Asleep

Rating:
Summary: The master storyteller is back!
Review: Banana Yoshimoto's novels have touched me in so many ways. Her lucid, subtle and disarming writing style is a work of art. She is a tour de force in contemporary fiction. I have waited a long time for the release of Asleep, and I am not disappointed.

The three novellas in Asleep are earnest, sensuous, eccentric, and extremely surreal. The three female characters in the book are bewitched into a spiritual and magical sleep. In Night and Night's Travelers, the first story, a woman finds herself sleepwalking at night. In Love Song, a woman's sleep is haunted by a rival whom she once competed with in a love triangle. And in Asleep, a woman loses her best friend to suicide. Also, she is having an affair with a man whose wife is in a coma. Things take a strange turn when she finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. The stories are very ambiguous; you have to pay attention to every detail in order to grasp their meaning. The magical realism in the stories is as mystical as a ghost story and the language is deceptively simple -- it is meant to play with the reader's mind.

I am awed by this incredible piece of fiction. The stories are very well done and interestingly nuance. This is her most creative work since Kitchen and her best collection of stories since Lizard. Powerful and spooky, Asleep will capture your heart. I strongly urge you to read this one!

Rating:
Summary: A dreamlike hazy world.
Review: Overcoming a loss is the subject of this book - much like Yoshimoto's other work. Yoshimoto's characters are always people on the verge of a breakdown of some sort; however, some mystical force is able to pull them back to life. Although this description might seem strange to people who have not read Yoshimoto before, it is accepted in Banana Yoshimoto's work. All of Yoshimoto's stories are a blend of the real and the unreal. On the one hand she can describe in detail the most daily and realistic activities and on the other hand her stories speak naturally of a supernatural force in life, be it intuition, visions or any other surreal happenings. Yoshimoto describes some powerful force that cannot be explained in the means we know but that somehow seems genuine in the world Yoshimoto creates. I guess it is accepted because Yoshimoto does not use any big words or declarations. She talks about events every person can relate to and the"force" she describes is really something that comes from within (the mind, the heart, the subconscious).
All of Yoshimoto stories have a spiritual sense to them which is achieved both by the story and the poetic language.
"Asleep" contains 3 stories that revolve around the subject of sleep: In the first story the narrator, a young woman, talks about the two loves of her dead brother. The narrator does not mention her mourning or her suffering. She describes other people and their loss and the bereavement comes out through every cherished memory and the troubling, bitter-sweet recollections. The writer tells us about her good relationships with the two women and learns what an important role they play in her life in the past and in the present.
The second story deals with a woman who escapes to alcohol. She feels the alcohol is like an obsession she cannot control. Something that clouds her days and nights. After she tackles an "open issue" from her past and comes to terms with herself and her "inner world" things are improving.
In the third story "Asleep" the heroine is struggling with the sleep that overtakes her whole day. She is drifting through a current emptiness in her life following a loss of a close soul. This character has a man in her life whose wife is in coma - thus sleep surrounds her from all sides. She learns to see that the sleep is there for a reason and to understand it as the friend she lost used to work in "sleeping next to people". Her job was to ensure these people that her presence is close by, and thus to free them from their troubling dreams. All these incoherent details and "weird" characters are beautifully woven together. Yoshimoto has a lovely way of describing people and the connections between them. My only criticism is that "Asleep" does not achieve the "perfect" level of "Kitchen". The story is sometimes very slow and reflective and therefore I gave it only 4 out of 5 points.

Rating:
Summary: Ugh
Review: The works of Banana Yoshimoto have long been an important feature of my bookshelf. I tell everyone I know to pick one of her works up and read it, to experience the sheer captivation that is reading her fabulous stories. I cried for all different reasons through Kitchen and N.P., and Goodbye Tsugumi is also wonderful. I even tried reading Lizard in Japanese. They all have the ability to transport the reader into a new, but familiar world and delve deep into the human psyche.

Then I read "Night and Night's Travelers" in the Asleep collection. At the completion of this story I wanted nothing more than to throw the book to the ground and jump on it with all possible force. Perhaps this piece was not quite as compelling in English as in the original, but it nonetheless left a taste of disappointment in my dry, cynical mouth. The death in the story was not handled well, and the overuse of hyperbole and cliche is something to cry into one's brandy over. I hope the rest of this book proves to be back to her original, interesting self.