WHETHER OR NOT you believe in ghosts, Banana Yoshimoto’s Asleep, a collection of three novellas, will haunt you with its beautiful, pared-down prose. Three women experience nocturnal disturbances: the first, mourning a dead lover, begins sleepwalking for miles in the middle of winter; the second is visited by the ghost of a woman against whom she was once pitted in love triangle; and the third, who has embarked on a relationship with a married man, slips into alcohol binges and sudden periods of deep sleep.
ASLEEP
by Banana Yoshimoto (Grove Press, $21)
The most accomplished story is the first, a complex character study narrated by Shibami, a university student who seems to live vicariously through her older brother Yoshihiro. Yoshihiro died some years ago, but he remains more real to Shibami than her own lover. An old letter taps her memory, and she recounts their teenage years, portraying Yoshihiro as a handsome and charming adventure-seeker who once took off for Boston with Sarah, his blond American girlfriend. Yoshihiro eventually splits up with Sarah and, upon returning to Japan, begins a romance with cousin Mari. This new relationship becomes a prism through which the narrator reveals herself. Oddly, Shibami feels an exclusion from this union that she didn’t with the first. “I realized . . . that my brother was starting to fall for Mari. He wasn’t even trying to hide it. . . . In fact there had been something between them ever since they were small, something that pulled them together even when they were paying no attention to each other at all.”
But as mild jealousy gives way to communal grief, the author portrays not just people but emotions as vanishing entities. If the three novellas have a unifying thread, it’s that the female protagonists experience men as ghosts. Shibami and Mari aren’t just mourning the death of Yoshihiro, they’re mourning their all-too-ephemeral hold on love.
