Banana

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When I looked at this title I kept on thinking about the music of Mike Oldfield's Moonlight Shadow. In the preface, the author mentions that she wished to dedicate this song to Mr Jiro Yoshikawa, who had introduced this music to her, the inspiration for this story. Instead, the words are short, sweet, and sharp, as each narrator falls upon their knife of grief and attempts to walk it off. Here, there is no sweeping away of the tragedy into a neat compartmentalization, a time to mourn and a time to thrive coexisting in carefully delineated measurements of a person's history. For how can the horror of a beloved one being taken away in such an unfairly abrupt and often nonsensical manner ever be reconciled, as if the matter could heal as cleanly as a broken bone knitting up in a predictable number of days? As if the evolution of coping with an overwhelming loss could be graphed for all affected, and therein calculate a formulaic equation specifically calibrated for speeding up the resolution as efficiently as possible. As if it was a lie that when it came down to it, one is alone and will always be alone with one's mind, and that is how the battle of mournful reconciliation must always be fought. So you get the idea, lots of info about something most of us never gave, well, a fig about. It is a fun read and you will find yourself saying (or thinking, if you don’t want to make the person next to you on the subway slowly edge away) “I did not know that.” Given that there are existential threats abroad to the common banana, and that we are not yet ready with a cross-bred version that is resistant to those threats, we should probably do what we can to appreciate the banana before it…um…splits. I remember the first time I ever understood that the retelling of ordinary events could become magic. I a teenager, just beginning to write, searching for inspiration. I’d always loved books about other worlds – science fiction, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan series, even old pulp novels I bought at a local junk shop. But it had only recently begun to occur to me that the greatest constructed worlds could be found in works that were considered to be ‘true’ literature. That point was made most sharply with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude…”

En la primera novela, Kichen, la autora establece una original o al menos curiosa mezcla entre lo fúnebre y lo gastronómico que empaña el resto de los subtemas, incluso el amoroso. I felt that I was the only person alive and moving in a world brought to a stop. Houses always feel like that after someone has died."The treatment of transgender issues in the novel is a little of its time and place (deadnaming, misgendering and confusion between transgender and transvestite all feature), although rather less cringeworthy now than another translated novel I read recently, Ruth. See Yuri Stargirl's blog for a well balanced take on this aspect. I cannot say that Banana Yoshimoto will be a contender for the Nobel Prize, but I can say that she delivers a strong argument for being one of the great writers currently writing today. Metaphors must be hard to translate, but this one is so mixed up, I grudgingly admire it: "The two of us, alone, were flowing down that river of light, suspended in the cosmic darkness, and were approaching a critical juncture." One of the important characters in the book, Eriko, is a transsexual woman, and Yoshimoto both has her speak her own truth and presents her in a very positive light as self-willed, resiliant, highly atttractive, extremely generous, and surrounded by loving friends. She is also a victim of anti-trans violence.

How about the notion that the banana was the fruit referred to in ancient texts about the Garden of Eden. The climate in the Fertile Crescent was not conducive to apples. And there is some softness in the translations of ancient writings. The forbidden fruit was called a fig, which is also what the banana was called. And really, doesn’t it seem a more fitting shape for the job? Which makes it all the more ironic that bananas are essentially asexual. They do not breed. The fruit we eat today came from cloned plants. Mass-consumption bananas has always come from plants that do not propagate themselves, but require man’s intervention.Maybe the two most prominent points are his overthrow of Honduras government and his acquisition of the United Fruit.

Siguiendo con mi costumbre de no alejarme demasiado tiempo de la literatura japonesa, elijo Kichen (1988) la ópera prima de Banana Yosimoto (1964-) para mi lectura. El libro consta de dos novelas cortas independientes (la segunda más breve, casi un cuento), pero con un nexo común: la muerte como tema principal. La muerte y, especialmente, los efectos que ésta causa sobre las personas que rodean a los fallecidos y que sienten un gran afecto por ellos. Can cooking help you cope with the despondency you feel from loss? I’m not talking about wolfing down garlic mashed potatoes from a pan; I’m talking about a multi-course gourmet meal that you are willing to toss out if it’s not perfect and start all over again. That’s the theme of Kitchen. Our main character is a twentyish-woman who lost her father at an early age and then her mother. She went to live with grandparents but her grandfather died, and then her grandmother, and now she has no living relatives. Revolving around the theme of dealing with loss, Kitchen focuses on two young women as protagonists and their perceptions of life and death.There's something about Japanese writers. They have the unparalleled ability of transforming an extremely ordinary scene from our everyday mundane lives into something magical and other-worldly. There were glimpses of something deeper. When overtly self-analytical, I don't think they worked, but some were genuinely poignant and thought-provoking.

if a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I'm grateful for it. Kitchen is definitely not the most ingeniously narrated tale ever. Rather it suffers from the monotony of brief, simple sentences that may not sit well with some readers who love eloquence. Once you've gotten through all the history of the two major banana companies - United Fruit (United Brands and later Chiquita) and Standard Fruit (Dole) - the book goes into the prominent dangers of disease and how various organizations are working to genetically cross Cavendish (the current most popular variety) with wild, heartier breeds to install disease resistan If I had lost a parent, partner or child, maybe I'd have been more engaged with this book, but I suspect my experience would be so different as to be barely comparable. I'm grateful that I'm not in the position to compare.

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A cousin to this genre is the micro-history on man-made constructs and other non-commodities including, but not limited to, home, cleanliness, color, reading, marriage, wives (but, interestingly, not husbands), cancer, rabies, sex, zero, infinity, rats, swearing, corpses, and many more. Perhaps it would be easy to label this as just a sentimental novel by an overrated novelist—but that may be missing the point. This is a powerful novel if allowed to be read as a powerful novel. It tries to give answers to difficult questions. Sometimes the novel succeeds. Sometimes it fails, even, dare I say, becomes hokey. But all of that can be whitewashed over by the simple notion that this novel achieves what other great novels achieve: the ability to be whatever the reader wants it to be.