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Banana Yoshimoto’s warm, witty, and heartfelt depictions of the lives of young Japanese have earned her international acclaim and best-seller status, as well as a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. In N.P., a celebrated Japanese writer has committed suicide, leaving behind a collection of stories written in English, entitled N.P. But the book may never be published in his native Japan: each translator who takes up the ninety-eighth story chooses death too—including Kazami’s boyfriend, Shoji. Haunted by Shoji’s death, Kazami discovers the truth behind the ninety-eighth story—and comes to believe that “everything that had happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy.” Banana Yoshimoto’s language sweeps the reader immediately into the streets of Tokyo, with her uncanny ability to merge the echoes of Japanese traditional literature with a contemporary plot. N.P. is essential reading, a stunningly simple tale of youthful desires and obsessions....
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In cherished novels such as Kitchen and Goodbye Tsugumi, Banana Yoshimoto’s warm, witty, and heartfelt depictions of the lives of young Japanese have earned her international acclaim and best-seller status. Her insightful, spare vision returns in two novellas possessed by the ghosts of love found and lost. In Hardboiled, the unnamed narrator is hiking in the mountains on an anniversary she has forgotten about, the anniversary of her ex-lover’s death. As she nears her hotel—stopping on the way at a hillside shrine and a strange soba shop—a sense of haunting falls over her. Perhaps these eerie events will help her make peace with her loss. Hard Luck is about another young woman, whose sister is dying and lies in a coma. Kuni’s fiancé left her after the accident, but his brother Sakai continues to visit, and the two of them gradually grow closer as they make peace with the impending loss of their loved one. Yoshimoto’s voice is clear, assured, and deeply moving, displaying again why she is one of Japan’s, and the world’s, most beloved writers. ...
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With the publication of Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, the literary world realized that Yoshimoto was a young writer of enduring talent whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. Kitchen is an enchantingly original book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father) Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart.
In a whimsical style that recalls the early Marguerite Duras, "Kitchen" and its companion story, "Moonlight Shadow," are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a very special writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul.
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Banana Yoshimoto’s warm, witty, and heartfelt depictions of the lives of young Japanese have earned her international acclaim and best-seller status, as well as a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. In Lizard, now available in Grove Press paperback, Yoshimoto deftly fuses traditional and pop culture to create contemporary portraits of love and life. These six tales explore themes of time, healing, and fate—and the journeys of self-discovery through which young urbanites come to terms with them. In “Newlywed,” an unhappily married young man deliberately misses his stop on the train, only to be questioned by a shape-shifting homeless man about the trials of his marriage. In “Blood and Water,” a woman recalls how she left the village she grew up in—which was run by a New Age cult—in order to lead a fulfilling life, even against her parents’ wishes. And in the title story, “Lizard,” a woman who has never before felt truly secure in her life admits a deep secret to her lover—that she has the ability to heal others with her mind. In different ways, these six stories explore what it takes to navigate the perils of the modern world as well as what it takes to reinvent one’s self. Permeated by the author’s own effervescent spin on magic realism, Lizard cements a special place for Yoshimoto in twentieth-century Japanese fiction....
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