Name: Asleep
Rating: 4.191860465116279 (43 reviews)
ISBN: 9780802116697

Michael Emmerich

Banana Yoshimoto

Three extraordinary novellas narrate the individual stories of three women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep--a sleepwalker mourning a lost love, a woman unable to remain awake who is involved in an affair with a man whose wife is in a coma, and a woman whose dreams are haunted by a woman she once confronted in a love triangle. 60,000 first printing. $75,000 ad/promo.

Asleep

Asleep tells the stories of three women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning a lost love, finds herself sleepwalking at night. Another, embarking on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself unable to stay awake. The third finds her sleep haunted.

ikkychan

One of my most favorite characters is Celine, from Richard Linklater’s film Before Sunrise. She’s an inquisitive, perceptive, self-conscious young woman who’s drawn to the impulsive, charming all-American boy Jesse. After deciding on an impromptu rendezvous and getting off the train together, the two strangers spend the entire night strolling across Vienna—from the quiet shimmer of twilight to the blurry, honey-hued dawn where they must inevitably part. To make the most of the little time they have, they throw themselves into an incessant, almost frantic exchange of thoughts and stories, as if trying to pour the whole of their lives into that one night. Of all the things they talk about, one line stuck with me. Celine talks about the “magic” of human connection: <blockquote>
 “I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.”
</blockquote> The weight of that line always lingers. There’s something so human—so painfully beautiful—about that attempt. We’re the most culturally diverse species in the world, speaking thousands of different languages, shaped by completely different contexts. And yet, we still try to reach across that gulf. We look at one another and try to see through each other’s eyes, try to speak our pain, share our joy, explain our contradictions. Because deep down, we know we’re all somehow connected. Maybe not by the details of our lives, but by the emotional resonance—the way grief hollows us, the way love lifts us, the loneliness of being alive. That’s what Banana Yoshimoto sees so clearly in 
 Asleep
: not just the individual griefs of her characters, but the way loss echoes through all of us like a shared language. The book is a collection of three stories—
 Night and Night’s Travelers, Love Songs
, and 
 Asleep
—and each revolves around a young woman grappling with the death of someone close. In Night and Night’s Travelers, Shibami reflects on the loss of her brother Yoshihiro and the strange, layered mourning shared between his former lovers, Mari and Sarah. Love Songs traces the complicated relationship between the narrator and her late rival-turned-friend, Haru, whose death cracks open unspoken tensions. But it’s the final story, Asleep, that hit me the hardest. It’s the most haunting, the most intimate. It’s the one that doesn’t just describe grief—it inhabits it. Terako, the protagonist of Asleep, is trapped in a kind of emotional purgatory. Her days are spent in a thick fog of sleep, drifting in and out of consciousness as her real life slips further out of reach. Her hypersomnia isn’t just exhaustion—it’s a response to the slow unraveling of her inner world. Everyone around her seems to be moving on, building lives filled with small, bright moments. Meanwhile, Terako is stuck. Her grief has frozen her in place. Not long before the story begins, her closest friend, Shiori, takes her own life. A quiet, shocking exit—no letter, no warning, just sudden absence. Terako is left adrift, unable to articulate the grief that now defines her. Her silence mirrors the broader discomfort with death and mental health in Japanese society. When she says her words feel like they "turn to dust," it captures not just her inability to speak her pain, but the loneliness of losing someone in a world that doesn’t know how to hold that kind of sorrow. With nowhere else to put that pain, Terako sinks into sleep. It becomes her shelter, her hiding place, her way of "burying" what she can’t say out loud. Yoshimoto often treats sleep as a liminal space—something that exists between life and death—and here it becomes a form of spiritual communion. Terako uses it to draw close to Shiori, who once worked as a professional sleeper offering comfort to those near death. It’s almost as if Shiori’s death and her job have merged into a metaphor: sleep as farewell, sleep as numbness, sleep as escape. What makes Shiori’s death so painful isn’t just that she was Terako’s friend—it’s that she was the one person who truly saw her. She understood Terako’s dynamic with Iwanaga, the married man Terako is in love with. She saw how Terako was "nil... stacked in the stockroom," emotionally sidelined and complicit in her own suffering. Without Shiori, Terako has no one left to reflect her reality back to her. No one to confirm that what she feels is real. Iwanaga, Terako’s older, married, lover, meanwhile, is the embodiment of quiet cruelty. He’s not overtly abusive—on the surface, he’s polite, tragic, even generous. But his passivity and self-delusion are suffocating. He gives Terako the illusion of choice while subtly stripping her of agency. He provides money, sets the pace of their encounters, and never gives her a real place in his life. His comatose wife becomes an excuse for endless suspension. In many ways, he is the reason Terako’s life has become a pause button. And yet—Terako loves him. Not despite the sadness, but because of it. Her love for him is steeped in melancholy. There’s a kind of romance in the tragedy, a poetic beauty in loving someone who can’t ever fully return it. This is emotional masochism disguised as depth. The kind of love that convinces you pain is proof you’re doing it right. It’s a pattern that likely began in childhood—when you’re neglected or made to feel invisible, you grow up thinking love must be earned through suffering. Terako can’t even bear to look directly at Iwanaga. When she thinks of him, her mind flits to details—the texture of his handwriting, the sound of his voice—anything but his actual presence. These fragments feel safer than the full reality, just as dreams feel safer than waking up. She deflects from him the way she deflects from her own grief. It’s too overwhelming to look at head-on. Yoshimoto makes it clear: Terako’s sleep isn’t rest. It’s a metaphor for how she lives—detached, suspended, barely present. Her early neglect taught her that sleep was the only place she was safe. Now, as an adult, it’s where she hides. There’s a scene where she falls asleep on the way back to Tokyo after a rendezvous with Iwanaga—missing the emotional comedown of returning to her everyday life. These blackouts are small deaths, allowing her to skip the hardest parts. Even Iwanaga’s wife, lying in a literal coma, mirrors Terako’s figurative one. Both women are stuck—one by biology, the other by emotional resignation. The difference is that Terako chose this. And that makes it even sadder. But then, something happens. One day, Terako falls into an even deeper sleep—missing a whole day and night. When she wakes, utterly exhausted, she meets a strange high school girl in the park. This girl speaks with sharp clarity, scolding Terako, snapping her out of her stupor. Is she real? A ghost? A hallucination? Maybe even the spirit of Iwanaga’s wife? It’s ambiguous, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is what she says. <blockquote>
 “If you go on like this you’ll end up getting trapped in this mode.”
</blockquote> The girl’s presence is eerie, charged with spiritual energy. She could be the comatose wife’s apparition, Shiori’s reborn, or a voice from Terako’s subconscious. Her “crystal eyes” evoke piercing insight. Her push to get a job, to stay active, echoes earlier warnings. In Japanese literature, such spectral encounters often mark a shift in consciousness. The girl might not be real—but she’s right. The girl in the park might be a ghost, a hallucination, or Terako’s own voice—but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Terako listens. In a novel about silence and suppression, that act of hearing—and heeding—her own need for survival is revolutionary. This encounter becomes a turning point. For the first time, Terako takes a step toward reclaiming her life. She finds work—nothing grand, just a temp job—but it’s a start. It's a physical way of staying awake. And that matters. She’s no longer surrendering to sleep, no longer surrendering to the idea that her life must be lived in the shadows of others. Still, she hasn’t left Iwanaga. Her realization that "nothing has changed in me and nothing has changed between us" is brutal. But it’s honest. She sees him more clearly now. During the fireworks scene, she notices Iwanaga’s details—not as a form of deflection, but as someone who’s present. She watches his face in the lantern light. She’s awake. And there’s a small but powerful shift when she thinks, <blockquote>
 “With things as they are now, I might even be able to start liking someone else.”
</blockquote> That’s not just a line—it’s a seed of change. The final blessing—"May every sleep in this world be equally peaceful"—feels like a prayer for everyone in the story: Shiori, Iwanaga’s wife, and herself. It’s a wish that sleep might return to being a refuge, not a prison. A place of peace, not avoidance. Terako’s story isn’t about grand transformation. It’s about small, stubborn acts of resistance. Finding work. Staying awake. Seeing clearly. These are her rebellions. This is how she mourns, not by collapsing, but by continuing. Yoshimoto asks: When does sadness become self-destruction? When does comfort become paralysis? The answer is subtle—but somewhere in Terako’s slow, painful awakening, it’s there. Waking up might be inconvenient, even painful. But sometimes, it’s the only way to live.

Banana Yoshimoto has a magical ability to animate the lives of her young characters, and here she spins the stories of three women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning a lost lover, finds herself sleepwalking at night. Another, who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. A third finds her sleep haunted by another woman whom she was once pitted against in a love triangle. Sly and mystical as a ghost story, with a touch of Kafkaesque surrealism, Asleep is an enchanting book from one of the best writers in contemporary international fiction.

renni

”It occurred to me how splendid it was to be able to look around at this night - this night, when we could do all these things - with a mind and a spirit so marvelously clear. It felt almost like I was praying. May every sleep in this world be equally peaceful.”

charisa

oh, banana. you somehow write so directly, yet convey a sense of faraway feelings every time. i liked this collection better than Lizard; the bleary, half-asleep roaming of each main character felt startlingly familiar and relatable. yes, the relationships were a bit uhhH... unconventional, but i felt like they provided a deeper sense of disorientation and a blurring of reality. 

an aside: for fun, i've been working on a short story drawing somewhat from banana's literary voice and it's been e n l i g h t e n i n g. some defining characteristics that i've observed in her writing: matter-of-factness, tension between beauty and sadness, colloquialism, meditative snapshots of nature or nostalgic scenes, random superlatives (awesome, fantastic, etc.). i just wish i could read her writing in the original japanese bah

Rowan Myers

I always say that sometimes the books you really need to read find you. I was a fan of Banana Yoshimoto's before I read this, having read her sublime "Kitchen", and had purchased this the next item from her bibliography to read. And I needed to read it. I connected with every character, understood every moment, and it just sang to me.

I'm very thankful I found this book and shared quiet hours with it, listening to the characters and empathizing with their pain. Thank goodness for Banana Yoshimoto.

Finn Salter

literally could not put it down. felt like a dream that you’re half awake for, just following in your mind. i loved it.

Morgana

** spoiler alert **
           Io capisco che il sonno nel racconto sia solo un modo per rappresentare la situazione della protagonista, ma mettendomi nei suoi panni non ho potuto non trovare le sue azioni veramente assurde.
Vai a dormire prima di mezzanotte, dormi fino alle 2 del pomeriggio e già wow, che dormita e la cosa non ti stupisce? No, lei se ne stupisce veramente poco. Esce, non riesce a svegliarsi nemmeno dopo due caffè, e cosa pensa? "muoio di sonno, meglio se torno a casa a dormire" ma hai dormito fino ad ora! Torna a casa e ovviamente dorme, ma fino a quando? Le cinque del mattino. Si sveglia e "ops" ma non ti viene il dubbio di avere qualcosa di grosso che non va? No, lei piuttosto pensa che la ex moglie del suo amante le abbia mandato qualcosa, assurdo.

Altra assurdità nell'altro racconto,come fa Marie a sapere sempre tutto? come mai nessuno si spaventa? Lei incontra il probabile ( sicuro per me!) figlio del fratello morto e quando incontra Marie la tocca e pensa che abbia incontrato il fratello e sa anche dove ( nella hall di un albergo ) solo che ovviamente poi si corregge dicendo che "ah giusto, è morto era solo una sensazione" ma la protagonista sa che questa sensazione è in realtà vera perché lei ha incontrato il presunto figlio e come potrebbe saperlo marie? ma per lei è una cosa normalissima.

Tolte alcune assurdità il libro è carino e si legge bene.

Asleep

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