It has been years since a new Banana Yoshimoto has been in my hands- 2006! Yeah, so I became a fan in 2004 and read all of her translated works in a couple of months. Back to back like snug little bookends. I was so happy reading her books and living in those pages. I feel the most at ease with the world and myself in that world when I'm completely into books. The best are those that I'm so into that I forget to talk to anyone at all. If I can keep going I never have to look down and remember I' More...

Life is merciless, it can bring random injustice upon us, sucking out our last breath of willpower, inflicting insurmountable damage. But sometimes it is also capricious and chooses to give hope to the hopeless, eyesight to the blind, atonement for the victims.
Chihiro and Nakajima cross paths on an unremarkable day when looking out of their respective windows they find their glances colliding with each other. They start engaging in silent, hesitant conversations, full of dubious smiles, nods and More...

http://wineandabook.com/2012/02/20/re...

It was this blurb on The Millions about Yoshimoto's The Lake being shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize that prompted me to pick it up:

"The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto: She’s big in Japan, inspiring a cult following and selling upwards of six million novels, but Banana Yoshimoto will always polarise opinion. Critics may be tempted to call her Murakami-lite, given her fondness for the same kind of broad subjects as her heavyweight compatriot – ultra-mo More...

It’s hard to summarize this novella-length story without giving too much away. In fact, I’d recommend against reading the marketing copy, since it spoils the one and only surprise in the book. It’s best described as a stilted and intensely awkward meet-cute, I guess. Introspective young woman notices odd neighbor, and almost despite herself, begins to reach out to him and draw him out of his shell. They begin a fragile romance as she gets closer to the truth of his ethereal weirdness, and both o More...

(review #9 for CCLaP!)

DO NOT READ THE BACK COVER OF THIS BOOK.

I didn't, luckily, so I was able to experience it as written, as a slow build, a soft, sad, slight mystery, with all the hidden things left hidden, or at least obscured, until they were meant to be revealed. I can't believe Melville House wasn't smart enough to realize that you can't give away the big twist in huge blue letters right there at the top of the blurb. What a massive disservice to Banana.

Ah, Banana. I've loved her for a lo More...

I like that Yoshimoto steers clear of stereotypes; the characters are complicated, multifaceted, and yet down-to-earth. I like that the language and dialogue are easy to understand. But sometimes, the characters seem too contradictory. And for a darkly mysterious story like The Lake, I wanted to feel more of a resolution concerning the characters' future trip to France. The author does manage to break through with a hopeful ending, but too unsure. I get the feeling that if I recall this book to More...

"Here we were, two ridiculously fragile people, sliding along on a very thin layer of ice all the time, each of us ready to slip and take the other down at any moment, the most unsteady of couples--and yet I believed what I had said. It would be all right"

I enjoyed this, quite a lot. The first person, easy flowing narrative, and with the actual crux of the story I felt it was Murakami meets du Maurier - which is quite odd in a way. I found the writing very Murakami-esque, simple and easy flowing More...

In The Lake,as in a number of her novels, Banana Yoshimoto takes as a theme the power of family, and of loss to effect the lives of her characters. Here, the characters are Chihiro, a daughter of a non traditional family – a “mama-san” and owner of a rural/small town club, and a father who is “A person of local import” who is not married to her mother.Chihiro feels distanced from her father, as if he only really existed for her mother and she finds him ridiculous because of his airs as a big fis More...

Banana Yoshimoto has been a long time favorite author of mine and her latest novella, "The Lake" doesn't disappoint. The story is first person, told from the point of view of Chihiro, a young woman who has just lost her mother and is feeling rootless. She encounters a needy and usual man named Nakajima, who has also lost his parents and this commonality seals their bond. They carve out a life together that is stunted emotionally and is hovered by a dark secret.

Much of the story has a hint of som More...

"Here we were, two ridiculously fragile people, sliding along on a very thin layer of ice all the time, each of us ready to slip and take the other down at any moment, the most unsteady of couples--and yet I believed what I had said. It would be all right" (187).

This is a story told by an aspiring female Japanese muralist and her quirky relationship with her kind-of boyfriend who struggles with a secret past trauma (revealed in the 2nd half of the book).

Limitations:
-Written in the first person, More...

Chihiro’s got a dead mom who was a club owner in Japan, and a strained relationship with her father, a businessman who never married her mother but maintained a solid relationship with her in a sort of “playing house” kind of way. She’s an artist looking for distance and a new life and sets up shop in a new town in an apartment with a view of a mysterious dude who is always looking out his window.

The old window-to-window turns into a face-to-face something like a relationship in Banana Yoshimot More...

Banana Yoshimoto's ability to hone in on the depth of her main characters is quite a gift. The protagonist, Chihiro, having grown up in the countryside in Japan is an interesting result of her upbringing and her temperament. She, like her mother, consisted of "two selves that came and went inside her. One was sociable and upbeat, a woman of the world who lived in the moment and seemed like a really cool person to be around; the other was extremely delicate, like a big, soft flower nodding gentl More...

The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto (trans. from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich, Melville House, 2011)

The Lake confirmed the impression I was left with after having read Asleep and N. P.: Yoshimoto is one of those contemporary writers situated at the border between what one could call (for lack of a better word) “serious” literature and pop fiction. The fact that The Lake was better received than N.P. in this country is at least in part due to the fact that its translator, Michael Emmerich, is consid More...

The Lake was shocking in how much I liked it. It started innocently, with nothing earth-shaking in either its subject matter, a Japanese woman who works as an artist and is starting a relationship with a live-in boyfriend, or in its spare prose. But it snuck up on me. Spoiler alerts: I'll probably give away some of the ideas.
Early on, Chihiro speaks with her dead mother in a dream:
In my dream, I felt twice as sad and so weak it almost crushed me. Tears were trickling down my cheeks when I woke.
A More...

Banana Yoshimoto is big in Japan. Her mostly modern fables of love and loss - of which The Lake is her twelfth - have acquired a cult following, and sold upwards of six million copies.
Those familiar with Yoshimoto's previous work will presumably be unsurprised by her latest offering. 'The Lake' is a slim, fragile story revolving around the relationship between two young Japanese students, Chihiro and Nakajima.
Chihiro has recently lost her mother: the first line of the novel reads: 'The first tim More...

Banana Yoshimoto is not for everyone.

Entering the world of the Lake, you must give up all preconcepts of what plot is, of how stories must unfold as a series of discrete and mappable events.

Instead, with Chihiro, you find yourself experiencing a story that unfolds as a series of thoughts and sensations, ruminations on herself and her family, that, like unfolding an intricately wrapped present, leave you hungering to find kernels of truth inside.

Like many others, I urge you to read the book with More...

Moving, deeply complex and emotional. I have no idea how I found this book or why I chose to read it--probably had something to do with the fact that his name is Banana. No big deal.
This novel reminds me of the days I used to spend exploring the creek in the back of my neighbor's yard. Looking back, the water might not have been the clearest, and in places it was utterly stagnant and still. But at the same time, I was both haunted and drawn by its mystical nature. That's the best way, in my feeb More...

In The Lake, Chihiro and Nakajima, both of whom are damaged people, meet by chance as they can see each other from their respective balconies. Chihiro is trying to cope with the loss of her mother, by remembering who her mother was as the majority of people would. Nakajima’s problems are more complex and as the story unfolds and their relationship deepens, both reader and Chihiro find out the truth of what happened to him.

Some people have called this an off-beat love story, but I don’t think tha More...

“Say it simple, stupid”; this could definitely be the message that the author is trying to convey to the reader; or rather to the other writers. If there’s a canon in Yoshimoto’s writing that’s simplicity. She just tells a story and she tells it briefly and beautifully; her words flow like a quiet spring stream. With the exception of Amrita all her books are small in size, but full of meaning. By using a few words and characters that have much in common, book after book, she seems to be writing More...

This is the first time I've rated her work with 2 stars. I'm not sure what it is that I find lacking, exactly, and maybe that's just me.. because I find this one flat. It doesn't really move forward until the last chapter, and I know Yoshimoto's style is not exactly what you call fast-paced.. but I find this one boring.

I don't particularly care about Chihiro, the main character. I find her selfish and annoying, with her constant complaining and how she feels about her family. I like Mama-san, he More...

I actually thought I'd already written about this, but it seems to have fallen off my shelves.

Yoshimoto is one of my eight or ten favorite living novelists. Among her gifts are absolutely perfect emotional pitch; the ability to create characters who manage to suggest much more than they reveal, without the reader's losing patience with them; and a deep respect for mystery and the fact that we so rarely in our lives fully understand anything.

Dislocated girl meets dislocated boy in Tokyo, first gl More...

This isn't necessarily a bad book, so the two star rating is more to the effect that it's derivative and has been done better, even done better by Japanese writers. Oh, too, before I forget, don't read the synopsis before you finish the book or the whole book is kind of--not ruined--lessened.

It's the story of a girl who's a bit unusual, a bit of an outsider, who meets another unique soul--who is deeply damaged by an unspeakable past--by a sort of coincidence, and what follows is the strange tal More...

I know that I have read a book by Banana Yoshimoto before, but I can't remember what it was. When I picked up The Lake her sparse prose and almost brutal forwardness were familiar. The Lake begins in bed, with the narrator and her unusual boyfriend Nakajima. The book chronicles the strange closeness that develops between these two characters as they reveal their pasts to one another and try to leave them behind for a future together.

I find the pacing of the dialogue strange in most books transla More...

I noticed this book on Netgalley with a note that a portion of the proceeds will go towards Japan Disaster Relief, so if nothing else it caught my eye for that. I like fiction set in Japan and China but in the past have read mostly historical rather than contemporary fiction.

I was glad when I finished the book and went online to get all the details to do this review that I hadn't re-read the blurb as it gives away one of the key points of the plot and would have been a real spoiler if my memory More...

I'm on a fence with this book. It's slow paced, a typical "slice of life". I got used to this genre after encountering it so often while watching Japanese movies or reading Japanese books. Still, at first "The Lake" seemed a bit boring. The main character isn't all that exciting and the first person narrative makes the reader get all the information on the plate instead of letting him find things on his own slowly. Nakajima, on the other hand, was a much more interesting character. The mystery s More...

It seems sometimes that the more simple and direct an author's writing is, the more I struggle to get into a book. My chief problem with Yoshimoto is that she combines a deceptively simple form of writing -- short sentences, basic construction, etc. -- with analogies and metaphors that aren't always that intuitive. So, I find myself skimming along quickly and then suddenly having to read the same paragraph over a few times because I'm pretty sure I'm missing something. Yet, for some reason, I wa More...

If you're already interested in this one, read as little as possible about it. Several of the descriptions and reviews include major spoilers, things I wish I hadn't known going in.

I don't often enjoy this type of book. It's got fairly basic prose, a dreamy feel, and a tightly focused viewpoint. There's a definite story here, but it's more about thoughts and feelings and perspective and relationships. I was never exactly comfortable with the main character, but she had an interesting perspective More...

I had high hopes for this one. I liked the narrator's voice, quirky, unassuming but compelling. And the theme the book begins with -- the loss of a mother and what it means to be a grown up -- was handled in spare, powerful strokes that had all the power that the maudlin manipulative Please Take Care of Mom did not. (I think it is a symptom of middle age, but meditations on the loss of a parent get me choked up like few other things, if done thoughtfully). Also promising was the beginning narrat More...

Kesti hetken päästä tähänkin mukaan, mutta kunhan henkilöt kävivät tutuiksi alkoi lukeminen rullata. Yoshimoto kirjoittaa sujuvasti, ja Yasunari Kawabataakin kääntänyt Michael Emmerich tuntuu tavoittaneen alkuperäiskielen säästeliään ja melko lyyrisen ilmaisun hyvin. Kysymyksessä on rakkaustarina ja ehkä vois sanoa psykologinen draama, ei kuitenkaan järin intensiivinen sellainen. Tavallaan kirjan tunnelma on huoleton ja syvällinen yhtä aikaa. Tarina on realistinen, johon jännitteen tuo toisen pä More...