Banana Yoshimoto
Japanese fiction of the late twentieth century produced writers who worked across multiple prose forms — novelists who were also essayists, storytellers who moved fluidly between registers. Banana Yoshimoto, born Mahoko Yoshimoto on July 24, 1964, in Bunkyō-ku, is a Japanese novelist, essayist, and short story writer who works in the Japanese language.
Educated at Nihon University, Yoshimoto writes under a pen name — a choice formalized under the Library of Congress authorized label "Yoshimoto, Banana, 1964-." Between 2002 and 2015, she rendered that name in hiragana. Her notable works include the novel Kitchen and Shirakawa yofune o yobune, titles that have sustained her presence across the literary landscape of her country.
Her writing has been recognized with a series of literary prizes spanning her career. These include the Kaien Shinjin Bungakusho, the Bunkamura Les Deux Magots Literature Award, the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize, the Murasaki Shikibu Prize, the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, and the Tanizaki Prize. The accumulation of these honors, across different stages of her career, marks the sustained critical attention her work has received in Japan.
Quotes by Banana Yoshimoto
Banana Yoshimoto's insights on:
Thanks so much for seeing, the first time you met us, that even though we’re like ghosts, the two of us, even though we’re not supposed to exist, we are alive.
Perhaps it’s because she spends all her time sleeping – she comes and goes just as she pleases in the world of her dreams, she’s free to go anywhere she wants. And that gives her access to much more information than people have who are up all the time.
Things that don’t matter at all to one person can hurt another so deeply it seems as bad as dying.
Akira often gets mad at me because he thinks I’m too nice to strangers, and cold as a fish at home. What can I do? He’s right, but that’s the way I am. I’m more enthusiastic about people I’ve just met, whom I barely know at all, than with old friends. Before the awkwardness of a new acquaintance has worn off, I’m ready to offer myself up to that person.
For ten years I had been protected, wrapped up in something like a blanket that had been stitched together from all kinds of different things. But people never notice that warmth until after they’ve emerged. You don’t even notice that you’ve been inside until it’s too late for you ever to go back – that’s how perfect the temperature of that blanket is.
From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up on living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I would go on living in the midst of a glomy depression, and that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I walked the night path calmly.
He was quiet in the way people are when they believe the world would get along just fine without them.
I got up and sprinted into the ocean, chasing my father. I’m in love with the moment when the water switches from being so cold you want to leap up into the air to something that feels just right against your skin.
