Banana Yoshimoto

In this “witty, perceptive novel”, a young woman moves to Tokyo and encounters the world of university enrollment and impending adulthood (Elle). Banana Yoshimoto’s novels of young life in Japan have made her an international sensation. Goodbye Tsugumi is an offbeat story of a deep and complicated friendship between two female cousins that ranks among her best work. Maria is the only daughter of an unmarried woman. She has grown up at the seaside alongside her cousin Tsugumi, a lifelong invalid, charismatic, spoiled, and occasionally cruel. Now Maria’s father is finally able to bring Maria and her mother to Tokyo, ushering Maria into a world of university, impending adulthood, and a “normal” family. When Tsugumi invites Maria to spend a last summer by the sea, a restful idyll becomes a time of dramatic growth as Tsugumi finds love and Maria learns the true meaning of home and family. She also has to confront both Tsugumi’s inner strength and the real possibility of losing her. Goodbye Tsugumi is a beguiling, resonant novel from one of the world’s finest young writers.

Goodbye Tsugumi

heather

Because the ocean had always been there, in the good times as well as the bad times of my life, when it was sweltering out and the beach was filled with people, and in the dead of winter when the sky was heavy with stars, and when we were heading to the local shrine on New Year's Day ... all I had to do was turn my head and it would be there, the same as always.

Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too-that's just the way things work. 

The whiteness of the flowers seemed to levitate in the dark. Every time the crowd of petals bobbed under a puff of wind you were left with an afterimage of white that had the texture of a dream. And just beside that dream the river continued to flow, and off in the distance the dark nighttime ocean stretched the glow of the moon into a single gleaming road. The black waters before us swelled up and fell back again, glimmering with tiny flecks of light, the dark motion extending all the way to infinity.

We continued walking. Even when we had stepped into some scrunched-up side street where you couldn't see the ocean, the roar of the waves would follow us. Just as the mnoon followed us. There beyond and beyond the rows of old roofs, always-the moon.

I think I'm good at running away from the pain that comes with these ordinary emotions.

Perhaps the word "illusion" would have meant more or less the same thing, but to me "performance" seemed closer to the truth.

Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, anda chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.

It occurs to me that perhaps this is what people mean by "nostalgia": the pain of knowing that this powerful yearning will eventually fade.

This world of ours is piled high with farewells and goodbyes of so many different kinds, like the evening sky renewing itself again and again from one instant to the nextand I didn't want to forget a single one.

Goodbye Tsugumi quotes

Join the club