Yoshimoto’s leading women are lonely and blinkered, though not in the way that I have come to expect from the prickly and elegantly severe fictions of writers like Rachel Cusk, Aysegul Savas or, lately, Jhumpa Lahiri, whose narrators tend to experience a failure or a lack of desire to integrate into society. Though there might be superficial similarities between the stories - about boyfriends, familial tensions, horrific incidents in the narrators’ pasts - each one feels distinct, rich in its own particular way. “Not Warm at All” takes the form of a recollection of a childhood friend who was murdered, and “Tomo-chan’s Happiness” follows a young woman trying to love after being raped at 16. Two shorter entries move away from this warmth and tenderness and into an eerie disquiet. Just like a pet bird that had accidentally ventured out of its cage, the incident had cast me out of the world that I had known.”
Running beneath the long, slow current of her physical recovery is Mimi’s parallel spiritual transformation: “Those days - that dream - had exposed something inside of me and changed it. In “Mama!” - one of the most brilliant stories I’ve ever read - Mimi, a publishing company employee, is poisoned by a disgruntled co-worker. “This life seemed simple at first glance,” Yoshimoto writes, “when in fact it existed within a flow that was far bigger, as vast as the seven seas.” After the narrator and her lover split, their paths meander as they age in a way that makes the reader smile. Couldn’t mixing in it, even just a little, sap you of some of the vitality you needed to live in this world?” As the living couple’s intimacy deepens, the odd poignancy of the ghosts becomes entangled with their anxiety about the imminent destruction of the building, and with it their temporary relationship.
They make the narrator “uneasy,” she says: “Ghosts probably lived in ghost time - time that flowed in its own strange way, somewhere completely removed from our own.
The ghosts go about their mundane lives, seemingly unaware that they are ghosts. In “House of Ghosts,” a young woman encounters, well, ghosts of an elderly couple in the soon-to-be-demolished apartment of her new lover. At the center of each is a woman negotiating the quiet fallout of personal history. The five stories in Banana Yoshimoto’s collection “Dead-End Memories” - first published in Japan in 2003, it is her 11th book to be translated into English - are strange, melancholy and beautiful. DEAD-END MEMORIES: Stories, by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Asa Yoneda
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