Defeated Love: Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen

We live like the lowliest worms.  Always defeated - defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep.  Everyone we love is dying.  Still, to cease living is unacceptable. (82)

It's hard to say whether the pair of novellas that make up Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen are more about love or death.  Perhaps it is most accurate to say that they are about mourning, that tense demilitarized zone between the two.

The characters of both pieces live haltingly in the shadow of a major trauma.  In "Moonlight Shadow" it is a fatal car crash that kills Hiiragi's girlfriend and older brother.  He copes in various ways - coming to school in his girlfriend's clothing, lurking around the stores where she used to buy her tennis gear, seeking out the companionship of his brother's girlfriend, who is the novella's narrator.  Meanwhile, the narrator (Satsuki) is befriended by a strange woman, Urara, on the banks of the river.  The woman seems to echo her feeling of loss, and appears at the most unusual times.  One day she calls, which is odd because they have never exchanged phone numbers.  I just thought, what would her number be, and then dialed, Urara tells her.  So, of course, when Urara tells her to show up at the river early one morning if she wants to see something really unusual, Satsuki takes the invitation quite seriously.

In the title novella, there is again a multilayered trauma.  In the first section, Mikage's grandmother - the last member of her family - has died, and she doesn't feel she can stay in their vast apartment by herself.   When Yuichi, a young man who had befriended her grandmother, shows up at her door and offers her a place to stay, she takes up his offer, in all its strangeness.  She moves in with Yuichi and his mother, Eriko, who (it soon emerges) is actually his transvestite father.  What follows is a period of bliss - Mikage falls in love with cooking, and with having a family to cook for, and she soon begins to pursue it as a career.  But, perplexed by the boundaries and ethics of her relationship with Yuichi (who has a girlfriend), she moves out.  The second section begins with the second layer of trauma: Yuichi calls and tells her that some time back, the much-beloved Eriko was killed by a stalker.  He had been delaying calling her, because he felt she would be furious he hadn't told her sooner.  Now he is the one in need of comfort, in the throes of mournful despair.  But still they hover warily at the edge of different relationships - will they move toward each other and risk another loss, or drift comfortably apart?

This is too simple and expression of the central theme of the paired works, which is a knowledge that love is inextricable from death, and that happiness hugs in its heart a core of loss.  "Everyone we love is dying."  The characters must choose, it seems, between a life of numbness - "those little Anodynes," as Emily Dickinson says, "that deaden suffering" - and one of joy and pain.  Love is paid for with the knowledge of the inevitability of loneliness:

These women lived their lives happily.  They had been taught, probably by caring parents, not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness regardless of what they were doing.  But therefore they could never know real joy.  Which is better?  Who can say? Everyone lives the way she knows best.  What I mean by 'their happiness' is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. (59)

Yoshimoto rings the changes on the idea of loss, which is as much about the individual's relationship to self (that is, to isolation) as to the beloved:

No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die.  Without that, I am not alive. (59)

And the most wrenching aspect of loss, as so many have noted, is the idea that memory is fallible, ephemeral, sandy and shifting, so there is no holding on to the beloved, no way of fixing experience in the mind:

When I finished reading I carefully refolded the letter.  The smell of Eriko's favorite perfume tugged at my heart.  This, too, will disappear after the letter is opened a few more times, I thought.  That was hardest of all. (53)

The more you return to a memory, the more well-worn it becomes, the more it starts showing the fading of age and the fingerprints of your later self.  As Satsuki realizes at the end of "Moonlight Shadow," there is yet another facet of loss - the loss of oneself as one was when one loved.  She lost her first love young, and she is fixed in time in that love.  From this point forward she will never be that person again - she has lost herself as well as him.  And yet she views this (rightly) as an inevitable slippage.  It is almost a gift from her dead beloved that his loss draws a line (the underscoring of closure) under her youthful self, allowing her to view it, even if just for a moment, as if preserved in amber, separate from who she is now.

These were Banana Yoshimoto's earliest works, and they met with a substantial amount of acclaim in Japan when they were published.  The publicity materials declare an onset of Bananamania (say that without sounding like a muppet, I dare you) worldwide. But despite moments of poetic beauty, this remained a fitful and disjointed narrative for me.  Pensive interludes were often disrupted by purple, cliche-ridden passages of imagistic daydreaming, like this one from a scene in which Yuichi and Mikage fall asleep, happy in each others' company, on what may be the world's most comfortable couch:

Yuichi and I are climbing a narrow ladder in the jet-black gloom.  Together we peer into the cauldron of hell.  We stare into the bubbling red sea of fire, and the air hitting our faces is so hot it makes us reel.  Even though we're standing side by side, even though we're closer to each other than to anyone else in the world, even though we're friends forever, we don't join hands.  No matter how forlorn we are, we each insist on standing on our own two feet.  But I wonder, as I look at his uneasy profile blazingly illuminated by the hellish fire, although we have always acted like brother and sister, aren't we really man and woman in the primordial sense, and don't we think of each other that way? (66)

It's hard for me to say how many of my complaints had to do with Yoshimoto's style, how many were the result of a profound ignorance of Japanese prose conventions (which are doubtless very different from those of English language fiction), and how many were sparked by the translation.  Yoshimoto even winks at the awkwardness of cliches traveling across linguistic boundaries:

'Yuichi,' I said, 'the fact that you're relaxed enough with me now to tell me how you're really feeling is a source of comfort to me.  It makes me very happy.  So happy I feel like shouting it from the rooftops.'


'What kind of talk is that?  Sounds like it was translated from English.' Yuichi smiled, the light from the table lamp shining on his face. (76)

Regardless of the source of my misgivings, and despite the fact that I found many things to appreciate about these as mournful love stories, it was a prickly enough reading experience that I am not sure I will be back for more Bananamania.



Kitchen (1988)
Banana Yoshimoto
***

The Rules of Gentility

 What Janet Mullany has written here is a romp.  A textbook romp.  And certainly, there is a time and a place for literary romps.  And that time is summer, that place is the beach.  So here I find myself, in Waikiki, reviewing The Rules of Gentility in all its rollicking breeziness. And no guilt shall I feel! This is hardly the time to feel queasy about not making my way forward in reading Proust.  Right?

(I am sure my anxiety has nothing to do with the fact that the other day, as we were waiting to be seated at dinner in Waikiki, I was reading a book called My Lord and Spymaster, which may or may not have featured some bodice-ripping on its cover.  D turns to me and says, "Sometime I wish I carried a sign around with an arrow, pointing at you, saying, 'Ivy League Ph.D! In Literature!".  This is just the latest salvo is his continuing war on what he sees as a pernicious book addiction.  The other day I was weeping over a particularly sad passage of my latest read, and he said, rather stormily, "Can you blame me for seeing your books as my natural nemeses?  They make you cry!!".  Of course, this stance is rather undercut by the fact that he just finished reading the 700-page epic Game of Thrones and is now embarking on the minimalist masterpiece of Jim the Boy.  When I interrupt him to ask how his book is, he scowls at me: "It's a book.  It has pages and words.  Look, are we reading or are we having a conversation?".  I give him a sparkling smile.)

So here it is: Miss Philomena Wellesley-Clegg is making her charmed way through a life of eternal husband-hunting and bonnet-coveting.  For bonnets, you know, are the Jimmy Choos of the early nineteenth century.  And husbands - well, let's just say that our Philomena loves making lists as much as any chick-lit heroine of the computer age:

My current list of Possible Husbands is as follows: [...] 3. The Mad Poet, although I am not sure he writes poetry, or at least gets much beyond the first line, of which he seems to have many.  He is excessively handsome.  It is such a shame his real name is Mr. Hengest Carrotte. (2)

Her more virtuous moments she devotes to harebrained schemes to save loose women with the Association for the Rescue and Succor of those in Extremis (make an acronym out of that, will you?).  And then into her life comes her closest friend's brother-in-law, the only man who could ever equal her name in dashing pomp: Mr. Inigo Linsley.  From their first encounter (she has just returned from a very rewarding shopping excursion), an abundance of saucy double entendres is promised:

He bends to pick something from the stone flags.  'I believe this is yours, Miss Wellesley-Clegg.'

Oh, heavens.  It is a stocking, fallen from one of my parcels.  I snatch it from him, my face heating up.

'I assure you, madam, my thoughts were far above it.'  He bows and ushers us into the house ahead of him, and by the time I realize what he has just said, Julia has taken my arm and led me upstairs to her private sitting room for serious talk about good works and bonnets. (6)

The plot romps off from here, told in passages that alternate between the hero's voice and the heroine's (this is not a convention I find nearly as irritating as some do, and I think it works fairly well here).  Inigo and Philomena find themselves entangled in the classic fake betrothal (this one agreed between them in a water closet).  They fight against their growing attraction, since a real marriage doesn't seem to be in either's best interest.  He introduces her to his mistress (an actress named, of course, Fanny) and their child, leaving her in some perplexity as to the current status of that relationship.  They frolic off to a brothel with the Association to offer a lady of the night the salvation of a position as Philomena's maid, only to discover that many harlots make a better and more dignified living than a lady's maid ever could.

In other words, like in every good romp (a near cousin to the farce, and of course the sex farce), the plot becomes increasingly ludicrous and implausible as the tale unfolds.   It is only a matter of time before we find Inigo declaring his undying love for Philomena while they both lie in his mistress's enormous bed next to Fanny and the baby.

And the thing is, all this ludicrous plotting was lively, but oddly unsatisfying.  Mullany writes with such wit and verbal ingenuity that I found myself almost wishing it had all been in the service of a more realistic world-building - something more along the lines of a traditional Regency.  A Jane Austen.  Not every romance is best served by those conventions, but I couldn't shake the feeling that Mullany would do it very, very well.

There is an additional problem of characterization, one that may be particular to me or may be endemic to the tone of books like these: these characters were often silly to the point of alienating my sympathy.  There are early traces of the hero as a humorless rooster:

The stranger seizes my hand. 'Good God!' he exclaims. 'You must be young Inigo.'

Young Inigo? Who the devil is this man to address me so?

'I see you don't remember me.  But how could you?' He pumps my hand up and down with manly vigor. 'Well, well.'

His hands are rough and his face is pleasant enough, square and weather-beaten, lines at his eyes.  Soberly if well dressed, he must be a well-off farmer or sailor, at a guess.  Certainly not a gentleman.

'Of course, you were still in petticoats,' he continues.

I've had enough and withdraw my hand.  'Insult me again, sir, and I shall demand satisfaction.' (8)

Luckily he loosens up considerably in the pages that follow.

But Philomena herself seems largely to be based on some of the most delightfully hateable characters from Austen - Kitty and Lydia Bennet, with their bonnet obsessions and rampant flirtations.  Lydia in particular is the culprit in one of two literary moments that consistently make me fling a book across the room, even when I have gone to some lengths to prepare myself for them, psychologically.  The first is when Laurie falls in love with Amy after having been rejected by Jo in Little Women.  The second is the incident in which Lydia claims precedence from her elder sister Jane, because she is now a married woman, despite the fact that her elopement has nearly ruined the rest of the family.  Rage.  Endless, righteous outrage. This bodes very ill for my sympathetic identification with her.

The long and the short of it?  A fast read, and a fun one, but I look forward to a richer world from Mullany's pen.



The Rules of Gentility (2007)
Janet Mullany
**1/2

Fellow YA devotees...

... hie ye to Persnickety Snark, which (besides having a brilliant blog name) is in the midst of running down the results of a massive poll of the top 100 Young Adult novels.

Some of my favorites have already made an appearance in the ranks of 50-100, like the sublime Fire by Kristin Cashore, Maria V. Snyder's gripping Poison Study, Patrick Ness's addictive The Knife of Never Letting Go, and Francesca Lia Block's bracingly bizarre Weetzie Bat.

I have also been moved by the list to add some books (of course I have) to Mt. TBR:

• Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margie Stohl
• Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
• Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
• Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr
• The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
• Glass Houses by Rachel Caine
• Whale Talk by Chris Cutcher

What favorites haven't we seen yet?  What would you add?  I am thinking Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books....