Name: Moshi moshi
Rating: 3.691176470588236 (34 reviews)
ISBN: 9788807019029

Banana Yoshimoto

Moshi moshi

ikkychan

Long story short, I have mixed feelings about this. Banana Yoshimoto’s Moshi Moshi follows Yoshie (or Yocchan, as her loved ones call her), a young woman grieving the sudden death of her father, who died in a suicide pact with a mysterious woman. She and her mother move to Shimokitazawa, a bohemian neighborhood in Tokyo, to rebuild their lives. The story dives into loss, healing, and the lingering presence of the dead, wrapped in Yoshimoto’s trademark dreamlike, melancholic yet hopeful prose. Just like what I’ve said before about Amrita, Yoshimoto still has a problematic way of approaching extramarital infidelity. She tends to soften or sidestep the male party’s accountability, but here she takes that tendency even further by giving the reader someone else to blame: the women. The narrative makes Yoshie and her mother wrestle with layered grief—grieving the man they loved while also grieving the faith they once had in him. To make matters worse, the woman involved with him isn’t written as a complex individual. Instead, she’s portrayed as someone who has a history of luring married men into affairs that end in a mutual suicide pact, almost like she’s running some eerie, private cult. Honestly, the way Yoshimoto frames Yoshie’s father’s infidelity as the result of being bewitched by a mysterious, almost supernatural woman leans heavily into a familiar trope—the femme fatale archetype. This choice of framing does a few troubling things. First, it reduces the father’s betrayal to a mere character flaw rather than a deliberate moral failing. The language used—describing him as “careless” or “stupid”—infantilizes him, as though he were some naïve young man swept away by forces beyond his control. His affair and eventual suicide pact start to feel like a lapse in judgment rather than a string of intentional decisions. The narrative allows him to appear weak and confused rather than fully responsible. Second, the “other woman” is left flat, a hollow vessel in the story. She barely exists outside of how her presence affects the father, Yoshie, and Yoshie’s mother. There’s almost no attempt to give her motives or depth. She is described as someone with an insatiable “longing for death,” which strips her of any humanity and reduces her to a plot device—a convenient scapegoat for unresolved anger. This is particularly frustrating because Yoshimoto, in her earlier works, has shown she can write women with complicated, painful desires and histories. Here, though, the other woman feels like a shadow, a ghost of an archetype rather than a person. It’s not difficult to see why Yoshimoto might lean on this dynamic. In Japanese society, patriarchal norms often frame infidelity as a temptation that men fall into rather than a conscious betrayal. In earlier works like Asleep or Goodbye Tsugumi, Yoshimoto gently critiques that narrative. In Moshi Moshi, though, she doubles down on it. Maybe she’s more interested in exploring Yoshie’s grief than her father’s morality, but the result is a story that dodges the harder questions. Anger at the “evil woman” is easier than confronting the father’s actions head-on. There’s also the late reveal that Yoshie’s father was suffering from cancer. This feels like a narrative sleight of hand—a way to retroactively soften his choices, as if to say, “he wasn’t himself.” But illness doesn’t erase agency. Cheating and breaking your family’s trust aren’t symptoms; they’re decisions. The text doesn’t press on that discomfort. Instead, it pathologizes the father’s actions, framing them as tragic rather than selfish. It’s a pattern we see often: men’s misdeeds get explained away by external factors, while women shoulder the blame outright. And so we watch Yoshie and her mother direct all their anger at the other woman. There’s little attempt to explore what it would mean for them to be angry with him, or even to hold space for both. This dynamic mirrors real life in unsettling ways—how often women are conditioned to pit themselves against “the other woman” instead of addressing the man’s betrayal. Imagine how different the book could have been if the other woman had been given a voice, or even a single chapter in which we see her inner conflict. Yoshimoto has humanized marginalized or lonely figures in Kitchen and Dead-End Memories; it’s a shame she didn’t do that here. Another bone I want to pick is how Moshi Moshi ties healing to privilege. In Yoshimoto’s earlier novels, healing is intimate and grounded. In Kitchen, for instance, Mikage finds her way back to herself through small, accessible acts—cooking in a borrowed kitchen, forming bonds over everyday meals. In Tsugumi, the solace comes from shared summers and the quiet resilience of home life. But in Moshi Moshi (and similarly in Amrita), the characters’ healing involves international travel, financial cushions, and access to opportunities most readers don’t have. Yoshie and her mother can afford to move to Shimokitazawa, a trendy Tokyo neighborhood. Her mentor, Michiyo-san, has the resources and connections to whisk her off to Paris. In Amrita, Sakumi escapes to Saipan, funded by her bartending job and a conveniently supportive family. It creates an odd tension. Yoshimoto’s prose is still beautiful—there are moments where Yoshie’s simple act of cooking dinner for her mother feels profound, or Yoshie’s and Yamazaki-san’s, her father’s closest friend, salt ritual lingers like a quiet blessing. The narrow streets of Shimokitazawa hum with life, and you can almost hear the clinking of cutlery in Les Liens, the bistro whose name literally means “The Bonds.” These small details hold the novel’s emotional core. But the solutions offered—Paris, new beginnings abroad—feel distant, elitist, and strangely tone deaf. Most of us can’t buy a ticket to Paris when grief becomes unbearable. Yoshimoto even acknowledges this in her afterword, writing that people often criticize her for creating “ideas that sound good, but which they wouldn’t be able to keep believing in if they were faced with the death of a loved one,” and that some say, “adults have various responsibilities and obligations that mean they can’t live by just following their feelings.” I think those critiques hit home. Moshi Moshi shows a growing disconnect between grief as most of us know it—messy, ongoing, grounded in the day-to-day—and the version offered here, which feels curated, like a glossy magazine spread about self-discovery. It feels like Yoshimoto has drifted away from the ordinary magic that defined her earlier works. In Kitchen, there’s poetry in a bowl of noodles eaten at midnight. In Dead-End Memories, a shared apartment and small rituals build quiet strength. But in Moshi Moshi, healing becomes something tied to privilege and displacement, as if you can only find yourself by leaving everything behind. There’s a term for this: the authorial bubble. Yoshimoto herself, a celebrated writer with financial stability and international recognition, may no longer feel tethered to the realities of people who can’t afford to heal that way. And, of course, market trends play a role. The rise of iyashi-kei (healing) narratives in the 2010s often paired healing with travel and escape, feeding into the fantasy. Or maybe, as you read, you feel it’s simply a kind of thematic laziness—choosing the quick, dramatic reset of travel over the slow, unglamorous work of staying put and rebuilding. The most poignant moments in Moshi Moshi are still the small ones. Yoshie making a meal for her mother, the busy yet serene streets of Shimokitazawa, the tender gesture of the salt ritual. These fragments hold echoes of Yoshimoto’s older ethos: healing is born from ordinary life. But these moments get overshadowed by the Paris finale, where healing is framed as something you can buy a plane ticket for. Imagine if the novel had leaned harder into those small, grounded acts. What if Yoshie had stayed and reopened Les Liens somewhere else, or confronted her father’s betrayal through a local burning ritual? What if the story had explored rebuilding, rather than running? That would’ve tied back to the magic of her earlier work—the sense that even in our darkest moments, the ordinary things can save us. As it stands, Moshi Moshi is a haunting, beautiful, yet frustrating read. It still carries Yoshimoto’s dreamy melancholy, but the narrative choices—absolving men of accountability, framing healing as a luxury—create a distance that’s hard to ignore.

A surreal and deeply human novel about recovery and rebuilding life after a mysterious death, from an internationally acclaimed Japanese literary sensation

Moshi Moshi

As always with Yoshimoto, I’ve highlighted so many lines that resonated with me. 

The reason I didn’t give it a higher rating is because I was so thrown off by the sudden realization of the MC on who she really is in love with. Are age gaps really a thing in Japanese lit?

As always with Yoshimoto, I’ve highlighted so many lines that resonated with me. 

The reason I didn’t give it a higher rating is because I was so thrown off by the sudden realization of the MC on who she really is in love with. Are age gaps really a thing in Japanese lit?

Erika Monti 

Lorenzo Foltran

Jamie Brown

Harriet Langan

"A beautiful translation...Yoshimoto deploys a magically Japanese light touch to emotionally and existentially tough subject matter: domestic disarray, loneliness, identity issues, lovesickness...[a] nimble narrative." ―ELLE In Moshi Moshi, Yoshie’s much–loved musician father has died in a suicide pact with an unknown woman. It is only when Yoshie and her mother move to Shimokitazawa, a traditional Tokyo neighborhood of narrow streets, quirky shops, and friendly residents that they can finally start to put their painful past behind them. However, despite their attempts to move forward, Yoshie is haunted by nightmares in which her father is looking for the phone he left behind on the day he died, or on which she is trying—unsuccessfully—to call him. Is her dead father trying to communicate a message to her through these dreams? With the lightness of touch and surreal detachment that are the hallmarks of her writing, Banana Yoshimoto turns a potential tragedy into a poignant coming–of–age ghost story and a life–affirming homage to the healing powers of community, food, and family.

Moshi moshi

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