Banana Yoshimoto: Asleep, Kitchen, Hardboiled and Hard Luck, Lizard. 16.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Banana Yoshimoto is one of my favorite authors at short story or novella length. I haven’t liked any of her novels as much as her work at shorter lengths.

Yoshimoto excels at the vivid depiction of all things hard to describe: relationships that don’t fall into standard categories, emotional states that are momentary but deeply felt, and the fine line between memories, dreams, and ghosts.

Her work is frequently fantasy or on its borderline, the sort of mainstream-friendly work which features spirits and psychics and curses but not, say, vampires or magical girls. A lot of her characters have unconventional love lives, sex lives, gender identities, gender expressions, or all of the above. Her style is very simple, very easy to read, but with a great deal of depth below the surface.

She's a Japanese author in (excellent) translation, and all her work that I've read is set in Japan.

Her novella “Kitchen,” in the two-novella collection of the same name, is one of the most uplifting and beautiful stories I’ve ever read: love, grief, healing; family, gender identity, and a whole lot of delicious food. If you’ve never read Yoshimoto before, start there, and don’t miss her afterword. Click here to buy it from Amazon: Kitchen (A Black cat book)

I also really like her short story collection Lizard. One story in that, about magical meetings on the subway, was originally serialized in subway posters! Click here to buy that from Amazon: Lizard

Asleep, the one I just read, is a collection of three novellas about love and loss and sleep.

"Night and Night’s Travelers" is about three young women who loved the same man, one platonically (his sister) and two romantically (his former lover, an American, and his cousin.) His sister and cousin try to help each other through their grief after his death, and his American ex-girlfriend hovers around the edges of the story, in recollections, letters, and mysterious phone calls.

In "Love Songs," a young woman is haunted by a voice she hears singing to her as she falls asleep. She thinks it’s the voice of a woman she used to know in a complicated relationship halfway between polyamory and a love triangle, and visits a psychic to have one last conversation.

In Asleep, yet another young woman (Yoshimoto’s main characters are almost always young women) is in love with a man whose wife is in a vegetative state after an accident, and she falls under a spell of sleep herself.

My favorite of these was "Love Songs," though I also liked "Night and Night’s Travelers." I didn’t like "Asleep" as much, largely because the main relationship seemed too dysfunctional to survive. I overall enjoyed the collection, though. Click here to buy it from Amazon: Asleep

Another set of Yoshimoto novellas is Hard Boiled and Hard Luck, the first a ghost story, the second a better take on the themes of "Asleep." I liked them both quite a bit, especially the classically spooky atmosphere of the first. Click here to buy it from Amazon: Hardboiled and Hard Luck

Charisma, by Steven Barnes. 17.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

A group of at-risk kids are the unknowing subjects of an experiment intended to maximize their potential. But the experiment goes horribly wrong, as such experiments inevitably do. One daycare center becomes the subject of a notorious trial when all its kids start having violent and sexual nightmares; none of them recall any actual abuse, but the center goes under anyway. Journalist Renny Sand covers the trial, and is surprised by the wise-beyond-their-years self-possession of all the child witnesses.

Years later, someone is methodically murdering the children involved in the experiment. Renny starts researching, and finds that the entire story leads back to Alexander Marcus, an African-American legend who might have become President, but was mysteriously assassinated long ago.

The middle is a bit draggy and also features a scene so homophobic that I almost threw the book across the room. (Dude! Just because they’re gay bodybuilding thugs does not mean they are rapist gay bodybuilding thugs!) However, after that moment of massive fail, the scattered narrative threads start twining together in such a compelling manner that book-throwing became impossible, at least for me. If the homophobia isn’t a dealbreaker, I recommend this for its extremely suspenseful climax, a cool and original twist on the old “build a better human” idea, a very believable sixty-eight-year-old action heroine (former Secret Service), and, of course, my favorite thing, (almost) psychic kids. The prose is much better than in Blood Brothers, too.

One of the central plotlines, which I won’t get into too much detail on due to spoilers but which becomes clear in general terms early on, is that the dead hero Marcus might have had a very nasty secret. This is one case in which the author’s race did affect my reading of the book: if Barnes was not black, it would have been hard not to read this as “of course the African-American heroic legend is really [something awful].” But since Barnes himself is African-American and can be presumed to be conscious of those sorts of stereotypes, I read it as a take on the classic nightmare of any member of an oppressed minority: that the person held up as the great hero of your race will turn out to have feet of clay, and then, because you don’t have the privilege of being judged individually, everyone else will take that as a commentary on your entire race.

Like Woody Allen’s “Jew eat?” bit in Annie Hall (a joke about seeing anti-Semitism everywhere, even in the inquiry "Did you eat?"), which is self-deprecating humor coming from a Jew that would be plain deprecating coming from a gentile, some things come across differently depending on who’s saying them – if for no other reason than the presumption that at least the author is aware of what the stereotypes are, and so is presumably deliberately trying to do something with them. Though, of course, intent is not a guarantee of success, unconscious stereotyping can affect anyone, and I’m sure some Jews did find “Jew eat? No? Did’jew?” offensive regardless of the author. Anyway, that was my take on Marcus; yours may be different.

I note with regret but without surprise that there are no black people on the cover, just a pair of disembodied eyes.

Click here to buy it from Amazon: Charisma

The Colored Museum, by George C. Wolfe

[fannyanns.livejournal.com]

This is not a book, specifically, but a play, written by Wolfe in 1985. It's a raw, edgy exploration of a multitude of topics.

There was a production of this play at my undergrad college while I was there, and I was the stage manager/prop queen/thundermaker (I got to beat on a big piece of metal and it sounded like thunder; It was *really* cool). Of course, I didn't really "get it" at the time, but I learned a lot from this play and the experience of working with an all-POC cast as a non-POC person.

Google books preview of "Cookin' With Aunt Ethel"

books.google.com/books

and a study guide from a production done in 2006:

209.85.173.132/search

An excerpt from the study guide:

"That summer, [1986], The Colored Museum began its early run in the Public Theater. Although the critics loved the show, many patrons were offended by the controversial topics expressed in the play. Wolfe won the Dramatists' Guild's Elizabeth Hull-Kate Warriner Award for the best play dealing with social, religious or political topics. Following the run of The Colored Museum, Director [Joseph] Papp invited Wolfe to be the Public Theater's resident director."

and, last but not least, a vid. (the sounds isn't so great, but it's just as funny as I remember.)

I Am a Cat, by Natsume Sōseki

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

I've just finished reading a satiric late19th-century Japanese novel originally published in installments. It's been published a variety of ways: as ten installments in a magazine, as three shorter books, and as one very hefty volume. I have the hefty volume.

It's about a nameless cat, written in a very formal, stuffy way (the cat uses the royal "we", as in "we are a cat"). It's an interesting contrast to British novels of the same period, but some of the observations are very funny. During the cat's account of his first attempt to catch rats, he compares himself to a famous historical general. The seriousness with which the cat describes his routine (pine sliding!) is funny, but only if Dickens makes you LOL.

I think the best part is the last volume, which includes a long conversation between several Japanese men, friends of the nameless cat's owner, Mr. Sneaze. They read poetry, discuss philosophy, and tell stories.

More fascinating history on the novel here, but the Wikipedia entry tells how it ends.

Strands, by Keri Hulme

[twistedchick]

This, the second book of poetry by the author of the bone people, is hard to find but worth the search. From Keri Hulme's own description of the book:

Describe strands? O, fishing and death. Angry women/angry earth chants, and funny inserts/insights/snippets/snappings. Winesongs of fifteen years maturation. Plait together land and air and sea: interweave the eye and the word and the ear. Show people that I take life seriously, but not so seriously as to ruin my chance of getting out of it alive...I am a strand-dweller in reality, a strand-loper of sorts -- nau mai! Come share a land, a lagoon, a mind, a glass...

A sample: ( cut for space )

It's probably not in your local library, but this Amazon link has some copies. The ISBN number is: 0-86806-475-0

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[sanguinity]

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Topaz, Beverly Jenkins

[arantzain.livejournal.com]

( 1884: Faux railroad stocks, the Black Seminole, Newspaperwomen and Indian Territory. Also, romance. )

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Toni Morrison is brilliant, as usual. I can't think of another scholar I admire more.

I've read her criticism and her novels, and loved both, but her criticism is the most lucid and perceptive...I can't get over it. Her gifts as a novelist bring something to her critical work that few have ever matched.

Maybe no one working today. She elevates criticism to poetry:

For young America, [Romance] had everything: nature as subject matter, a system of symbolism, a thematics of the search for self-valorization and validation--above all, the opportunity to conquer fear imaginatively and to quiet deep insecurities. It offered platforms for moralizing and fabulation, and for the imaginative entertainment of violence, sublime incredibility, and terror--and terror's most significant, overweening ingredient: darkness, with all of the connotative value it awakened.

Highly recommended, highly readable, and very short. You can get this into an afternoon easily, although I didn't, and it deserves re-reading.

Her Nobel lecture is also an incredible read that deserves its own post.