Yellow and Overripe

 I just finished The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto (a pen name inspired by the banana flower, of which I'd never heard until now). She is a celebrated Japanese author with a large global following. The back cover calls the novel "...A quietly stunning tour de force." The Chicago Tribune describes Yoshimoto as "...A master storyteller [whose] ... sensuality is subtle, masked and extraordinarily powerful." "Her achievements are already legend," according to the Boston Globe.

I say she laid it on pretty thickly with The Lake.

I'll start this review with a somewhat lengthy aside that I hope you'll forgive.

In high school I studied film for a year. At the time I was enrolled I wasn't that interested, but my wise and magical guidance counselor knew better and insisted. It was a new and exciting program, she said, and I was a senior with space in my schedule. I consented, and sure enough, I loved it. Our teacher had brought in some old movie theater seats and a projector, and we spent many a class watching films and discussing them - not a bad way to spend an afternoon at school.

It was in this class that I was first presented with the narrative balance of show and tell. Any story must be told from a perspective, and the choice of perspective influences its delivery. Stories usually play out with action and dialogue, but it is up to the author to decide how much 'moral' to inject into the telling, and how much room for conjecture by the audience to leave. My teacher held but certainly did not invent the opinion that voiceover narration was often abused in film and that such a visual medium should be trying to make statements visually wherever possible. By that benchmark, narration cheapens a film by feeding a conclusion to the viewer, forgoing their own process of deriving meaning. It depends on the piece, of course, but his general rule was that narration should be avoided wherever possible.

This idea was new to me, and I quickly took it to heart. I agree with the notion that the room for interpretation is often an ingredient in the best work, for it allows a person the opportunity to have an individual and maybe unique experience. At the time I was listening to a lot of instrumental, textural music that in retrospect I enjoyed specifically because it was devoid of any 'slant' - it didn't tell me how to feel about listening to it. I could use it as a vehicle to explore my own state of being.

The Lake gives the reader no such freedom. Seldom have I felt so trapped in a narrative, so linearly fed an author's conclusions.

It's a girl-meets-boy story with a familiar subtext. She's an art student dealing with the loss of her mother. He's an abstract thinker with an intriguing boyish vulnerability and a dark past. They live across the way from each other and meet by standing at their respective windows, which is just so sweet. Eventually they come together; he's awkward and cute and earnest; she's straightforward and curious. They go to visit friends of his, and in the most predictable fashion imaginable, she discovers the truth about his skeletons in the closet. And then he opens up about it. The End.

That's not a spoiler. You can't spoil a story that's already been written so many times it has entered the archetypal realm. The confused young man finding validation through the receptive understanding of a young woman, the small and infirm but clairvoyant voice-of-god character, the magnitude of adult folly as seen through children's eyes - these are all tired concepts whose conclusions have already been reached, and Yoshimoto pulls nothing new from them. Her scenes are so hackneyed, they suck the magic right out of her lovely words. And they are lovely, as promised - her simple depictions are vivid and her characterizations crisp, as I've come to expect from my limited reading of modern Japanese fiction. There's an economy of words and an elegance here. You'll be touched by her distillations of life's gritty truths...

... Until you read the 50th, and then the 100th, and then you're glad the book's over already, because damn. You'll be hard pressed to find one page in this novel that does not attempt to shed light on some touching corner of humanity, or make a clever observation of human behavior, and it quickly starts to feel forced. Dialogue in this book is 25% conversation, 75% inner monologue, and I walked away from the story feeling like a breathless sports commentator had been calling the blow-by-blow of each plot development as it unfolded. Give your story some space, Banana! The few pretty metaphors she works in are swiftly explicated away before your reading eyes, leaving you to wonder what this story could have said on its own, at its own pace.

I hope this novel is not indicative of the general tenor of her work, because I am disappointed. It could have been short, sweet and poignant, instead of short-but-still-too-long. Perhaps it's that I read The Lake after having recently finished Haruki Murakami's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, a fantastic display of simple showing, interspersed with small, delicious tellings that only heighten its surreal mystery. That's a novel I will probably read multiple times before fully understanding it. I felt I'd finished The Lake a quarter of the way in, and thus simply reaching the end was all the reread I'd ever need.