Banana Yoshimoto

Russell F. Wasden

After losing her delicate younger sister to suicide, a Japanese-American woman incurs a case of amnesia and embarks on an emotional journey of recovery, aided by her clairvoyant kid brother. By the author of Kitchen. Reprint.

Amrita

A celebrated actress who has died in mysterious and shocking circumstances leaves behind an unconventional extended family that includes an older sister, a woman in her twenties through whose eyes the story unfolds; a young brother who possesses mystical powers; and a fiancé who is writing a novel with uncanny parallels to his own story.'Her novels can have the effect of addictive drugs . . . Pathos, nostalgia, the sense of exquisite sadness at the fleetingness of life are key elements of beauty in Japanese aesthetics, and all are themes central to Yoshimoto's books.' The Times

Ellie 

Now I like myself. Always. No one in this world is perfectly healthy. My loneliness was an important part of my own little universe, not some pathological disease that needs to be gotten rid of. It's something that was inside me

“When I look at the pages they give me a good feeling. I suppose I could say the whole book has a nice fragrance about it."

I thought for a moment. Isn't it strange how we unconsciously search for something that will make us cry, only when we want to, and only when we're not able to? Just thinking about it is painful. 

Sarah Sammis

I tried my best to lose myself in this book but I just couldn't. It didn't captivate me as much as the other book by this author did. Perhaps it was a result of the long and stressful work week that hindered my reading of this book. I don't know. I think sometime in the future I'll have to give this book a second go.

Winona 

This is probably the first time the Goodreads star rating system has genuinely reflected my feelings towards a book: "It was Ok." That's how I felt about  Amrita  -- it was just an OK book. It's strange, now that I've finished  Amrita , the experience of reading it seeming to fade away altogether. Akin to Sakumi's memories after she split her head upon on a flight of stairs. Maybe it has to do with how, despite the jewels in the prose that shone like a beautiful dream, so much of this book was just so distasteful.

Be careful, reader, for now I shall delve into the reasons why I thought that "Amrita" was just an "OK" book.

[TW Suicide]

As someone who has struggled with crippling chronic depression, and has also attempted to end her own life, this book's treatment of suicide has probably got to be one of the worst I have ever come across. Suicide in literature rarely tends to be treated with respect.  13 Reasons Why  glorifies it by treating it as a tool for revenge, John Green romanticises it, and others just demonise the person who has committed the act. I haven't read  The Bell Jar  (yet), but from her poetry, I can tell that only Plath really got it. The reasons behind it, and the psyche that a suicidal person tends to inhabit when it's all that's on their mind. Probably because of personal reasons. 

In  Amrita , Yoshimto does something extremely offensive: she romanticises it in some aspects, she demonises the person who took their own life, she cheapens it, and, what's worse, she acts like it's not a big deal throughout most of the narrative. In fact, Mayu, whose suicide is essentially what sets off the chain of muddled, confusing, misty events in Sakumi's (her sister, and the excessively verbose narrator) life. Everything we know about Mayu is through the eyes of Sakumi, and Sakumi is the litmus test that she holds everyone against. We only know about Mayu's personality in comparison to Sakumi - it's understandable, because we never meet Mayu, she's dead from the beginning of the book - but it's also problematic because Sakumi does not seem to care about the reasons why her sister chose to end her own life. She dwells on her sister's glamorous lifestyle from time-to-time, and just when the reader thinks that maybe Sakumi has come to a realisation about her sister, we get gross resentment and a rather ugly vindication of a woman who ended her life.

Why?

Well...because, as if suicide wasn't already dramatic enough for Yoshimoto's bizarre story, Sakumi is sleeping with her sister's boyfriend. The very same boyfriend who most likely forced Mayu to have two abortions because he's a manipulative, self-serving, dickhead of a writer. It's really sickening how no one - not even the mother in this book - seems concerned by the fact that Sakumi is in a relationship with her  dead sister's  boyfriend. No one finds it suspicious that Ryuchiro could just move on from one sister to the next? He lived with Mayu. He was there when she was driving herself down the spiral that eventually killed her. But not once do we hear him express regret over not noticing earlier and doing something to stop her. Nope. He's sad about it for a bit - but in a way broody, narcissistic, chauvinistic poets are: he's sad about it because it fuels his inspiration. He's probably a terrible writer. 

I kept reading for two reasons:
1. Because I don't have it in me to abandon books.
2. Because I hoped that somewhere there would be a moment of self-actualization for Sakumi.

I felt like she was a passive figure in her own life. Just drifting my here to there. Even though she talks about living actively, somehow she's just a non-entity. I could very well be missing the point, after all this book does feature ghosts! However, despite her constant dwelling, her ridiculously verbose and fantastical manner of speech, her whimsy, etc, she had no personality whatsoever. Actually, most of the people in this book were pretty much non-entities. It's funny, because Yoshimoto spends so much time describing just how cool, quirky, and different the characters in  Amrita  are (going as far as to give many of them different kinds of psychic powers) all of them just felt flat. They didn't feel anything like real people. They didn't talk like real people. They sounded like a bunch of upper-middle class (who are able to easily pack up and fly wherever they want to because they're well off) drunks who thought that making pop culture references, and listening to Elvis and The Beatles, makes for a personality trait. They were all just various shades of obnoxious non-entities. 

Except for Yoshio. I liked Yoshio. Yoshio probably gives this book it's second star. He felt real. He reacted like how a person - especially a vulnerable child in such a dysfunctional household - would react to a series of tragic events that occur one after the other. I wanted to protect Yoshio, get him outside of that awful house, away from his selfish mother, and his pathetic sister, and into a family that doesn't think that seeks to comfort an eight year old struggling to process grief. 

He was probably the only thing I liked by this disjointed, obnoxious running commentary of a book. 

Hey...now that I mention it, doesn't this review kind of come across like that too?

Amrita

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