In 1988 Banana Yoshimoto entered the kitchen and never left. On the contrary: he took the whole house, the whole world. It all started from there, because – as the opening words of the first novel by the most famous Japanese author say – there is no place in the world that I love more than cooking. It was Kitchen to launch Banana Yoshimoto at home but it was Italy that gave it to the world, because it is due to a sensitive scholar like Giorgio Amitrano the intuition to export it (he signed the first translation ever). A virtuous domino effect was unleashed that transformed the novel of a 20-year-old or so into a global phenomenon and started a long chain of publishing successes.
Born in Tokyo in 1964, daughter of a famous essayist, Yoshimoto Mahoko remained with her pen name of Banana, a recognizable face and emblematic of Japan. Even when the dizzying multiplication of icons and fashions associated with her country normalized her, simply making her a writer, she continued her work: telling, telling, telling. His stories, which unfold in metropolises as well as in rural realities, have helped to remind us how Japan is not just a production machine or a screen of memories and fantasies or, again, a lunar forge of technology and pop phenomena. Tokyo and the country all around, on the other hand, are teeming with individual destinies that are tinged with melancholy, with aspirations that turn into regrets. There, too, behind every failure lurks, discreet but tenacious, the moment of rebirth. Women and men like us.
The second issue of the Corriere della Sera series, which explores contemporary Japanese literature, is dedicated to Banana Yoshimoto. And the chosen title, Sweet tomorrow (the translation of Gala Maria Follaco), proves to be one of his best for his ability to penetrate with delicate ruthlessness into the traumas of the Asian nation. a talent, that of knowing how to reflect in a narrative key on the lacerations of Japanese society, which Banana has achieved over time and which he had fully revealed with The lake, released in 2005, inspired by the attack on sarin gas in the Tokyo subway on March 20, 1995, carried out by the para-religious sect Aum Shinrikyo (13 people died, over 6 thousand were intoxicated). In the same way, Sweet tomorrow, written in the aftermath of Fukushima and released in Italy last year, elaborates – but without explicit mention – the shock of 11 March 2011 when the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster shook Japan.
In this novel the writer dismantles once again the misunderstanding in which Kitchen and the atmospheres of the immediately following novels had risked imprisoning Banana: that it was a writer taken from an exhausted and exhausting adolescence, with a layer of sugary icing to cover the most painful cracks of everyday life. But no. At least in his most successful novels, e Sweet tomorrow lo, Banana proves to be anything but detached from the world, although it faces its contradictions through paths that are very distant, say, from the complexity of Murakami Haruki’s architecture. Evil must be said: said and fought.
In Sweet tomorrow the narrator Sayoko, a young woman who escaped an accident in which she lost her boyfriend; she has not yet found her place in the world: To have survived was still a burden for me. The meetings will free her from mourning and bring her back to life: she talks to her boyfriend’s parents, a bartender reveals to her how a child can give resilience, supernatural presences appear – almost a germination of the spirits that populate traditional stories – because this world is there. it takes little to mix. The rebirth regains ground and here the expressive apprenticeship developed in the first books by Banana, the tools to capture and record the small shocks, the emotional bradyseism that moves the characters.
We had it all, we were lucky. Live or dead, we never lack for anything, let’s read. As the author herself explained in an interview with La Lettura in June 2020, the pages of Sweet tomorrow they flow for those who have lost someone, and for those who are no longer there. I always try to leave a glimmer of hope in the end. Banana, therefore, does not flee from the violence of the world: he simply confronts it with his own strategy and tactics. He spins around it and then sinks his prose, which is only apparently delicate.
Kitchen and no more Kitchen, therefore, why – we read in the Sweet tomorrow – Sayoko’s eyes learn to see things never seen before and therefore to reconstruct a vital universehere, Banana definitively emerged from the kitchen of the beginnings to encourage us and to reveal to us which side is bending our existence.
The novel on newsstands with the newspaper
Continue with Sweet tomorrow by Banana Yoshimoto The great Japanese literature, a series in 25 volumes to be released weekly with the Corriere della Sera. The novel, from Tuesday 18 May on newsstands, was written by the author in 2011, after the tragedy of Fukushima, which is ten years old: translated by Gala Maria Follaco, the second volume (after The assassination of the Commendatore in full edition by Murakami Haruki) of this collection that aims to present the best Japanese authors of the last two decades. The series takes into account the entire literary panorama of the archipelago: masters, pop phenomena, Nobel laureates such as Kenzaburō Ōe (of which The Water Forest is proposed). And again: highly refined novels, recent successes and, thanks to agreements with Japanese agents, titles that Corriere makes available again. Tuesday 25 May – third release – it will be Sōsuke Natsukawa’s turn with The cat who wanted to save the books, a hymn to the imagination and the power of literature starring an irresistible talking feline (cats, as demonstrated by the sixth release of the series, The cat from heaven by Hiraide Takashi, are a Japanese passion). Good to know: each volume, with the cover and the graphic design of the XxY studio, costs € 8.90 plus the price of the newspaper and remains on newsstands for the whole week. The authors of the works collected in this series, edited by Annachiara Sacchi, sign both with surname and name, in the Japanese style, as well as with name and surname, in the Western style: it was decided to keep the order chosen by the publishers.
May 17, 2021 (change May 17, 2021 | 20:46)
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