Search results for ""author banana yoshimoto""

N.P. is the title of a last collection of short stories by a celebrated Japanese writer. Written in English while he was living in Boston, the book may never see print in his native Japan: each time a new translator takes up the task, death gets in the way.N.P. is an extraordinarily powerful story of passion and friendship, the nature of love and the taboos surrounding it, confirming Banana Yoshimoto's place as one of Japan's most important writers.'The voice of young Japan.' Independent on Sunday

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''Poignant . . . deeply nostalgic.'' GLAMOUR''Strange, melancholy and beautiful.'' BRANDON TAYLOR''The supreme poet of solitude.'' SPECTATORThere was no past, no future, no words, nothing just the light and the yellow and the scent of dry leaves in the sun.Japan's internationally celebrated storyteller returns with five stories of healing and hope. Effortlessly beautiful, nostalgic and melancholy, the stories in Dead-End Memories explore the stories of five women who, following sudden and painful events, find solace in the blissful moments in everyday life.The daughter of a restaurant owner experiences a budding romance, accompanied by the ghosts of an elderly couple. After a scandalous near-death experience, an editor gains a new lease of life. A woman seeks refuge in the apartment above her uncle's bar after being betrayed by her fiancé. As Yoshimoto's gentle, effortless prose reminds us, one true miracle can be a

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Banana Yoshimoto has a magical ability to animate the lives of her young characters, and here she spins the stories of three women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning a lost lover, finds herself sleepwalking at night. Another, who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. A third finds her sleep haunted by another woman whom she was once pitted against in a love triangle. Sly and mystical as a ghost story, with a touch of Kafkaesque surrealism, Asleep is an enchanting book from one of the best writers in contemporary international fiction.

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Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about mothers, transsexuality, bereavement, kitchens, love and tragedy in contemporary Japan. It is a startlingly original first work by Japan's brightest young literary star and is now a cult film.When Kitchen was first published in Japan in 1987 it won two of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, climbed its way to the top of the bestseller lists, then remained there for over a year and sold millions of copies. Banana Yoshimoto was hailed as a young writer of great talent and great passion whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of modern literature, and has been described as 'the voice of young Japan' by the Independent on Sunday.

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From the beloved, bestselling author of Kitchen, comes a deeply haunting, heartwarming exploration of loneliness and painful memories set in Japan.'Polished, concise, emotionally rewarding.' Daily Mail'Reading Banana Yoshimoto is like taking a bracing, cleansing bath.' LING MA'Gorgeous . . . an invitation to explore [Yoshimoto's] unusual, alluring world.' The TelegraphI had a premonition of setting out on a journey and getting lost inside a distant tide ... It was the beginning of summer, and I was nineteen years old.Yayoi lives with her perfect, loving family - something 'like you'd see in a Spielberg movie'. But while her parents tell happy stories of her childhood, she is increasingly haunted by the sense that she's forgotten something important about her past.Deciding to take a break, she stays with her eccentric but beloved aunt Yukino. Living a life without order, Yukino seems to be protecting herself, but beneath this facade Yayoi starts to recover lost memories, and everything she knows about her past threatens to change forever. 'A sure and lyrical writer . . . Yoshimoto transforms the trite into the essential.' The New Yorker'Yoshimoto's novels are like jewel boxes.' Vanity Fair

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A celebrated actress who has died in mysterious and shocking circumstances leaves behind an unconventional extended family that includes an older sister, a woman in her twenties through whose eyes the story unfolds; a young brother who possesses mystical powers; and a fiancé who is writing a novel with uncanny parallels to his own story.'Her novels can have the effect of addictive drugs . . . Pathos, nostalgia, the sense of exquisite sadness at the fleetingness of life are key elements of beauty in Japanese aesthetics, and all are themes central to Yoshimoto's books.' The Times

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An elegiac story of two young cousins coming of age at the Japanese seaside, Goodbye Tsugumi is an enchanting novel from one of Japan's finest writers.Banana Yoshimoto's novels have made her an international sensation. Now she returns with a magical, offbeat story of a deep and complicated friendship between two female cousins that ranks among her best work.Maria is the only daughter of an unmarried woman. She has grown up at the seaside alongside her cousin Tsugumi, a lifelong invalid, charismatic, spoiled and occasionally cruel. Now Maria's father is finally able to bring Maria and her mother to Tokyo, ushering Maria into a world of university, impending adulthood, and a 'normal' family. When Tsugumi invites Maria to spend a last summer by the sea, a restful idyll becomes a time of dramatic growth as Tsugumi finds love, and Maria learns the true meaning of home and family. She also has to confront both Tsugumi's inner strength and the real possibility of losing her.

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At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place - a naive book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time... The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people's company. As one character puts it, 'The world is full of delicious things, you know.'

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