1) because shôjo are not adults, they can perceive things that those in control of the society cannot;
2) because they are not young men, they can see things that those who will one day rule society cannot see; and
3) because they are no longer children, they are fully aware of who controls Japan.
In order to make some sense of shôjo manga, it is necessary to first frame them within the larger context of manga in general and Japanese society as a whole; in the U.S. there is no counterpart whatsoever to this medium...In the U.S., comic books are stories of the super-powered brawling of muscular men in tights, and are read mostly by young boys and a small but dedicated following of adult men. Only a handful of women and girls read comic books, and a cursory examination of a representative sample of comic books reveals why this is the case: American comics are decidedly masculinist, despite the efforts of some artists and publishers to bring "women's lib" into the world of the X-Men (who are not all men), Batman, and all the other Something-Or-Another-Men. The fundamental premise of the American comic book--superheroes foiling the evil plans of supervillains by means of physical force--is hardly conducive to feminist revision, or even feminine revision.
Contrast this with Japan, where one-third of all publications are some form of manga; where the best selling manga magazine--which is far and away the best selling magazine of any kind in Japan--claims a circulation of over six million; where about a third of Japanese in their thirties, half of those in their twenties, and nearly seventy percent of those between sixteen and nineteen years of age say they like manga; where about forty percent of all Japanese sixteen or older read manga regularly; and where subject matter runs the gamut from history and science fiction to gourmet cooking and golf....What distinguishes shôjo manga from the popular shônen, "youth" or "boys'," genre of manga, is an emphasis on relationships over action. Even shôjo manga that take the form of science fiction, fantasy or historical pieces are primarily concerned with the complexities of interpersonal relations, romantic and otherwise.
One of the judges for the Kaien prize, senior novelist and critic Nakamura Shinichirô, said of Kitchen that
This is a work written on a theme, and with a sensibility, that the older generation of which I am a part could not have imagined. It is the product of an abandon completely indifferent to literary traditions. Its naïve rejection of the very question of whether it does or does not conform to conventional concepts is precisely what makes it strike me as a new sort of literature. (Mitsui and Washida 1989: 143)
Nakamura, while guarded in his praise, is nonetheless generous in thinking of Bananas writing as literature, in Japanese more than English a high-cultural appellation. Others have wondered. She has been labeled the cutting edge of the new Japanese minimalism, ultimate in the sense that she is the perfect pop-cultural disposable (tsukaisute) author, like the manga comic books with which she is legitimately compared. The rejection to which Nakamura refers includes the entire high-cultural pantheon: Bananas debts, she tells us are to horror-novelist Stephen King and manga writer Iwadate Mariko.
Critics, however, often view Banana and her success as final confirmation of a fundamental shift in how one is to understand culture in Japan since the early 1970s, particularly literary culture. Nakamuras bewildered and back-handed praise is one register of how Banana represents what older generations of writers have dreaded: the victory of the popular, which is to imply non-oppositional, culture over the critical potential long (if anxiously) associated with junbungaku, or pure literature. Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburô, a prominent critic on the left for intellectual literature committed to social change, has bemoaned nearly two decades or irrelevancy of serious fiction for reading audiences in contemporary Japan.In the widely reprinted essay A Novelists Lament that appeared on the eve of Bananas debut, Oe complained that Japanese intellectuals, including students at the major metropolitan universities, no longer look to serious literary writing for new models of the future. What Oe means when he uses words such as serious and models are the discourses of his own New Left generation raised on Sartre, Mao and James Dean and committed to the romance of the artist as high-brow disaffected rebel. Banana and a host of other young writers today such as Tawara Machi, Murakami Haruki and Takahashi Genichirô comprise in the words of pop musician Namba Hiroyuki the pure literature of the manga generation in a reference to the comics that fairly dominate the print side of Japanese popular culture today and which raise the ire of many critics.
Narratives spun out of speeding sound-bites, this postmodern textuality that Banana was both raised within and now reproduces in her own work cannot be countenanced as fully literary in the view of critics nostalgic for the times when writers believed themselves engaged in the work of a critical introspection that prepares consciousness for the prospect of social change. Bananas stories, given their idiomatic kinship with billboards, television commercials, pop songs and fashion magazines, appear to those critics as unconditional capitulation to the forces of commercialization so often cited as the nefarious agent behind the production of popular culture, a charge familiar in the west since Theodor Adornos famous essay on the depressing predictability of Tin Pan Alleys music.
The apparent victory of popular culture emblemized by Bananas success, and with its unsettling postmodernist traits, have produced apprehensive fears among those intellectuals convinced of modernist high cultures unique stake in issues of human freedom and individual worth. But Banana has clearly generated an enthusiastic response among readers who heretofore lacked a body of fiction with which to empathize, and those readers are not solely adolescent women. One of her criticsboth male and nearly middle-agedhas written of his and his wifes startling, exciting experience of identification with the vacuous (nani mo nai) sense of life represented in Bananas books. Her fans are reportedly attracted to her works because they are easy to understand, written in a style both colloquial and real.( 277-79)In Kitchen, for example, Mikage reflects upon the present moment and its radical dislocation from the past:
Sometimes I realize that I used to have a family, a real family, but over time it grew smaller and smaller, until now I'm the only one left. When I think of my life in those terms, everything seems unreal. Time has passed, as it always does, in these rooms where I've grown up, but everyone else is gone. What a shock.
It's just like science fiction. This vast, dark universe.
One might speculate that Banana's characters choose to assimilate their experience in terms of popular culture (e.g., 'science fiction') because their pasts are only available in the form of its artifacts. Unlike previous eras, when often only our iconography was taken from the every-day and transported into the legitimated higher cultures we thought our authentic home, we and Banana can now be said to live in the popular. (288)
. . .In an essay pointedly entitled 'Family' (Famirii) she reflects:
Usually the world is a terribly difficult place to be, and lots of times we end up living our lives apart from each other. That's why the family is a fort built for us to flee into. Inside that fort both men and women become symbols, and there protect the home. I like that fact. I really think it's necessary, even when it's hard.
This defensive concept of family, a response to the stresses of a modern life that demands the participation of each person in differentiated, specializded and scattered tasks, is one in which both genders become 'symbols', which presumably means we act out roles (such as 'mother' and 'father') that are certainly useful and expedient in 'protecting the home', but are not by any means necessarily determined or inevitable for 'men and women'. (292)
It is not unusual to hear popular culture today identified with a kind of macro-nostalgia in which there is no space we authentically occupy, and so that culture tries to fill the gap by manufacturing images of both home and rootlessness. (Bananas works are an obvious example, but so is Little House on the Prairie.) Yet as Bananas remarks on the modern family would seem to imply, the attempt can fail due to its sheer eclecticism, for if we can so easily invent and re-invent our cultural representations of home, then in fact we have effectively eliminated the need for the institution in the first place. Perhaps family values, in Japan as well as the United States, become a national issue only once they are irretrievable. (305)
"I was crying for having been left behind in the night, paralyzed with loneliness." (67)
"Their happiness," meant "living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone." (59)
"No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive. That is what makes the life I have now possible." (59-60)
My spirits began to lift. I had done all I could.
I knew it: the glittering crystal of all the good times we'd had, which had been sleeping in the depths of memory, was awakening and would keep us going. Like a blast of fresh wind, the richly perfumed breath of those days returned to my soul...
Truly happy memories always live on, shining. Over time, one by one, they come back to life. (100)
And later she says:
"I came here from Izu by taxi. You see, Yuichi, how much I don't want to lose you..." (101)
The endless sea was shrouded in darkness. I could see the shadowy forms of gigantic, rugged crags against which the waves were crashing. While watching them, I felt a strange, sweet sadness. In the biting air I told myself, there will be so much pleasure, so much suffering. With or without Yuichi. (104, italics mine)
It was raining that hazy spring night. A gentle warm rain enveloped the neighborhood as I walked with directions in hand.My apartment building and the one where the Tanabes lived were separated by Chuo Park. As I crossed through, I was inundated with the green smell of the night. I walked, sloshing down the shiny wet path that glittered with the colors of the rainbow. (E 8) |
Yoru wa ame datta. Shitoshitoto, attakai ame ga machi wo tsutsumu kemutta haru no yoru wo chizu wo motte aruiteitta.Tanabeka no arusono manshon wa uchikara choudo chuuoukouen wo hasanda hantaigawa ni atta. Kouen wo nukete iku to, yoru no midori no nioide musekaeru youdatta. Nurete hikaru kouji ga nijiiro ji utsuru naka wo pashapasha aruite itta. (J 12) |
Just then, with the scratch of a key in the door, an incredibly beautiful woman came running in, all out of breath..."How do you do," she said in a slightly husky voice, still panting, with a smile. "I'm Yuichi's mother. My name is Eriko."This was his mother? Dumbfounded, I couldn't take my eyes off her. Hair that rustled like silk to her shoulders; the deep sparkle of her long, narrow eyes; well-formed lips, a nose with a high, straight bridge--the whole of her gave off a marvelous light that seemed to vibrate with life force. She didn't look human. (E 11) |
Soshite, doa ga gachagacha to aite, monosugoi bijin ga ikisekikitte hashirikonde kita no wa, sono toki datta...Kanojo wa haahaa iki wo tsukinagara sukoshi kasureta koe de, "Hajimemashite," to waratta. "Yuichi no haha desu. Eriko to moushimasu."Kore ga haha? Toku odoroki ijou ni watashi wa me ga hanasenakatta. Katamade no sarasara no kami, kirenagano hitomi no fukai kagayaki , katachi no yoi kuchibiru, sutto takai hana suji-soshite, sono zentai kara ka mo shi desareru seimeiryoku no yuremitaina azayakana hikari-ningen ja nai mitai datta. (J 17) |
I just had to go back for one more look at the kitchen. It was a really good kitchen.Then I stumbled over to the sofa that was to be my bed for the night and turned out the lamp. Suspended in the dim light before the window overlooking the magnificent tenth floor view, the plants breathed softly, resting. By now the rain had stopped, and the atmosphere, sparking, replete with moisture, refracted the night splendidly.(E 16) |
Petapeta to hadashi de daitokoro wo mou ikkai miniiku. Yahari, yoi daitokoro datta.Soshite, koyoui watashi no nedoko to natta sono sofaa ni tadoritsukuto, Denki wo keshita.Madobede kasukano akari ni ukabu shokubutsutachi ga 10 F kara no gouka na yakei ni fuchidorarete sotto ikidzuite ita. Yakei-mou, ame ga agatte shikke wo fukunda toumeina daiki ni kirakira kagayaite, sore wa migoto ni utsutte ita. (J 25) |
To avoid disturbing the |
Getsumei kari no kage |
No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive. This is what makes the life I have now possible.Inching one's way along a steep cliff in the dark: on reaching the highway, one breathes a sigh of relief. Just when one can't take any more, one sees the moonlight. Beauty that seems to infuse itself into the heart: I know about that. (E 59-60) |
Doushitemo, jibun ga itsuka shinu to iu koto wo kanji dzutsukite itai. Denai to ikite iru ki ga shinai. Dakara, konna jinsei ni natta.Yami no naka, kiritatta gakeppuchi wo jirijiri aruiki, kokudou ni detehotto iki wo tsuku. Mou takusan da to omoinagara miageru getsumei kari no, kokoro ni shimiiru youna utsukushsa wo watashi ga shitte iru.(J 91) |
Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends. Perhaps Eriko's was only a minor kind of greatness, but her light was sorely missed.(E 54) |
Ijinna jinbutsu wa iru dake de hikari wo hanachi, mawari no hito no kokoro wo terasu. Soshite, kieta toki ni dou shiyou mo naku omoi kage wo otosu. Sasayakana ijin sadatta ka mo shirenai keredo, Erikosan wa koko ni ite, soshite inaku natta.(J 86) |
Yoshimoto, Banana. Kitchen. Translated by Megan Backus. New York: Washington Square Press, 1993. (E = English Version)
Yoshimoto, Banana. Kitchin. Tokyo, 1991. (J = Japanese version)
Review
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, Translation by Megan Backus (Washington Square Press, New York, 1988, 152 pages)