In general, the synthesis is always productive, valuable and generates new enriching approaches. in the literary sense, the ability to appreciate very different perspectives in order to end up feeding on all of them, ensures a more fertile creative field, without restrictions of genres or labels.
and that’s what happens with banana yoshimoto or mahoko yoshimoto (if we stick to the author behind the pseudonym). because this Japanese author has been influenced, in that previous imaginary necessary for every writer, by writers as far away as truman capote or stephen king.
You are reading: Banana yoshimoto best books
Probably the singular mixture converges in one of the most remarkable aspects of this author: the dialogues. Knowing how to transmit much more than a conversation is not an easy task, it is probably the most difficult thing for a writer.
making the characters speak and that they are in charge of arousing emotions or transmitting sensations can only be done through the empathic capacity of the writer, that facility to get into the skin of the character he plays. if we add to this the learning of how other greats like capote did it with his conversations of extraordinary sensitivity between gray scenarios and king with his gift to bring each character closer, however rough or strange it may be.
so I recommend reading yoshimoto’s books it ends up being a recommendation about characters that exude truth, and that just for that they could win you over to their cause. but if, in addition, the narrative tension makes even the most existential story advance like a live rhythm, it can be said that the author ends up composing interesting novels that we savor with pleasure. current stories that raise debate about the lifestyle of the 21st century, with its contradictions, its temptations and an intense feeling of loneliness as the only companion with whom to face everything.
the 3 best books recommended by banana yoshimoto
lizard
yes, a storybook as the first on my list. I have my reasons. and it is that if before I pondered the quality of painting unforgettable characters, nothing better than the power of the brief to show that sum of characters exposed to connected experiences on an urban and magical existentialism.
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a monstrous city like tokyo can harbor soulmates. a sunset between the first lights of the big city can be the excuse to intertwine existence with the thread of the peremptory character of life, of yearning and final hope between a common sunset of melancholy.
banana yosimoto opens the doors to the Japanese spirituality of everyday life. presents us with a set of stories with which to immerse ourselves in the Japanese idiosyncrasy in its most intimate part.
and yet the feeling of life ends up being very similar here or there, even though the world built around it may be very different. the six protagonists who go through their corresponding six stories, start with a supposed intention of dissecting Japanese social groups into a kind of typical characters for different stripes.
but the final portrait of men and women, young and old, serves to erase all previous labels. there is no ideological or moral intentionality, it is about discovering how equal we are when we explore our surrounding world, from within.
The only difference is the experiences that have guided us towards one or another way of acting. but the human being, stripped of everything, is composed identically both of a large part of water, and of similar emotions.
we stop loving in the same way at twenty as at seventy, we suffer losses with the same restlessness, we wake up with the same cellular need to survive, we get lost along the way with the same closure. and everything, absolutely everything, ends up aimed at finding happiness on some occasion, however fleeting it may be. Yosimoto draws each character of this current Japan in his particular environment.
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we decipher the ancestral tradition in some of them and discover the same process of globalization in others. and we are still fascinated by the differences. but the really fascinating thing is realizing that common feeling that governs us all, from the land of the rising sun to the other side of the world.
kitchen
yoshimoto has already achieved great recognition with this, his first work. It was probably the irruption of the surrealist approach, of the existential metaphor that supposed that a young woman decided to spend the rest of her life in the kitchen of her house, hidden from the world after being alone on the planet. p>
In his kafkaesque becoming, mikage finally opens up to yuichi and decides that he is just another lost soul like him, and ends up deciding to go live at home, along with yuichi’s mother, who is really just posing as his maternal identity in order to maintain the untenable reality of abandonment and loneliness.
A space of estrangement is created between the three characters but, shared between them, it ends up being even more reliable and true than everything that may be outside.
Only the beautiful things, the extravagances, the rarities can only maintain their beauty as long as they do not interact with the gray of the world where one no longer believes in anything to survive.
the lake
There is no doubt that the death of a loved one is a rewriting of one’s own life. Banana Yoshimoto writes about this idea in many of his books. but it is probably in this novel that the idea takes on the most tragic tone.
Because in the story there is a strange dance between death and love, like a tango between lovers who at times drown in desire and then repudiate each other on their stormiest days.
the romance between the protagonists of this story dawns as something fragile, they do not surrender to the physical until their love is very advanced, perhaps they are for each other their mutual book on which to write the new life after death death….
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