Asleep

Asleep / Banana Yoshimoto

trans. from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich

NY: Grove, 2000, c1989.

177 p.

I feel like I've been asleep all month! I nearly missed posting a single review this month, after posting every day in August. Yikes, how does that happen? 

I still have a few books that I was finishing up at the end of my August Women in Translation marathon, and this is one of them. I love Banana Yoshimoto's work so when I saw this little book at the second hand book store I snapped it up. 

Like many of her books it has three short novellas making up the content. Each story is about a young woman who is asleep in her own life, whether metaphorically or as in the last story, often literally. 

In the first story, Night and Night's Travelers, a young woman narrates what happens to her family and her brother's girlfriends after he dies. She writes letters to his American ex-girlfriend, and is company for the Japanese one, Mari, their cousin. Mari starts sleepwalking, and the sister notes it all and takes care of her, but sees that the year of mourning has come to end for all of them except for Mari, who, she thinks, has been in mourning since her childhood. It's a soft, melancholy story.

The next, Love Songs, is a bit harsher, with more raw detail. It also has a hint of the otherworldliness that can appear in Yoshimoto's stories. A young woman who has been in a prickly love triangle, now over, is haunted in her sleep by the Other Woman. The man wasn't as important, apparently -- she doesn't really think much about him. This story is about what happens in her sleep, and in the long sleep of the other woman. Not as resonant as the first story, but interesting nonetheless. 

And the last story, Asleep, is where the literal expression of the title comes in. A young woman finds herself exhausted and sleeping all the time, when she falls into a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma. What should she do? Break it off? Continue? She's frozen and asleep in her own life, whether she's awake or not. But after an encounter with a woman in a park, who is a little bit eerie, things change for her. She says:

"I felt like I'd just woken up a moment ago, and everything looked so clear and beautiful it was frightening. Everything really was gorgeous. Those crowds of people walking through the night, the light from the paper lanterns dotting the arcade, the line of my boyfriend's forehead as he gazed straight up, eager for the fireworks to start, as we stood there in the slightly cool wind -- it was all so beautiful." 

When she shakes off sleep, life begins anew. 

In all of these stories, death, ending, and new beginnings intermingle. It's a style that I've noticed in all of Yoshimoto's work and gives it her particular twist. The beauty of living, the reality of dying, and how to carry on -- it's all there. I find her books compelling and always rereadable. Lots to think about in all of them, this one included.