i completely understand bananamania now. i definitely understood it with her previous works but wow, i really fucking get it. it's so hard to properly recommend/review this book without spoiling, but it's so good. go read it.

another one for the banana bingo cards out there. actually not as many common themes as some of her later works but there's some posthumous lesbianism, which is one hell of a statement in and of itself. we've got a very progressive take on transsexuality for the 1980s imo (which does make me want to look more into what the general social attitudes towards transness were like in japan in the 80s. if anyone has info on that i'd love it). even though eriko is referred to as a man a few times throughout the book (by others and by herself), it does pretty consistently refer to her using she/her both in narration and in dialogue between characters, save for a few times that were in discussion to her pre-transition past. i know the bar is on the ground for this comparison, but it's definitely a much better portrayal than RHPS. any of my transfem friends and folks reading this, i would absolutely love some insight from that perspective on this, with consideration to the time of publication. the blurb for the book refers to "mothers" and "free-spirited young women", referring to both Mikage and Eriko. Here's the biggest spoiler though; Eriko dies midway through. She's murdered at her club, in what is described as a stalking/rejection type situation. She is said to have killed her killer in her final moments, which does strike me as an "even in the end, she is strong and won't be buried passively". the rest of the story follows her son and Mikage as they navigate this combined grief. yoshimoto writes grief in a style that's hard to separate yourself from the characters, and it's a fantastic part of her writing. overall i loved the book, 10/10.

soul-healing for my autism, legitimately. 'autism' is never said out-right, but keiko is so explicitly autistic that i can't imagine a serious argument against it. a woman who finds a place that feels just right for her working in a convenience store and yet feels pressure from outside forces to dislodge herself from the normalcy those same pressures begged her to find. keiko's narration is especially healing because she doesn't ever seem to consider it a negative part of herself that needs correcting, but moreso a way to get her friends and family to shut up and give her some peace. i tore through this book in a single day, impossible to put down. please go read it.

i had to go on goodreads to try and find the name of the other character since it's been a little while since i finished this one, and man people over there do not know how to read a book with their brains. anyway shiraha is another character who seems to fit well into the archtype of 4chan incel autism, and i think his perspective is a fantastic foil to keikos. they both have this internal knowledge/attitude of "the world has an expectation of normalcy and conformity and those who do not fit this are punished in society", but they have wildly different ways of navigating this, and it makes them clash in an interesting way. i do love how keiko does not end up being "fixed" in any way at the end. she goes back to her convenience store position just as she wanted. it's a very autistic "be who you are, not who the world expects you to be" type of story. loved it.

honestly this work is hard to describe without spoiling anything. trigger warning for like, everything. but overall very good read. Kawabata's works thus far all seem to have this consistent energy of "what the fuck is wrong with all of you" in the best kind of way. also, not sure if it's just the books I happen to pick up or if it's a consisent theme in japenese contemporary literature but uh. yeah more lesbians. absolute disaster lesbians at their finest. also very interesting pov shift that i haven't seen much in other works, where the main pov of the novel slowly shifts from one character to the other. interesting stylistic choice that worked out very well in my opinion.

is this what lolita is like? also damn this hits the bingo card for triggering topics. pedophilia, attempted suicide, miscarriage, psych wards, dead parents, whatever else isn't coming to mind right now. also insane love triangle shit going on. keiko's energy is crazy. "ill kill him for you, ill ruin his life, ill destroy his family for you. tell me to do it and i will. please please please" girl calm down. also kind of like how it doesn't really strongly attempt to play oki as a sympathetic character and instead kind of lets him fade out as irrelevant except for the damage he's done. but his perspective just. stops. also the open ending is great. i love an interpretive ending.

a very quick and interesting read! I had only intended to start it as some light reading before bed and ended up finishing it in one quick setting. in comparison to some of the other books i've seen (and consequently checked out from the library after reading this one) it's a much smaller work than some of his other ones. this stood out to me despite not being an author i've read before because the version that my libary had, the front cover opened upwards? holding the book open without damaging it was kind of a nightmare, but artistically it's a fascinating and unique choice that I love. the strangeness of the book itself and all of the images dispersed throughout definitely added to the atmosphere. the story follows a boy who enters a strange labyrinth underneath his library while innocently trying to check out some books, and meets a very strange cast of characters along the way. apparently it's sometimes classified as a book for children, but i would not hand this to a child personally, and it was in the adult section of my local library as well. it's dark and weird and very good, i immediately checked out several other works by the author following this read.

what the fuck? what? fantastic book, don't get me wrong, but what?? sheep man? old man eating brains? young teen interested in ottoman tax collection? the poor bird?? this book was absolutely as much of a fever dream as the physical copy suggested. i don't even properly know what to say. i don't know if there's an audience for people who read books while intoxicated but i would not recommend that especially for this one lol.

TL:DR; grown man who hates himself so so bad gets into an imaginary battle of wits with a troubled and troublesome teenager and they get up to shenanigans through the course of an evening. This is a pre-read of mine for Dazai's other, more notable work, No Longer Human. I might get some analysis ideas and then go back and do a second read/annotation of this one before I start NLH. If I decide to come back, I may update this review or make a new one. Not too bad, not as gripping or interesting as some of my other reads, but I do think the narrator was charming to follow in a clumsy way and it did spark a few laughs through the read.

The first two-ish pages are just Oh My God Man Go To Therapy. The rest is similar but not as bad. I do enjoy how it ended with "and it was all a dream" in such a cliche way. On a scale from "and the moral of the story is the power of friendship! :)" to "man wouldn't that be fucked? anyway here's the weather" it's definitely closer to the latter but again, still a quaint and charming read.

Kawakami is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. Her stories are very short and sweet and have a beautiful air of whimsy about them. Absolutely perfect reads for a nice cozy afternoon at home or at the library. This collection has three stories, and each of them are playful and interesting. Kawakami has a fascinating way of telling stories with insanely absurd details and writing them off casually that makes the reader feel as if this strange thing is just an average part of life. Since they are just short stories, it is hard to give a proper summary without spoiling any of it. It was a very quick read, so I'd recommended seeking it out for yourself and giving it a read if you like surrealism, fantasy, (lesbians), and books that feel like a dream overall.

STORY NUMBER 1 IS DISASTER YURI!! Okay, now that I've gotten that off my chest. Apparently Yoshimoto isn't the only Japanese contemporary author with a knack for lesbians and incest in her writing. why do you people keep trying to fuck your brothers. I did really enjoy the book tho. The first story was so complex and tumultuous that the other two felt tame by comparision. As I said in the spoiler-free version, I love how Kawakami has a tendency to gloss over strange details in a way that makes them blend in as if they weren't strange. Oh, you know, someone in the family just vanishes one day. Everybody has that, duh. I personally love it.

oh my god she's at it again. i swear she must inject her books with crack or something because once you start it's so hard not to read it all in one sitting. this one follows a young woman who starts to have premonitions about her own life and past, and runs away to her strange and quirky aunt's house to try and understand what it all means. i started it before bed and read until i passed out then finished it the next day at the library. gentle plot twists and mysteries that make you desperate to find out what comes next without spiking my blood pressure like im watching somebody else play resident evil. the characters are all pleasantly strange in their own ways, and the story has a beautiful way of untangling each of them until everything starts to make sense and you feel like you know them personally.

while looking at other reviews of N.P. for inspiration on how i wanted to structure this page, i saw someone joke about a banana yoshimoto book bingo with spaces like "incest", "age gaps", "abortion", "lesbianism", etc. and now i'm starting to get why. this time it's only incest by law, the age gap isn't quite as notable, the abortion is only a quick mention or two, and i think the lesbianism is just a natural tendancy of the author. and this is not a negative criticism in any way, just to be clear. i love works that explore "problematic" themes in ways that are interesting and fun and don't feel like a parent or teacher breathing down your neck about how wrong it is. in the current age of social media and media literacy i think we could all stand to be exposed to these types of things and be a little more normal about them rather than crucifying anybody that even thinks about age gaps (or etc.) without surrounding it with several disclaimers.

this book is a collection of short stories that are all tied together and connected to one another, which makes it a perfect book for when you want to read on your break but need to get up and go quickly in case of emergency without having to stop mid-chapter. each story progressively blurs the lines between reality and surrealism/fantasy. at first you react something like "odd but plausible, could be a metaphor or a lost-in-translation thing". and then a while after you're more like "no what the hell, that's not how this works. that's not how being a human being works". i'd love to go back when the motivation strikes me and annotate this book. ideally i'd like to create a relationship map of the recurring neighborhood characters.

that is NOT how babies are made! seriously these characters are all over the place and i loved falling further and further into the madness. at first most of the stories seem like they could be true. fucked up in some cases (the hachiro lottery) but still plausible. and then you get into things like the zero-gravity day or whatever the hell they were using to scare kids with how babies are made.

This is one of those books that you end up reading through in a single sitting, solely because the question of "what in the entire fuck is wrong with all of you people" holds on so strongly that you can't bear to put it down. That might seem a bit harsh, but I did have to stop midway through the first part to make a character relationship/affairs chart just to keep up with all of the entangled relationships. The book follows this fascinating warfare of indirect social cues and minor micro-aggressions of each of the characters against each other. I read the entire book in under 24 hours and half of that was on the clock. I love a story where I have a hard time figuring out who's side I'm supposed to be on. The context of the time and author does shine through in certain parts (a man living in the allied occupation of japan immediately following WW2) but it is still a greatly worthwhile read. If I could read it again fresh, I would have liked to understand more about the cultural significance and specifics of tea ceremonies at the time before going into it, since that is the foundation for the rest of the story. Despite that, I do not feel like I've lost a significant amount of story by going in without that knowledge.

MOMMY ISSUES!! Actually I think everybody has all of the issues. What do you MEAN you fucked your dad's mistress? And then got the hots for her daughter after she killed herself? Breakup so rough you get haunted by MILFs. The relationships here are messy, especially considering there are only roughly ~10? named characters? I really did start keeping a chart of "who fucked who" and "who is dead". Also evil ass cliffhanger. I genuinely can't decide if I want to believe she's alive or not. Perfect ending but so so evil. Someone please read this and talk with me.

N.P. is a story about a young woman called Kazami and how-- in the span of one summer-- her life gets tangled up with the people and events surrounding a book of the same title that seemed to be cursed. It follows her as she interacts with different people whose lives are also connected to N.P., and how they all try to make sense of it. It's hard to summarize properly without spoiling it. I saw this book recommended in passing on Pinterest and picked it up from the library the next time I was there, and I almost finished it before we had even left the library. This book definitely drags you into the story from the start and has you hanging on. The characters are just so fascinating, and the story itself borders on supernatural in a unique way. It touches on a lot of difficult and thought-provoking topics that you wouldn't always expect from works written at the time. The writing itself is simple but evocative; it paints a very clear picture without making you have to look up every other word. I really enjoyed reading this! My only itch is that the pace of the story itself is a little difficult to follow at times. As most of the characters in the novel are translators by hobby or profession, it does talk in depth about the work, challenges, and emotional baggage of being a translator, and I loved the insight that each of the characters provide in this regard.

I don't have the book in front of me anymore since I just returned it to the library, but the back of book blurb from the author said something along the lines of "This book contains many subjects that I enjoy writing about, such as incenst, lesbianism, death, the occult, and fate". Which is a fantastic summary of some of the bigger topics that this book covers. Right from the first page, it's revealed that the (fictional) author of N.P., Sarao Takase, had committed suicide, and it later reveals that those who have attempted to translate the work into Japanese have met the same fate-- including the narrator's (much older) boyfriend, Shoji. Later, she is reintroduced to the two children of the author, Otohiko and Saki, who she had met at an event previously with Shoji. Both siblings are haunted by the book and their father's passing, but in different ways. We also later meet Sui. I realized later after reading that some of the English translations of the book contain a minor mistranslation of the relationship between two characters, Otohiko and Sui. They are called "step-siblings" but later how they are described more accurately would translate to "half siblings", as they do share a blood parent. Which is an important distinction to make, as they are also in a romantic and sexual relationship. This book covers a lot of darker topics, and while nothing is every explicitly stated to be supernatural, it has a very surreal air to it. The pacing can be a little difficult to follow, between flashbacks and other exposition, but it didn't really hinder my ability to follow along. Overall, I really enjoyed this story and can't wait to get my hands on some of Yoshimoto's other works.