly specialized professions, from someone who runs a highly curated antique store to someone who disposes of old telephones.
I’m in love with Yoshida’s writing style, which is playfully idiosyncratic but still clear and light and easy to read. Despite the gentleness of the stories, there’s never any sentimentality, just slightly damaged people doing their best to make it through their lives. おやすみ、東京 tends more toward realism than some of Yoshida’s other work, but small bits of strangeness still shine through the cracks of the mundane.
An English translation of this book, Goodnight Tokyo, is scheduled to be released on July 9, and I’m looking forward to Yoshida’s English-language debut!
Yōko Ogawa’s 2022 collection 掌に眠る舞台 contains eight stories connected by the broad theme of “stages.” Some stories are about the world of performing arts, while others take an abstract approach. Ogawa isn’t concerned with glamour, but rather the strangeness of the stage after the spotlights go out.
One of my favorite stories is ユニコーンを握らせる, which is about an actress whose sole performance was cancelled. She lives alone in her old age, comforting herself by repeating lines from a play that never made it past rehearsals. As always, Ogawa’s gentle portrayal of loneliness is exquisitely observed. With each tiny detail of the woman’s apartment, Ogawa paints a portrait of someone who can’t escape her fantasies of a past that never existed.
I also enjoyed いけにえを運ぶ犬, in which a young boy repeatedly stages a performance of enjoying a specific book at a traveling bookseller’s cart for the sole benefit of the bookseller’s dog, who watches the children to prevent theft. This is a story about poverty and negligence and the fear of being forgotten, but Ogawa nevertheless captures the magic of what it’s like to fantasize about books as a kid.
For me, the standout story was ダブルフォルトの予言, which is about a woman who lives in an empty storage room on an upper floor of the Imperial Theater in Tokyo. This woman’s job is to absorb all the bad luck of the performers on stage, sort of like an inverse Phantom of the Opera. Instead of an extravagant man who lives in the sewers and aggressively causes trouble, she’s a plain and boring woman who lives the attic and passively prevents accidents. At least, that’s what she says of herself, but what’s she really doing in the theater attic? And why is the narrator visiting her so often?
Something I’ve always loved about Ogawa’s writing is the lucid clarity of her language, but the style of 掌に眠る舞台 is much richer and denser than that of the author’s earlier work. Instead of being like icebergs, these stories are more like mazes. You have to take your time getting to the center, which is fine by me. It’s always a pleasure to spend time wandering through Ogawa’s signature uncanny spaces.
Nanae Aoyama’s novella A Perfect Day to Be Alone chronicles a year in the life of a young woman named Chizu who moves in with an elderly relative named Ginko after her mother accepts a teaching position in China.
Aoyama deftly captures the reality of a relationship between a flighty 20-year-old girl and a mature 71-year-old woman. There are no heart-to-heart talks or life lessons, just a lot of sitting around and chatting about nothing in particular.
Chizu breaks up with one boyfriend and starts a casual relationship with another, but this relationship goes nowhere. The same could be said of Chizu’s job at a kiosk at a suburban train station. Aside from a vague desire to save money, Chizu has no goals or ambitions.
Rather, the story is completely interstitial, a chapter between chapters of Chizu’s life. A Perfect Day to Be Alone brought me back into my own 20-year-old headspace with an immediacy that would be difficult to achieve through a story with more of a plot.
Nothing happens in A Perfect Day to Be Alone, but I enjoyed getting to know Chizu and Ginko, whose characters are sketched out and then defined with subtle touches. I appreciate the opportunity to spend time in their company, which is supremely chill and relaxing.
Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo is a slice-of-life novella whose short length belies its Proustian ambitions. The narrator, a housewife living in an apartment in the Tokyo suburbs with her husband and two young sons, engages in extended meditations on her home, family, friends, neighborhood, and place in the world.
I don’t use the word “Proustian” lightly, as Kanai’s prose requires patience and concentration to read and appreciate. The endless sentences gallop and sprawl across pages, sweeping the reader along in a flow of thought and sensation that transcends time and place as the narrator’s focus wanders. This is no breezy stream-of-consciousness nonsense, however, as each sentence is exquisitely crafted and brilliantly translated by Polly Barton.
As with Proust, there’s a certain comfort and emotional satisfaction in the act of paying such close attention to the mundane details of daily life, but Kanai’s narrator has a strong sense of irony. Gendered double standards aren’t a primary concern of this novel by any means, but an underlying frustration still shapes the narrator’s relationships and observations on what it means to be a housewife.
Mild Vertigo (originally published in 2002) doesn’t set out to upset or challenge the reader in the same way as much of Kanai’s earlier writing, but it nevertheless operates with an absolute lack of sentimentality that I find extremely refreshing, especially on the more literary end of the “slice of life” genre. Due to the dense nature of Kanai’s prose, it took me a surprisingly long time to read this short book, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Tree Spirits Grass Spirits collects twenty-one autobiographical stories about plants by the celebrated Japanese-American poet Hiromi Ito. As the translator, Jon L Pitt, explains in the book’s preface, these stories were originally serialized from 2012 to 2013 in a highbrow Japanese literary magazine, but Ito’s prose is lively and accessible. Each of the stand-alone stories in Tree Spirits Grass Spirits is gentle and thoughtful, and the collection is a breath of fresh and green summer air.
Ito divides her time between the cities of Encinitas in southern California and Kumamoto on the southern island of Kyushu in Japan. Each region has a unique climate and ecosystem, and Ito is fascinated by the plants that grow in both environments, from yucca and agave to camelia and hydrangeas to grass and mold. Ito’s stories touch on botany and natural history, but their primary focus is on humans, especially the humans in Ito’s own family.
Among my favorite of the stories is “Baobab Dream,” which recounts a challenge that many people have experienced with houseplants. As Ito puts it: “They are at their most beautiful when you first purchase them, and they get progressively shabbier and shabbier, even if you take care of them. And then, at some point, they wither away and die.”
And then, when you go to a garden store to get new plants to replace the old ones, it can be a challenge to identify what you’ve purchased. This is how Ito came into the possession of a mystery tree that she and her daughters resorted to calling “the baobab tree.”
While conducting research on what the tree might actually be, Ito considers the Latin names of various plants and arrives at the conclusion that botanical categorizations of plants often don’t make much practical sense. How are tulips and green onions members of the same botanical family, for instance? This confusion of taxonomy yields to broader meditations on how certain species are categorized as “invasive” as opposed to “naturalized,” and how this reflects Ito’s own experiences as someone who moves between cultures. In the end, however, such abstract concerns are secondary to the beauty of the plants themselves:
In the park next door, the mountain lilacs were at their peak. The peach trees and plum trees and cherry trees were blooming in folks’ yards. The roadsides were bright yellow from the acacias. The bushes of sweet-scented geranium in my own garden, too, had suddenly grown dense and were so thick that they seemed to be sweating, steeped in a green that surrounded one or two pink buds – swelling with each coming day and trying to open up any minute now.
Ito’s vivid descriptions of the physicality of the natural world carry over to her reflections regarding how it feels to be a human moving through the environment. This is one of the many reasons why I love the story “Kudzu-san,” which is about the kudzu growing in the neighborhood around Ito’s house in Kumamoto. As anyone who’s encountered the aggressively leafy vines can attest, kudzu is filled with vitality. If you cut it down, it will grow back twice as quickly, and its fuzzy tendrils are constantly creeping into unexpected places.
Ito remarks that there’s a certain lasciviousness to kudzu, so she searches for references to the plant in literary sources such as the Man’yōshū poetry anthology and the Tale of Genji. Such references are scarce, but Ito is intrigued by a chance mention of the famous Heian-period court magician Abe no Seimei, whose mother was supposedly a fox. In Japanese folklore, foxes are shapeshifters known for their sexual allure, so it seems only fitting that Seimei’s mother is poetically associated with the visual motif of kudzu. Ito’s own encounters with kudzu are likewise filled with startling physicality:
The vines we crushed in the morning lay as they were, and stood back up erect in the evening, swaying their stems and moving in on women – I had seen this, as well. They were more like snakes than plants. Even more than snakes, they resembled those eels that sway in the ocean. There are stories in old books about snakes that enter women’s bedchambers at night, and one about a snake that slid into a woman’s vagina after she had climbed a tree. Couldn’t all those stories be about kudzu?
What I admire about Ito’s stories is that, despite the poetic beauty of her writing, her meditations often progress in strange and unexpected directions without forcing symbolism or allegory onto the natural world. Ito observes her environment closely and looks inward as she describes what she sees, but the mycelial networks between her associations expand unseen below the surface of her writing. Just as autobiography often inspires self-reflection in the reader, Ito’s “phyto-autobiography” inspires an observation of ourselves in a larger context that doesn’t always follow human logic.
Tree Spirits Grass Spirits is a welcome companion to anyone interested in going outside and seeing the world around them from a fresh perspective. Jon Pitt’s translation gracefully conveys Ito’s casual style by allowing space for the rhythm and mouthfeel of each sentence, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that every paragraph is a joy to read. Almost all of the stories are less than ten pages long, and it’s a pleasure to dip into the collection whenever you’re in the mood to open your eyes and shift your viewpoint to a less anthropocentric frame of reference.
Tree Spirits Grass Spirits is published by Nightboat Books, and you can check out the book’s page (here).
Dragon Palace collects eight surreal stories by award-winning and internationally celebrated author Hiromi Kawakami. These stories are contemporary fantasies about shapeshifters, talking animals, and interspecies romance that borrow from traditional folklore even as they express the psychological complexity of modern magical realism. Originally published in 2002, Dragon Palace is now available from Stone Bridge Press with a translation by Ted Goosen, who also translated Kawakami’s People From My Neighborhood.
The first story in Dragon Palace, “Hokusai,” is about the octopus who seduces the fisherman’s wife in the infamous ukiyo-e print. At least, that’s who the bum who persuades the narrator to go out drinking claims to be. The narrator is depressed and hates his life, so he easily falls under the sway of the stranger who tells him fanciful stories of his exploits as an octopus-turned-human as they drink their way across a shabby port town. At several points during the evening, the narrator sees his drinking companion shift and change. By the end of the night, the narrator’s own form isn’t as solid as it once was.
Although “Hokusai” defies allegory, I read it as a story about how sad men become shitty men as they gain confidence through the stories they tell one another about women. Despite his unapologetic misogyny, there’s an appealing earthiness – or saltiness, I should say – to the octopus man that I found oddly compelling. Like the narrator, I wanted to hear more of his stories, and I was happy to go along for the ride.
“Hokusai” holds a special charm for me as a fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1931 novella The Shadow over Innsmouth, a classic American horror story about a decaying New England town whose residents have started marrying with fishpeople. Like Lovecraft, Kawakami paints a detailed portrait of a grimy port town that has seen better days. Unlike Lovecraft, she offsets the strangeness of interspecies relations by focusing on the more mundane aspects of what it would be like to have an ocean-dwelling boyfriend who doesn’t pay rent. In fact, even more than The Shadow over Innsmouth, “Hokusai” reminds me of Yoko Tawada’s famous short story “The Bridegroom Was a Dog,” which transposes the persistent “beast husband” trope of East Asian folklore to everyday suburban life.
“Dragon Palace,” the title story of the collection, swims even deeper into fantastic waters. The narrator is a housewife visited by the pint-sized spirit of her great-grandmother, who was supposedly a medium at the center of a sex cult before she abdicated to become a wandering vagrant. “Dragon Palace” is a prose poem on heredity and generational legacies, and about how the seeds of mystery are buried in the heart of even the most prosaic housewife.
“The Kitchen God” is a more grounded exploration of the theme of the strangeness hidden in everyday life. A housewife named Izumi is having an affair with an older man named Sanobe. Along with her recreational shoplifting, Izumi believes this affair distinguishes her from the other housewives in her neighborhood. What she seems to take for granted, however, is that her thriving collection of houseplants has turned the inside of her apartment into a small ecosystem. Among the leaves and vines lives a creature Izumi calls “the kitchen god.” This god may or may not be one of the weasels said to have infested the apartment complex, but it’s clearly no ordinary creature.
Images of strange interior spaces continue in “The Fox’s Den,” which is about a middle-aged housekeeper who begins a quasi-romantic relationship with one of her clients, an elderly booklover who once owned a used bookstore and has since become a book hoarder. To the jaded eyes of the housekeeper, this man’s attachment to old books isn’t as remarkable as his foxlike tendencies.
The housekeeper has been married twice before, once to someone she calls “completely human” and once to another man who had a tendency to behave like a fox. It’s never clear whether the animalistic traits of these characters are literal. Do they shapeshift like the octopus in “Hokusai,” or are these men animals only in the narrator’s imagination? This question is of no concern to Kawakami, who trusts the reader not to get caught up on minor details like “the nature of reality” as she explores the deep and essential weirdness of human beings.
The standout story in the collection is “Mole,” which was previously translated by Michael Emmerich in 2007 and published as “Mogera Wogura” in Kurodahan Press’s Speculative Japan anthology. In the slightly off-kilter world of the story, mole people live in human cities, where they go about their lives just like everyone else. “Mole” is narrated from the perspective of an adult male mole person, who lives with his wife in a hole. Although he’s a normal office worker, what’s unique about the narrator is that he collects humans who have lost the will to live:
The humans are bereft of energy—their faces are lifeless. Yet they are not dead. They live by eating away at their surroundings, at themselves, without ever moving. They remain with us in our hole without ever becoming moles themselves, waiting for the time when, still human, they can return to the world aboveground.
I’ve discussed this story in several of my literature classes, and it’s been my experience that students have a strong positive response. Although “Mole” could easily be read as horror, many students find it comforting to think that someone would pick them up and care for them during the days when they’re too tired to keep going. There’s a certain flavor of darkness to Kawakami’s writing that keeps her work out of the realm of being “wholesome,” but “Mole” comes the closest to a story that might be adapted into a short film by Studio Ghibli.
I have to admit that I’m not a fan of modern retellings of fairy tales. I tend to find them tedious and awkward, especially when they’re pushed into the service of a political agenda. Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for feminism and gay pride and destroying monarchies. Still, what’s always been interesting to me about “traditional” folklore is how incredibly strange it is. Sigmund Freud was wrong about a lot of things, but I think he was onto something when he talked about how it’s the very absurdity of folktales that allows them to resonate with people regardless of time or place.
The stories in Dragon Palace lean into the more surrealistic elements of folklore in a way I find emotionally satisfying. For example, what does a story about bar-hopping with a shape-shifting octopus mean in literary terms? I’m not sure, but I’ve definitely had a few boozy nights like that myself, and “Hokusai” captures the truth of that experience in a way that a more mimetically realistic story couldn’t. Likewise, what does it mean that the narrator of “Dragon Palace” picks up the off-putting spirit of her great-grandmother and hugs her like a baby? I couldn’t say, but I’ve definitely felt that exact sense of unreality while playing with one of my nieces and realizing that she looks just like my grandmother.
What I appreciate most about Kawakami’s stories is that they’re marvelously entertaining to read. Although it can sometimes be difficult to relate to the characters, each new page holds a fresh surprise for the reader. Goosen’s translation perfectly captures the tone of the original Japanese, in which Kawakami writes the most outlandish things in the most casual and colloquial prose. The style conveys the sense that someone is telling you these stories directly, perhaps as you sit in a cozy bar filled with people whose shapes shift just out of the corner of your eye. Dragon Palace is a fascinating collection of oddities in which some stories are humorous and accessible while others are more poetic and surreal. I’d recommend this striking collection to anyone intrigued by the prospect of catching a glimpse of the wonders that lie just under the surface of everyday life.
Diary of a Void is about a woman in her mid-thirties who lies about being pregnant and decides to run with it. Emi Yagi’s short novel isn’t quite a comedy, but it’s sharp and insightful and a lot of fun to read.
Shibata is a relatively normal person whose hobbies include going to live shows and drinking with friends. She works at a small distribution company that specializes in cardboard paper cores. Even though she’s been working at the company for a few years, her male colleagues still expect her to handle menial jobs such as making coffee and distributing mail. These chores are especially annoying when she’s trying to complete her actual work by a deadline, and she often ends up staying at the office until late in the evening.
Shibata is a full-time salaried employee, but her colleagues treat her like a part-time “office lady” simply because she happens to be female. She finally snaps when her manager stops by her desk and interrupts her to ask that she clear the dirty coffee cups from a meeting room. Why can’t the men in her office take their own coffee cups to the kitchen, Shibata wonders. If the manager has enough time to pester her, why can’t he pick up the cups himself? Why can’t he ask one of her junior colleagues?
After her manager bothers her about cleaning the cups one too many times, Shibata tells him that she’d prefer not to. The smell of cigarettes in the meeting room makes her nauseous, she says, because she’s pregnant. Not only does her manager take this statement seriously, but everyone in Shibata’s office suddenly starts treating her like a human being instead of a servant. She therefore decides to keep the lie going, a decision that seems less like a malicious falsehood and more of a reasonable survival strategy.
Despite the novel’s title, it’s hard to think of Shibata’s imagined pregnancy as a “void.” She applies for a maternity badge and keeps a pregnancy diary in order to lend credence to her story, but she’s not lying to herself. What Shibata is doing is finally leaving work early enough to cook dinner instead of scrounging for leftovers from the nearly-empty shelves of a late-night supermarket. She makes time for get-togethers with friends and subscribes to Amazon Prime to catch up on all the movies she’s always wanted to watch. She treats herself to nice meals on the weekends, and she makes friends at a local “mommy aerobics” class to stay in shape.
During the day, Shibata has an easier time at work, where her colleagues have finally started to make the effort to share the office chores. At night, she goes on long walks and reflects on her life and what it might mean to be a mother. Toward the end of the novel, Shibata encounters a friend from her aerobics class who has taken to walking with her sleepless infant late at night in order to prevent the baby from making noise. This exhausted woman delivers a cri de coeur about the state of motherhood in Japan, and every single word she says is true. I won’t spoil Shibata’s response, but it’s very good.
The author’s depiction of Japanese workplace culture is fascinating in its specificity while still being relatable to anyone who’s suffered through an office job, and the reader doesn’t have to be female to appreciate Shibata’s frustration with gendered double standards, which put the male characters in a number of awkward situations as well. In the end, Shibata isn’t a sage or a saint – she’s still the sort of morally dubious person who would lie about being pregnant. Some of Shibata’s takes on social issues aren’t great, and she occasionally comes off as unfairly judgmental, but her realness keeps her grounded as a narrator.
Save for a few choice depictions of clueless men at Shibata’s office and equally clueless expectant mothers, Diary of a Void isn’t particularly satirical or comedic, but nor is it heavy or depressing. Like Shibata herself, the reader occasionally has to run with the story of a fake pregnancy without asking too many questions. Still, Diary of a Void is an interesting journey with a fun ending. The novel resists sentimentality at every turn, and I found it gratifying that no life lessons are learned by Shibata or anyone else. Shibata is a great character, but the reader is the one who experiences a major change in perspective. Translators David Boyd and Lucy North convey Shibata’s dry wit and merciless observations with pitch-perfect tone and style, and the closing line is an absolute banger.
Life Ceremony collects twelve short narrative thought experiments about the taboos governing social customs. These stories are playful, intriguing, and marvelously well-written, but this book might not be for everyone. In this review I’ll discuss cannibalism in a relatively light tone that approximates the tone of the collection itself, so please take care if you’re squeamish about food or human remains.
The opening story, “A First-Rate Material,” is an excellent introduction to the themes of the collection. In a world very much like our own, human bodies are not burned after death, but recycled. Human bones become pieces of jewelry, human teeth and nails become the ornaments hanging from chandeliers, and human skin is used to upholster sofas. The young woman who narrates the story is proud of her luxurious human hair sweater, but her fiancé finds clothing and furniture made of human materials to be weird and upsetting. The narrator promises to respect his wishes, but things come to a head (so to speak) when they visit his mother’s house. Before his father passed away, he requested that his skin be made into a veil for his son’s bride to wear during the wedding ceremony.
Even if you’re okay with this thought experiment so far, the story starts to become disturbing when Murata describes, in great detail, what this veil looks like, as well as how the skin of an elderly man’s corpse feels against the narrator’s own living skin. The narrator’s fiancé pretends to be fine with the veil in order to appease his mother, but he’s clearly in shock during the drive home. The reader can’t help but sympathize with both the narrator and her fiancé. Are human bodies not beautiful? Is it not disrespectful to burn our loved ones, or to allow them to rot? In the end, is there any real difference between human skin and animal skin? On the other hand, the idea of wearing human skin is undeniably creepy.
This cognitive dissonance is upsetting, as Murata intends it to be. The gap between subjective perceptions and social expectations forms the core of each of the stories in Life Ceremony. Some of these stories have a gentle and almost fairytale-like quality, but some of them hit hard.
The title story, “Life Ceremony,” provides the purest expression of this cognitive dissonance in its levelheaded consideration of cannibalism. In the near future, the traditional family system is no longer relevant. Few people choose to get married or live together, so the state subsidizes pregnancy and runs community childcare centers for the babies produced by unattached mothers. Many of these babies are conceived at “life ceremonies,” which are funerals in which the bodies of the dead are prepared as a lively and joyous feast that’s open to the community. A life ceremony is considered a success if people pair off during the party in order to conceive children.
The narrator, Maho, isn’t particularly interested in pregnancy or life ceremonies, a view she shares with her male coworker Yamamoto. Maho and Yamamoto are drinking buddies who enjoy a close platonic friendship, and they occasionally discuss how weird it is that both eating human bodies and unromantic insemination used to be considered taboo when they were younger. This story seems like another playful thought experiment until Yamamoto dies in a sudden accident. His family asks Maho to help prepare his body for his life ceremony, at which point the matter of human cannibalism becomes much more concrete and tactile.
Murata has a lot of fun as she parodies the wholesome tone of recipe blogs and lifestyle magazines during a prolonged and detailed description of the preparation of human flesh for culinary consumption. This seems like it would be creepy – and it sort of is – but Murata does an excellent job of normalizing the practice. By the end of the story, many readers will have inadvertently entered a headspace of accepting Maho’s world as completely natural. A series of events that would culminate in a disturbing ending in any other story somehow read as surprisingly sweet and touching.
“Life Ceremony” is a virtuoso performance, and Murata makes it seem effortless. I want to acknowledge the skill of the translator, Ginny Tapley Takemori, in making the text feel so light and natural. Many of the words involving food preparation in English are quite visceral, so it’s a remarkable accomplishment to present the reader with the same clean lightness of the original Japanese text. Despite the occasionally disturbing subject matter, the imagery in the stories of Life Ceremony is never explicitly graphic, and Tapley Takemori’s translation skillfully conveys both the smoothness and the hidden depths of Murata’s prose.
Life Ceremony is a treasure trove of oddities, and each story is strange and fascinating in its own unique way as Murata invites the reader to question the logic of how we interact with the world and understand ourselves as social creatures. Each of the stories is just the right length to be read in one sitting, but the implications of Murata’s provocative thought experiments linger long after the last page.
Dead-End Memories collects five short stories whose purpose is to comfort and uplift the reader. None of the characters are bad people, and none of them does anything wrong. When people suffer, they do so off-camera, and only then in rose-tinted hindsight. Banana Yoshimoto’s fiction occasionally contains elements of darkness, and this is undeniably the case in Dead-End Memories. Nevertheless, the five stories in this collection are filled with light and sweetness.
The opening story, “House of Ghosts,” is classic Banana Yoshimoto. A young woman who aims to take over the management of her family’s restaurant falls in love with a young man whose parents are forcing him to inherit a local bakery. The couple bonds over home cooking, but the young man must leave soon to study in France. Also, his apartment is haunted. Thankfully, the ghosts of the former tenants, a long-married couple, aren’t bothering anyone, and they indirectly inspire the young woman to move forward without regrets by reminding her that life is long and full of opportunities. It’s all extremely wholesome.
The second story, “‘Mama!,’” is equally wholesome. The narrator, a junior editor at a large publisher, is poisoned at the company cafeteria by a man who was targeting a former lover. As she recovers, the editor remembers how she was rescued from her abusive mother and raised by her kind and loving grandparents. This early childhood trauma makes it difficult for her to recognize her fatigue, and she returns to work only to break down in tears on the job when she visits a writer’s house to collect his manuscript. The narrator’s boss is very understanding and grants her a month of paid leave. Having realized how precious life is, the narrator uses this holiday to marry her boyfriend and go on a honeymoon in Hawai’i. As in “House of Ghosts,” the most intimate and harrowing moments of the narrator’s suffering are glossed over in order to emphasize the process of healing.
The theme of healing carries through the other three stories in Dead-End Memories. In “Not Warm at All,” the narrator looks back fondly on a childhood friend who was murdered by his mother, while the narrator of “Tomo-Chan’s Happiness” finds herself nurturing a quiet attraction to a co-worker despite being sexually assaulted as a teenager. Meanwhile, the narrator of the title story, “Dead-End Memories,” is attempting to come to terms with a partner who seems to be doing his best to ghost her out of a serious long-term relationship. Perhaps because her situation is relatable to so many people, Yoshimoto is more comfortable allowing this story’s narrator to describe her emotional pain, albeit only with the support of the kind and handsome manager of the bar where she works. The jilted narrator ultimately decides that she has the right to move on and find her own happiness:
Maybe this has been a good thing after all. What I’m going through is only like being perched on a soft cloud and peering through a small gap at other people’s lives. The important thing is to keep your eyes open, because what you choose to pay attention to defines your world.
Despite the title of the collection, the stories in Dead-End Memories are about how painful experiences help us grow and mature as people. This may sound cliché; and, to be fair, it is. That being said, I would argue that Yoshimoto’s ability to address serious trauma with such a delicate touch is precisely why her writing continues to resonate with readers. Spending time with Dead-End Memories is like being assured by a close friend that bad things happen to everyone, but that everything will be okay in the end. Banana Yoshimoto’s stories are gentle and comforting and healing, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need.
Contemporary Japanese Literature 