Hardboiled and Hard Luck
Banana Yoshimoto Faber & Faber, 149pp, £9.99
ISBN 0571227821
Banana Yoshimoto's first novel, Kitchen, catapulted her to fame in her native Japan and led to one of her stories being serialised on the Tokyo train system. Hardboiled and Hard Luck, her seventh book to be translated into English, is composed of two thematically interlinked novellas dealing with subjects Yoshimoto fans will find familiar: dead siblings and lovers, dreams and ghosts.
While trekking in the mountains, the narrator of Hardboiled starts reminiscing about her ex-lover, a girl named Chizuru, who believed she could see ghosts. That evening, she realises it is the first anni- versary of Chizuru's death. Present-day events are intercut with the narrator's memories of Chizuru, as well as those of past guests at the hotel where she is staying. Hard Luck is also narrated by a young woman, whose sister, Kuni, lies in a coma. As the family waits for Kuni to be declared brain-dead, the narrator finds herself drawn to the strange brother of her sister's absent fiance.
Both novellas are set in autumn and are filled with a gentle, nostalgic melancholy. The narrators have passed through adolescence but remain unformed, in states of arrested transition. The narrator of Hardboiled is an orphaned drifter whose ex-lover is "still there inside me - a life put on hold, a memory I didn't know how to handle". After her sister's injury, the Hard Luck narrator postpones her plans to travel to Italy and waits in "that oddly empty block of time that's left before her death". The photographer Rineke Dijkstra has said that because "young people are less defined, it is easier to identify with them". Perhaps the sense of the adolescent in Yoshimoto's characters explains their appeal to her large and devoted fan base.
A plain, sometimes wooden dialogue is combined with a predilection for lyrical evocations of nature. Though at times these are cliched - "stars that glittered like diamonds" - there are moments of striking beauty: "foliage brilliant enough to drive you crazy"; "the sweet scent of dried leaves drifting in the wind". The translations of both novellas are full of Americanisms such as "Oh boy!" and "It sure was scary". Although plausible coming from the narrators, such phrases might have been toned down in the case of a 55-year-old receptionist living in a "Japanese-style room with shoji screens and a tatami floor". More problematic is Yoshimoto's use of dialogue in Hard Luck, the less successful of the two novellas. Despite failing to create distinct voices for her characters, she presents large chunks of speech without reporting clauses, leaving the reader confused as to who is talking.
Chizuru tells the narrator that she must "live a hard-boiled life", but there is little hard-boiled about Yoshimoto's fiction, and phrases such as "When you take a spill, you can always rise up from it with something good in your hand" read like inspirational fridge magnets. Her writing is full of portentous events that are invariably less significant than they at first seem - hints of a darkness never fully realised, as if each story is haunted by other, sadder tales that Yoshimoto chose not to write. Ultimately, these stories are redemptive: by the end both narrators have moved forward to places where their hearts have "a little room in which to manoeuvre".
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