FAREWELL TO YOSHIMOTO TAKAAKI 1924 - 2012

In March, 2012, Yoshimoto Banana’s father Takaaki passed away. A significant literary figure in Japan as a literary critic he was also heavily involved in left-wing politics and the student movement of the 1960s before later shifting his views in the 1980s when he beaome increasingly critical of Oe Kenzaburo and what he called ‘anti-nuclear fascism’. The following are some notes on the father-daughter relationship enjoyed by these writers.

1.  

1. In 1999 Ann Sherif wrote of Yoshimoto Banana, that her “devotion to popular fiction contrasts with the philosophical and scholarly emphases found in the writing of another famous member of her family: her father, writer Yoshimoto Takaaki.” This is a view that Yoshimoto encourages by suggesting that her father has had little influence on her writing, which makes an interesting corollary to the absence of the father figure (and in fact the biological family) in her early writing. Indeed, this distancing of her writing from her father’s literary activities makes Yoshimoto a literary orphan akin to the ‘orphans’ in her writing. However, one implication of this is that Yoshimoto is embracing the stereotype of the non-intellectual female writer whose writing has, according to Ericson, been described as non-intellectual and sentimental (1997) consisting of little else than ‘detailed observations of daily life’. Shimada Masahiko, novelist, essayist and director of the Japan Writer’s Association, adds weight to this view arguing that Yoshimoto’s writing is best understood when placed in the context of Japanese classics from the Heian Period, such as the The Pillow Book of Sei Shônagon (early 11^th century). Shimada argues that Yoshimoto’s writing, like the world of the Heian court women described in the Pillow Book, is a world of feeling rather than thought. Whether Yoshimoto is aware of this type-casting is unclear, but as we have seen, she has deliberately chosen to distance her writing from ‘literature’.
2. On Yoshimoto Banana’s writing style and relationship with the reading public, Takaaki compared her with the post-war cult novelist Dazai Osamu. He argues that they both speak to readers in a language that belongs to and defines them. Banana has created an intimate relationship with her readers in the same way that Dazai did with his readers. Of Dazai, Takaaki says that his fans felt that ‘only they could understand him’ and that he wrote for his readers, not for his literary editors, critics or literary friends (1997).
3. In the 1960s Ôe Kenzaburô argues that disturbances on university campuses ‘raged everywhere like a medieval plague’ (1995). Ôe agrees with Octavio Paz that these ‘identical subcultural trends’ had ‘global horizontal ties’ (1995). Interestingly, the influential post-war American translator Edward Seidensticker, says of Ôe Kenzaburô, that he found both his politics and his fiction ‘distasteful’ (2002) and seems to have taken umbrage at Ôe, who, like so many of the postwar interi (intelligentsia), including Yoshimoto’s father Takaaki, opposed the signing of the revised Security between Japan and the United States in 1960. Leith Morton observes, however, that Yoshimoto has criticised both the left and the right in his writing, resulting in what he describes as a ‘perverse complexity’, a term which interestingly could be used to describe his daughter Banana’s writing given her refusal to identify with movements as varied as feminism, the New Age and environmentalism (not to mention any trace of academic influence on her writing) in pursuit of her own form of jiritsu (independence) which nevertheless seeks to engage intelligently and creatively with the social problems that confront her generation (Morton, 2003).
4. The avoidance of ideology in Yoshimoto Banana’s writing can be classified as an example of a ‘separatist literature of inner space’ that her characters withdraw into, Yoshimoto’s writing is not, however, an example of a ‘separatist literature’ in the radical feminist sense. In fact, the focus of Yoshimoto’s writing is on the private world of the individual and not the implications their actions have in any public or social sense. Yoshimoto has said in conversation with her father Takaaki that she envisages her characters existing in a ‘pleasant place like the womb’. This along with the private nature of her writing is underlined in her statement that when she writes, she often needs to find that ‘pleasant place’ (1997). Yoshimoto may have a room of her own, but it is private and she is certainly not bound by any rules or regulations in relation to the room and its use.