Scan barcode
A review by flying_monkey
Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
Banana Yoshimoto was one of my favourite authors when I was younger, when Kitchen and NP came out in English, and she's produced sporadically interesting books ever since. Broadly speaking they all contain a combination of love, loss, community and food, often with a dash of the supernatural. Moshi Moshi was originally written as a newspaper serial, which explains some of the repetition / periodic updating that takes place in the story. It is narrated by a young woman in her early 20s called Yoshie, whose musician father has recently died, killed in a murder-suicide by a woman neither she nor her mother knew. After the loss, she ups and moves from her privileged neighbourhood, Meguro, to the a grimier, hipper area of Tokyo, Shimokitazawa. One feature of the book is that most of the characters and places are only very thinly fictionalized versions of real people and places. The cafés, restaurants and even the neighbourhood itself are all based on the real Shimokitazawa, or at least the Shimokitazawa that was: Yoshimoto makes it clear in her afterword, which is as political as I've ever seen her be, that the neighbourhood is being destroyed by the march of chainstores and gentrification, like so many other similar neighbourhoods in Tokyo or any other major world city. Yoshie, who has trained in food service, finds a job in a perfect little bistro run by an older woman she admires, and then just when she thinks she's finding herself, her mother pitches up at her tiny apartment and announces she's going to live there with Yoshie for a while. In fact, her mother, who had lived all the time Yoshie has known her as a "Meguro madam", the kind of pefectly-groomed, upper middle-class Japanese wife and mother you'll immediately recognise if you've lived in Japan, seems to fit even more easily into boho Shimokitazawa than Yoshie does, and is soon wearing funky 2nd-hand threads and working in a tea shop. Yoshie gets involved with a man she thinks she loves, and then all kinds of events force change and reconsideration on her.
So far, so mundane, right? This sounds like a typical Japanese 'woman's novel.' But it's really not. Banana Yoshimoto has always had more than an edge of the perverse and the creepy. She's not, as some of the goodreads reviews seem to think, in any way 'cute' (I wonder if these people just think everything Japanese is cute). The weirdness starts with the whole situation with Yoshie's father and the mysterious women, who is not only portrayed as having some kind of supernatural power over men, but also quite early on is revealed to be a long-lost but close blood relative. The suggestions of ghostliness and incest don't end there either. Yoshie's father may or may not be haunting their old apartment. Yoshie's sexual relationships in the novel both have a direct connection to her dead father, one of them, because of the way in which Yoshie knows the man concerned, seems almost more incestuous then her father's relationship with the 'devil-woman'.
None of this really goes anywhere, and it's all treated as simply part of Yoshie growing up, but I think it would be a mistake to treat this novel as superficial as some reviewers do. Like a lot of Japanese art, it's the space inbetween that says a great deal, and what is left unwritten, what is not admitted by our narrator (why does everyone trust her account anyway?) is as interesting as what is written and said. There are hints of this throughout - the bright and hard-working Yoshie makes several references to her 'other' side, her darkness and perversion, and its intriguing to imagine a whole shadow novel that narrates things entirely from this side.
So far, so mundane, right? This sounds like a typical Japanese 'woman's novel.' But it's really not. Banana Yoshimoto has always had more than an edge of the perverse and the creepy. She's not, as some of the goodreads reviews seem to think, in any way 'cute' (I wonder if these people just think everything Japanese is cute). The weirdness starts with the whole situation with Yoshie's father and the mysterious women, who is not only portrayed as having some kind of supernatural power over men, but also quite early on is revealed to be a long-lost but close blood relative. The suggestions of ghostliness and incest don't end there either. Yoshie's father may or may not be haunting their old apartment. Yoshie's sexual relationships in the novel both have a direct connection to her dead father, one of them, because of the way in which Yoshie knows the man concerned, seems almost more incestuous then her father's relationship with the 'devil-woman'.
None of this really goes anywhere, and it's all treated as simply part of Yoshie growing up, but I think it would be a mistake to treat this novel as superficial as some reviewers do. Like a lot of Japanese art, it's the space inbetween that says a great deal, and what is left unwritten, what is not admitted by our narrator (why does everyone trust her account anyway?) is as interesting as what is written and said. There are hints of this throughout - the bright and hard-working Yoshie makes several references to her 'other' side, her darkness and perversion, and its intriguing to imagine a whole shadow novel that narrates things entirely from this side.