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.

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