First published in serial form in 2010 in The Mainichi Shimbun, Japan's oldest newspaper, Banana Yoshimoto's new book Moshi Moshi – a phrase used by the Japanese when answering a telephone call from friends or family – is big on food, dreams and death.
Since adopting her exotic pen name and having a bendy yellow fruit tattooed on her right thigh, these are themes which Yoshimoto, born Mahoko Yoshimoto in Tokyo in 1964, has often explored. As this first English translation of Moshi Moshi affirms, moreover, she is also adept at lending a strange, subtle magic to commonplace aspects of her protagonists' lives.
When the book’s 20-something narrator Yocchan starts working at the Tokyo bistro Les Liens, for example, the acclimatisation period that other novelists might freight with drudgery is instead portrayed as deeply satisfying, almost mystical: “Gradually, I found I could sense how my customers were feeling,” says Yocchan. “Things like that person wants more water, or they’re not finished with that cup of tea. I was smitten by the process of acquiring this new understanding.”
Yocchan has moved to Shimokitazawa, an entertainment district of Setagaya, Tokyo, a year after the tragic death of her father, Mitsuharu. A keyboard player with the rock band Sprout, he entered into a suicide pact with his mistress, a beautiful but deeply-damaged woman whose existence Yocchan and her mother knew nothing of prior to his passing.
The book’s title chimes with the anxiety dreams Yocchan has about her father. We learn that, accidentally or otherwise, he left his mobile phone at home the night he died. In dreamland, Yocchan sees him searching for it and her phone calls to him go unanswered.
Early in the book, Yocchan’s bid for a fresh start, alone in Shimokitazawa, are put to an end to when her mother insists on moving in with her. Yocchan has been daydreaming about new romance and is initially furious at her mother’s imposition. And Yoshimoto is good on how the grief that’s shared between loved ones can be disrupted by selfishness.
But Yocchan grows to relish sharing a cramped space with her mother while the spacious family home that’s haunted by Mitsuharu’s ghost lies empty. Fortified by the caring local restaurateurs and shopkeepers Yoshimoto sketches so beautifully, mother and daughter gradually rebuild their lives as they attempt to decipher who their beloved husband/father – a good man who erred terribly – actually was.
We also watch Yocchan and her mother’s great respect for each other deepen when dad – “a hologram projected between us, showing us each a different image” – is removed from the equation. “Was this what she was like when she was younger?” wonders Yocchan, witnessing the return of her mother’s vitality.
The book’s secondary characters are also expertly drawn. There’s Shintani-kun, the transitional boyfriend and music venue promoter who Yocchan is first attracted to because of the graceful way he eats, and Yamazaki-sun, the drummer who is able to assure Yocchan of her father’s love for her despite his obvious failings.
It's Yoshimoto's beguiling evocations of life's small details, though, which make Moshi Moshi a joy to read despite its dark undercurrent. "We'd pull out a [happy] memory and spend time in it ... like rolling a piece of candy around in our mouths," she has Yocchan recall, while the cherry tree that stands on the street where Les Liens is situated becomes a talisman for the grieving young woman: "I'd [lay] my hand on its trunk each time I passed by, whether it was in leaf, or bare in winter. The habit had become one of the many daily points of contact that anchored me to life in [Shimokitazawa]."
Interestingly, there are playful moments in the book where Yocchan's life fleetingly maps on to that of Moshi Moshi's author. Yoshimoto is on record as saying that her favourite band is 1980s English pop act Prefab Sprout, and when Shintani-kun asks Yocchan "Who's your all-time top secret celebrity crush?", she cites its singer-songwriter, Paddy McAloon.
More telling, though, is the Yoshimoto-penned afterword to Moshi Moshi which the book's able translator, Asa Yoneda, also tackles for this edition.
Yoshimoto tells of how, when her own father, the poet and critic Takaaki Yoshimoto called her prior to his death in 2012 and suggested that she'd written Moshi Moshi about him, she was speechless. "But when I was reading the proofs for the paperback not long after losing him so suddenly", she adds, "I found the characters expressing my own feelings so perfectly that I felt supported and reassured by my own novel."
James McNair is a regular contributor to The Review.
