Banana Yoshimoto
Banana Yoshimoto (吉本ばなな Yoshimoto Banana,(born 24 July 1964)
Slow-going Muse
This is a passage from her debut novel "kitchen".
"Steeped in a sadness so great I could barely cry, shuffling softly in gentle drowsiness, I pulled my futon into the deathly silent, gleaming kitchen. (...) I wanted to wake up in the morning light. Aside from that, I just drifted, listless. " [from "Kitchen" in 1987 / translated by Megan Backus]
She always writes about everyday lives using common words, but carefully expresses what she sees in her story.
The translator Megan Backus describes that her writing is "so beautifully balanced between the plain and the poetic, the clich?d and the overwhelming".
* Such a style of her arouses reader's sympathy in some cases but was criticized in other cases.
Her works were translated into more than 6 languages and was awarded in Asia and Europe.
Notable works:
Kitchen (1988)
Hardboiled and Hard Luck (1999)
Next author (Kazuo Ishiguro)