Overripe Banana

...yes, it was that kind of feeling," or when she offers a statue of the RCA/Victor dog Nipper as a powerful symbolic presence, she manages to wreck both her new book and her old ones—revealing that what once seemed a serendipitous touch with metaphor was always nothing more than a misunderstanding of pop culture that derived mainly from a failure to grasp the extent of American irony...

...Salinger published in 1961 his over-precious second novel, Franny and Zooey, critics were finally able to discern the forced quality they had missed in their astonishment at The Catcher in the Rye in 1951...

...Similarly, though many writers have worked the vein before, there is still some gold to be mined from the suicide of a character's sibling, if only to signal the dangers facing the self and to provide a single, sharp, recurring grief that will tether the narrator's wanderings in memory...

...Yoshimoto's first novels were widely praised for their unpredictable descriptions that no American author would ever risk: Kitchen told the story of a 19-year-old girl so lost after the death of her grandmother that she moves her futon into the kitchen and sleeps there beside the refrigerator, "wrapped in a blanket, like Linus...

...There is some genuine literary value, a little shopworn but still serviceable, in having a character slowly recover from amnesia, if only to provide a symbol for the problems faced by everyone in discovering who they are—and particularly by the drifting, rootless children of Japan's middle class...

...It's hard to convey in any coherent way the stupendous incoherence of Amrita...

...The UFO that the family (forewarned by Yoshio) traipses out to see, the albino beachcomber and his singer wife whom they encounter, the reggae bar in downtown Tokyo that Sakumi's boss opens—it's all clearly supposed to mean something, and somehow manages not to...

...Travel paid for with the strong yen is simple for Yoshimoto's characters— the mother flies to Paris, the daughter to Hong Kong, the whole family to a Pacific island—and along the way they seem to encounter only people who share their interest in unthreatening paranormal experiences and easy forays into New Age mysticism...

...The translator may be the one responsible for such lines as "I listened to my brother's footsteps tediously climb off to bed," but only the author could be to blame for Sakumi's explanation that her sister Mayu's nervous breakdown was "her true self crying out to be saved...

...But with her latest novel, Amrita, she may have finally wrecked her chances here, for this is one of those books so bad that they ruin not only themselves but everything else their authors have written...

...Kitchen, for instance, is now revealed to have tried to have it both ways, a girl wandering about unre-marking in a new world of divorce, sex-change operations, and aimless-ness, but nostalgic somehow for a structured past she never knew...

...Part of the problem with the book lies in its prose...

...When the news surfaced that Jerzy Kosinski had plagiarized the plot of Being There, his third book, readers could at last see the thinness of invention present even in his well-regarded first two works...

...But Banana Yoshimoto uses the dusty old device mainly to lend a specious urgency to Saku-mi's tiresome stream-of-consciousness recollection: "Now I remember...

...Readers ought always to be suspicious of novelists who have to explain what the theme of their novel is, and in fact Yoshimoto's books demonstrate exactly the opposite of her claim: the profound discontinuity of life for those without any moral center, those for whom their twenties and thirties are merely the upper reaches of childhood...

...Living in a haphazard household with her divorced mother, a younger brother named Yoshio, and various poorly defined characters who stray in and out, Sakumi is attempting to recover both from a bad fall that knocked out large chunks of her memory and from the suicide of her sister Mayu, a beautiful starlet lost by the family to the glamorous world of jetsetters, movie stars, and drug-dealers...

...But in Amrita, when she writes lines like, "I felt like putting the events of that day away on a disk and saving the file forever...

...Narrated by its heroine, Sakumi Wakabayashi, a Tokyo barmaid in her twenties, the book covers ground that Yoshimoto has been over many times before: the urban world of the young Japanese for whom the kind of stylized and slightly misunderstood American pop hipness typified by renaming oneself "Banana" is the only ethical code they know—the generation that, without ever choosing any life in particular, has somehow lost for itself the possibility of either its parents' suit-and-tie industriousness or its grandparents' kimo-noed traditionalism...

...When Kitchen appeared in English Contributing editor J. Bottum is the literary critic of The Weekly Standard...

...Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, and John Updike have all, at one time or another, produced failures that managed mostly to expose problems they had successfully masked in their masterpieces...

...Inheriting her dead sister's boyfriend, a novelist-turned-screenwriter named Ryuichiro, Sakumi seeks in a dazed kind of inaction some resolution to her sufferings...

...In their rush to avoid anything resembling judgment, Yoshimoto's books speak with all the moral authority of Art Linkletter's Kids Say the Darndest Things...

...When J.D...

...I want to express the idea that, regardless of all the amazing events that happen to each of us, there will always be the never-ending cycle of daily life...

...But, like most of the novel, it doesn't hang together in any meaningful way...

...And the book's wispy, delicate young Japanese author avoided noticing the obvious contradictions of the whole thing only by adopting the cloying narrative voice of the faux naif—the premeditatedly ingenuous, the calcu-latedly precious, the willfully inane, something like a low-rent version of The Catcher in the Rye narrated by a pixilated Valley Girl...

...But Yoshimoto seems to have introduced the theme of suicide only with some vague notion that the book—her longest and most ambitious thus far—ought to have a weighty occasion for all the deep feeling her characters incessantly express...

...Generally praised translations of a second novel, N.P., and a collection of short stories, Lizard, quickly followed, and it looked for a while as though the Banana Yoshimoto empire would establish itself in the United States...

...she exclaims over and over again in a breathless narrative filled with exclamation points vainly trying to make significant the banal remarks they trail...

...American reviewers, entranced with the novel's glimpses of the unfamiliar Japan of a rootless new generation, seemed happy to have a hip, young, foreign author—a sort of Far Eastern female version of Jay McInerney or Bret Easton Ellis—to recommend...

...A novel of situation rather than incident, with oddball characters set down in unconventional circumstances in order to record their eccentric feelings, Amrita lacks much in the way of describable plot or action...

...In an over-explanatory afterword to Amrita, Yoshimoto observes, "The theme of this book is simple...

...There was never a whole lot of serious literary significance to the young Japanese publishing phenomenon who changed her name from Mahoko Yoshimoto to "Banana" in 1987 and has written nine bestselling books in the ten years since...

...The daughter of one of Japan's leading 1960s radicals, Yoshimoto found with her first novel, Kitchen, the same kind of huge and virtually inexplicable success in Japan that was found in America by Erich Segal's Love Story in the 1970s and Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County in the 1990s, selling out 57 Japanese printings in less than five years...

...As the story opens, its key events have already happened...

...Stripped of the plot and action that masked her previous novels, Amrita forces the reader to realize that all Yoshimoto's fiction betrays little more than the moral thinness and intellectual inattention of a child...

...In what the reader is nudged to consider a profound parallel, the younger brother Yoshio slowly gains a magical power to predict the future exactly as Sakumi regains her power to remember the past...

...in 1993, however, it received far more serious notice than such freak bestsellers normally obtain...