The Lake

 

The Lake / Banana Yoshimoto
translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich
Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011, c2005.
188 p.

Even though Women in Translation Month is now over, I was still reading some great books at the end of the month. I have taken a few days off of reviewing but I now have to catch up and share some of these fabulous reads. 

This one is another novel by an old favourite, Banana Yoshimoto. It's also a bit more strange than we usually get from her. It features two young, disaffected people; a female artist and a man about her age who she meets after they watch each other from their apartment windows for a while. 

They become friends of a sort, in a kind of relationship, despite the issues that he seems to suffer from. She slowly discovers more about his past, and realizes that he's had a traumatic event in his childhood. It's connected to a cult that kidnapped him and other children, which he eventually managed to escape from (this is loosely inspired by the real-life Aum Shinrikyo cult). 

They go together to visit two very strange siblings who live by The Lake, a pair that were in the same cult as he was - a difficult step for him to take. These siblings are tiny, mystical, and odd, and their influence permeates the lives of our two Tokyo based characters. The girl gets a commission for a large mural on a school wall, and uses her experience at The Lake to inspire her images. And slowly the relationship between the two grows and solidifies. 

It's a bit of an eerie, darker read in some ways, but it takes trauma seriously and lets the characters develop slowly. There are uncanny elements but you see how the story ties everything together, and gives a sense of growth and uplift in the end. I found it interesting, different, and memorable, even if not quite my favourite of her works so far.