Name: Lizard
Rating: 3.867647058823529 (34 reviews)
ISBN: 9780671532765

Banana Yoshimoto

Ann Sherif

A collection of six short stories incorporates themes of time, healing, and fate, following the adventures of young men and women who struggle to understand confusing emotions while embarking on journeys of self-discovery. Reprint.

Lizard

maia

"It's amazing how differently people respond to trauma. Your mom had something awful happen to her, but now she's fine. My mother ended up taking her own life. And families are all different too-sonme come through it, and others don't I wonder if it's more the personalities involved or the nature of the trauma. Either way, the children pay for it the rest of their lives. I witnessed my own mother's death, for God's sake, and that's not something I'm going to forget, ever. But at least I'm still alive, and I can enjoy a good meal now and then, and feel happy when the weather's good. I don’t know.”

“I just wish there were someone, like God or somebody, who was in charge of what went on in this world, someone to watch over us and tell us, ‘This type of behavior is not acceptable’, or ‘You're doing fine’, or whatever. I wish someone would put a stop to all this. But there is no higher power, so we have to do it ourselves.”

Your love is different from mine. What I mean is, when you close your eyes, for that moment, the center of the universe comes to reside within you. And you become a small figure within that vastness, which spreads without limit behind you, and continues to expand at tremendous speed, to engulf all of my past, even before I was born, and every word I've ever written, and each view I've seen, and all the constellations, and the darkness of outer space that surrounds the small blue ball that is earth. Then, when you open your eyes, all that disappears.

The way we think may be completely different, but you and I are an ancient, archetypal couple, the original man and woman. We are the model for Adam and Eve. For all couples in love, there comes a moment when a man gazes at a woman with the very same kind of realization. It is an infinite helix, the dance of two souls resonating, like the twrist of DNA. Jike the vast universe.

"You had a talent for it, though, and I didn't." "A talent for what? Sex?" I laughed. 

"No, for living. You know all the right techniques, all the secrets. You understand how to flow with time, and not get stuck in one place. Once you master one thing and have done it enough, you move on. Or at least youre good at pretending to move on. I think most people live their whole lives repeating the same patterns, again and again and again."

I didn't even know what hope was. Even if something like that existed, shining and sparkling brightly somewhere, way beyond my reach, I knew that I couldn't absorb its force.

When I looked out from that window each morning at the river, I saw the water glistening, like a million sheets of crushed gold leaf, flowing by. The light within me was something gorgeous like that. I wondered if that was what people in the old days used to call hope.

Christine Kraus

This town breathes in all the universes that people in this city have in their heads.

I would live and die, hopelessly ensconced in the cynical ways of the city.

These six stories explore the themes of time, healing and fate, and how urban, sophisticated and independent young men and women come to terms with them.

ikkychan

Banana Yoshimoto once said that her two main themes are “the exhaustion of young Japanese in contemporary Japan” and “the way in which terrible experiences shape a person's life.” Her stories often explore the inner turbulence of youth, urban alienation, and characters suspended between memory, imagination, and reality. One of the most persistent tensions in her writing is the gap between external events and internal perception—how what happens to us can be less important than how we carry it. This weight of perception becomes the emotional core of her stories. In her short story collection 
 Lizard
, Yoshimoto continues to explore this idea, tracing how belief, trauma, and guilt shape human experience. There are six stories in this collection: “Newlywed,” “Lizard,” “Helix,” “Dreaming of Kimchee,” “Blood and Water,” and “A Strange Tale from Down by the River.” I’ll talk about the ones that stayed with me most. Let’s start with “Lizard,” the story that gives the collection its title. It deals intensely with trauma, guilt, and the loss of innocence—especially through the young woman known only by her nickname, Lizard. When she was a child, she witnessed her mother being assaulted and stabbed by a stranger. That experience fractured her, leaving an emotional scar and lasting shock she carries into adulthood. Over time, she discovers she has the ability to heal others through touch, and she establishes a holistic therapy practice. But even as she devotes her life to helping others, she’s haunted by a deeper wound: the belief that she somehow caused the attacker’s death by willing it to happen. This belief is irrational, of course, but deeply human. It’s a textbook case of magical thinking—a child’s conviction that thoughts have power, that wishing something hard enough can make it real (e.g., "If I pray hard enough, Mom won’t die"). Lizard’s childhood rage becomes fused with the man’s death, and the belief that she "willed" it into being takes root. Her guilt is intense, not because of what happened, but because she believes she caused it. That’s the tragedy: the belief itself reshapes her entire life. There’s irony here, too. Lizard’s conviction that she caused the man’s death is a psychological defense mechanism—an “illusion of control.” If you think about it, it’s easier to live with guilt ("I did this") than to accept powerlessness ("I couldn’t stop it"). If she’s to blame, at least she had some power. Accepting that terrible things just happen, that the world is arbitrary, would leave her shattered. So instead, she constructs a life of atonement. Her healing becomes both a way to do good and a form of penance—a lifelong effort to atone for a sin she never actually committed. And yet, somewhere deep down, she knows her belief doesn’t hold up. There’s a part of her that suspects the man’s death had nothing to do with her at all—that he may have been mentally unstable, or simply set himself up in a motorway accident for reasons unrelated to her. But she clings to her version of the story because it's the only way she’s been able to make sense of the senseless. To let it go would mean unraveling the only narrative that has allowed her to survive; to deny it is to deny herself. Her yearning for a higher power—someone who can step in and say, “This behavior is unacceptable”—reveals her deep existential loneliness. As children, we look to adults for moral guidance, for justice, for protection. But as adults, we’re left to navigate a world with no clear rules and no cosmic referee. Lizard wants to be punished, wants someone to tell her what she did was wrong so she can be absolved. Instead, she’s left drifting. When she says she prefers the idea of hell because there would be “more sick people to heal,” it’s devastating. It shows that her altruism is entangled with self-harm. She’s unable to imagine a version of love or forgiveness that doesn’t involve punishment. And the narrator—her boyfriend—can only watch. As he sees her sleeping, peaceful and unreachable, he realizes that the illusions she’s clung to since childhood can’t be undone by love alone. His tears aren’t just for her—they’re for all of us who grow up and find that the truths we once needed to believe don’t protect us anymore. In "Dreaming of Kimchee", Yoshimoto explores another form of inner ache: the emotional wasteland of being “the other woman.” The protagonist is in love with a married man, and though she tries to live in the moment, her life is colored by guilt, isolation, and an undercurrent of self-erasure. She is cast in the role of antagonist, a shadow figure on the margins of her lover’s real life. Their time together is limited, scheduled, and transactional. He leaves behind socks, shirts, and a pillow—but not the presence or permanence she craves. What she really wants is the most mundane of things: “ordinary companionship.” And ironically, that ordinariness comes not from her lover, but from her younger sister Kyon—through shared tea, TV, and chores. This contrast exposes the hollow center of her affair. Illicit love can feel exciting and intense, but it lacks roots. It starves the soul of ritual and rhythm. To cope, she develops a habit of flipping through magazines and reading other people’s stories of infidelity. It seems casual, but it’s deeply revealing. Her detachment—reading them “as if they didn’t apply to her”—is a defense mechanism. It’s her way of pretending she’s not part of a cliché, not just another woman trapped in the same sad story. When she scoffs at the claim that only “5%” of affairs lead to lasting relationships, she’s not dismissing the statistic—she’s fighting for the uniqueness of her pain. She meets the wife a few times. The encounters are awkward and raw. Sympathy between them flickers occasionally, but anger simmers too. The wife warns her: “Men who cheat once will cheat again.” It’s a line that lands like a curse—not because it’s cruel, but because it’s true, and the protagonist knows it—it vocalizes her own subconscious dread. The fear that her lover might one day leave her for someone else begins to eat at her. She becomes what she once pitied: paranoid, insecure, watching for signs, wondering if kimchee in the fridge signals another betrayal. The kimchee jar becomes a kind of emotional turning point. One evening, after sharing it with her lover, she experiences an unexpected wave of calm. Something within her shifts. Later, she finds out why—her lover had received a call from his ex-wife, who told him she was remarried. That moment freed them both. Her happiness was like a release, lifting the weight of guilt that had tied all three of them together. What’s powerful is how this moment doesn’t come with dramatic confrontation or absolution—it’s just a quiet, strange peace. For the first time, she sees her partner’s guilt, his exhaustion, his silent suffering. He wasn’t just cheating—he was also trapped in shame, afraid of losing her, unable to speak his fear out loud. Their dream about kimchee—shared, mutual, tender—becomes a symbol of their reconciliation. Not just with each other, but with themselves. They’ve preserved their pain, like kimchee, and let it transform. The fermentation of shame into acceptance. That’s the kind of quiet healing Yoshimoto writes so well—not a clean slate, but something transformed by time, patience, and a strange, sad grace. In Lizard, Yoshimoto doesn’t offer easy resolutions—only the quiet, painful beauty of people trying to live with their pasts. Her characters may be haunted, but they move forward anyway, carrying their wounds like talismans of who they’ve been and who they’re still becoming.

Finished in a day, a lovely compilation of intriguing stories with about the same core concept. I do think it would come off more interesting if you were going through something similar in your life; encountering hope.

rumitumi

honestly, it started out pretty slow to me but as i go on and read all these stories, it struck me how i relate to some of them.. the last story is really really good. the last line is perfect.

ayoni

Sarah Sammis

Captivating, enchanting and alive from start to finish. A book of stories that carry the persevering weight of grief and love; a portrayal of the essence of humanity, with all its darkness and light, all its vulnerability and tenderness.

deniz

made me feel grimy in a very human way. will read again in 5 years.

banana yoshimoto wrote this to explore time, healing, karma and fate. she also wrote “i believe that we are not born with hope, but rather it comes to us as a transforming force”. i’ve never been so invested in seeing how hope is discovered for the first time in these characters, even how much they doubted the arrival of hope. i need more slice of life books like this! 

charisa

3.5 rounded up! i think i prefer banana’s novellas to her short stories, with the exception of dead-end memories. her breezy, colloquial style tends to translate better across a longer format, since there’s more space for her characters, with their runaway ruminations and offbeat personalities. 

at a shorter length, the bits of philosophy and backstory fall a bit flat. the characters feel more like vehicles for commentary on fate and self-discovery than comprehensive beings tied to nuanced histories and motivations. 

on that note, i’m suddenly reminded to re-read kitchen yet again…

Morgan Thomas

For some reason every time I read a Banana Yoshimoto novel (this is my second) I expect something sinister to happen. Someone to die, a cheating spouse, some disturbing plot twist or extreme moment of violence (and I think this speaks more about me and my expectations than the author's writing). But I never get it. Instead I get the slow contemplation of someone's deep inner life. The affects on us as adults of trauma from our young lives and how it shapes us, especially the relationships we have with others. In this case romantic relationships. 
I found these explorations to be thoughtful as the characters navigated complex emotional relationships while trying to examine where their thinking had stalled. There was a self awareness as these characters were able to critically look at who they were and grow. But again some of these stories had such deep violent experiences that I was shocked their actions as adults weren't similar. But I suppose that ends up working out in the end.

this is my first experience with anything written by banana yoshimoto, so i didn’t know what to expect going in but i was quickly taken by the dream like writing !! this is a collection of short stories, each focusing on different ways people find their own places and hope and purposes in life. at times it left me reflecting and touched so i really enjoyed reading this from where i’m at right now.

there is something a little sparse about these stories in the way they aren’t too heavy on the details, they bled with an atmosphere of slice of life reality and fantasy. and despite the sparse feeling of them, they still hold emotions of hopefulness by the end which i think is a really nice company to have when going through your own self discovery. the stories are written like snapshots, all seeming to share the transitioning from one part of someone’s life into another and because of that the narrators have a lot of complicated emotions (entering different parts of a life is never a light thing so). so it kept my attention!! 

i was probably a little too hasty with how quickly i read them but i think this collection is something i’d reread again in the future. and i definitely want to check out more of this authors work now

although i’d say definitely checking the content warnings before reading this is like a must

Lizard

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