never appeared. It’s a one-summer stand, I’m afraid. 20 months ago

Her best book so far. The character Tsgumi is complicated, well developed. At odds with herself if not the world.

I think Tsgumi is a good end to the summer Banana reading program. I’ll save her other works for next year. 20 months ago

3 short stories in one book. More of Yoshimoto’s ghosts, love, with, of corse, little plot and little need for plot resolution. amusing but not deep.

I finished it in a state of insomnia. 21 months ago

She read it one day and said I might be able to as well.
It is in line behind two others. 22 months ago

If it were any other time of year, I would cast Banana across the room upon reading her. There is something greatly irritating about her style. It may be the fault of jangly translation, but I doubt it. Her books are rife with vapid colloquialisms and too damn many conversational ghosts. I am frustrated by her, but every summer I haul her out and see what she’s up to. She is nervy and edgy in a way that is both gentle and brash. She is apologetic and not all at the same time. She has become a fixture of summer, and this year is no exception. There are energy and ennui in her writing – a good fit for languid evenings. 23 months ago

A long and winding novel: Amrita, by Banan Yoshimoto.

The book is full of the mundane, ocassionally discussed delicately and with great insight. It’s not enough, this alone. Yoshimoto knows this and drops in broken families and suicides and murder and other whatnots that go unexplained, and ghosts and out of body and the other more interesting things and Herman Hesse water symbolism (including snow) to bolster interest. It’s enough to hold me to the end.

She admits this is not her best effort in a post script to the english translation. I will library her for other works, soak them in. If this is her worst, it is enough to get it out of the way and look forward to better. I mean, really, Rat is never wrong about such things. So yes. I will. I promise. 23 months ago

I found her book Amrita. “Sure!” I said to m’self. “I’ll read anything!”

So here I am plowing along. Getting, quite frankly, bored with tedious descriptions of room adornmnets or jasmine teas and what not, until a line dropped in about the murder last night grabs m’self. So I read along for another line dropped in about a ghost of somebody not dead. And there ya go. I’ll finish though it is like slow fishing. I’m thinking “Hey! At the end maybe this girl with hair covering her face crawls through the telly and all is well!” 23 months ago

is a custom, if not tradition. Consumed: Hard Boiled and Hard Luck.

This little book has the requisite ghosts and conversational morbidity that define nearly all of her novels.

If you find yourself in a dream, and in this dream you are speaking to the ghost of a lover who committed suicide a year ago this very day, and you waken with a stone in your pocket that is the same as the ones you see as you walk an eerie road just before you stop for ramen and sake at an inn that burns down an hour after you leave… you are in a Banana Yoshimoto novel. 23 months ago