A LITERATURE OF SELF-HELP: THE JOY OF SANDWICH MAKING

While Yoshimoto Banana's writing deals with social issues such as abuse, religious cults and family breakdown, the author has said many times that she doesn't want to make these issues burdensome for her readers. In her writing, Yoshimoto refuses to make victims of her characters and, instead, she explores their ability to heal and be healed as well as their spiritual growth. An important point to consider is that unlike Yamada Amy, Murakami Ryu, Murakami Haruki, Shimada Masahiko and, more recently Kanehara Hitomi, Yoshimoto does not write explicitly about hard-core sexuality or drug use. Instead, she can be compared with Jung in her substitution of spirituality for sexuality. And while her characters are isolated, they learn to live through their senses and food, especially in the early writing,  takes the place of sex. 

Before we look at how food is viewed in Yoshimoto's writing, it needs to be pointed out that there is an absence of sex generally in shojo literature, a genre that includes novels such as Hashimoto Osamu's Momojiri Musume (Peach-Bottomed Girl) through to Kanai Mieko's Indian Summer and Yoshimoto's Tsugumi. This genre is filled with nostalgia and, as it appeals to both male and female readers, Saito Minako has argued that it represents the breakdown of traditional gender roles or even the breakdown of Japan's corporate society. Yoshimoto's early shojo novel Tsugumi, is about the 'perfect shojo who will never grow up'. Tsugumi has been sick since birth and has strong anti-social behaviours but nevertheless is part of a group of teenage girls who obsessively watch their favourite TV series together. When it comes to an end, Maria, Tsugumi's cousin says, 'I found myself in the grips of a wrenching sadness. I was only a child, but I knew the feeling that came when you partyed with something, and I felt that pain.' These feelings have been described dismissively by some critics as being part of a pre-Oedipal state filled with nostalgia, a state which privileges a childhood past over an adult future but, Yoshimoto's characters are often caught up in circumstances over which they have no control, which in this case includes Maria's parents' divorce and Tsugumi's illness. Rather than show them being damaged beyond repair, Yoshimoto focusses instead on their ability to heal themselves. This is not by growing up and leaving their adolescent world behind but by embracing it. Of course, they cannot stay in this worle forever but Maria says of this time '... those days were blessed.' Inspirational stuff! This is a literature of self-help not adolescent complaint or despair!

In place of sex, food becomes a significant element in the lives of Yoshimoto's characters. It allows them to express and to take pleasure in a non-sexual way. In the novel Kitchen, the kitchen itself can be seen as an ‘enclosed’ space or else a ‘secret room’ within which Mikage, the protagonist, tries to find a new self. It becomes a place of refuge for Mikage after the death of her grandmother. Later she joins the staff of a master chef and it becomes a workplace. Therefore, Kitchen is not only the title of the novel, but also refers to the secret place in which Mikage’s new sense of self is developed. Mikage herself says: "Dream kitchens… I will have countless ones... Alone, with a crowd of people, with one person – in all the many places I will live. I know that there will be so many more (43). Therefore the kitchen can be seen as liberating and leads to the empowerment of Yoshimoto's characters. 

Cooking is a passion for Mikage. Yoshimoto describes the thrill that she experiences in the kitchen when Mikage says: "I was not afraid of burns or scars; I didn't suffer from sleepless nights. Every day I thrilled with pleasure at the challenges tomorrow would bring. Memorising the recipe, I would make carrot cakes that included a bit of my soul. At the supermarket I wouild stare at a bright red tomato, loving it for dear life. Having known such joy, there was no going back" (59). In this way the kitchen is reclaimed as a place of creativity instead of being seen as a symbol for the oppression of women chained to the kitchen sink by domesticity. Interestingly, however, Yoshimoto rejects this view of the kitchen in a subsequent novel Amrita where Sakumi says of  the kitchen: "It's wrong for mothers, daughters, and wives to be imprisoned there forever. The kitchen is not only a place where we can create wonderful borscht, but it's also a breeding ground for malice and kitchen drinkers" (34). In this way, perhaps, Yoshimoto avoids being polemicised as a 'feminist' writer. 

While food can be seen as a substititute for sex or an outlet for creativity it is also reassuring. In the short story 'Moonlight Shadow' Sakumi is taken by Hiiragi to the place where her boyfriend Hitoshi died. Afterwards they eat tempura together and she says "It's delicious... So delicious it makes me grateful I'm alive" (125). In Amrita, Sakumi gets a fever and she is comforted by Saseko who brings her homemade sandwiches. Sakumi says "On top of everything else, the sandwiches were incredibly delicious" (181). Sakumi who is on holidays in Saipan, has a part-time job in a bakery in Tokyo called Berries which she describes as being a "like a lighthouse amid the skyline of the dark suburban streets. People never came from far away, nor did we ever have so many customers that we ran out of bread, so I never felt hurried by the lines" (239). Whilst this idealised description of the bakery is entirely unsexualised, towards the end of Kitchen, Mikage recalls:

When was it that Yuichi said to me, “Why is it that everything I eat when I’m with you is delicious?”

I laughed. “Could it be that you’re satisfying hunger and lust at the same time?”

“No way, no way, no way!” he said, laughing. “It must be because we’re family” (Kitchen, 1988, English translation 1993, 100-1).

This quote shows that while food may be seen to have taken the place of sex, there is an awareness that the human appetite can also be seen as being sexual. However, the main tendency in Yoshimoto's writing is to avoid the sexualisation of food and instead to focus on its healing and comforting properties.

Finally, as well as exploring close adolescent relationships and the joy of food, sounds are also used to punctuate the text to evoke certain moods in the reader. In Yoshimoto's novel N.P. Saki calls Kazami to tell her that she is going overseas and Kazami can hear the sounds of the airport in the background. Later, when Shoji’s bone clicks in the little box at the beach she says ‘The sound echoed in my ears for a moment, just as the rhythm of the surf stays with you’ (175). Dave Kehr, in a comparison of Western and Japanese animation, writes that while Western animators try to create a ‘convincing illusion of life’ Japanese animators attempt to evoke a particular mood through the use of colour or a single expressive gesture. Yoshimoto’s writing incorporates all of these techniques in her writing. It is this sense of a shared textual pleasure with her readers (rather than sexual pleasure) that is the hallmark of the enclosed shôjo world. This ‘separatist literature of inner space’ that is most clearly realised in Kitchen defines the first phase of Yoshimoto’s career.

JUNGIAN ARCHETYPES IN YOSHIMOTO BANANA'S WRITING

In a 2006 fax interview (see previous blog) Yoshimoto suggested that Jung had not been a dircet influence on her writing. She had not read much for it to be a influence. But nevertheless there are some striking parallels that can be drawn between his work and Yoshimoto's writing. 

Throughout her writing Yoshimoto explores a sense of identity that is compatible with Jung’s archetypes. In Kitchen, Mikage says about herself and Yuichi, ‘aren’t we really man and woman in the primordial sense, and don’t we think of each that way’ (66). Furthermore after exploring Extra Sensory Perception in her early writing, Yoshimoto explores communication between people, plants and animals in Karada wa Zenbu Shitteiru (The Body Knows All) and communication with stones in Hard Boiled. Yoshimoto’s writing has affinities with Jung’s sense of the psychic interaction between people and the natural world. Jung argued that as scientific understanding has grown the world has become ‘dehumanized’, resulting in people’s sense of isolation in the cosmos and the loss of an ‘emotional “unconscious identity” with natural phenomena’:

These have slowly lost their symbolic implications. Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightening his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied.

Yoshimoto was born in the same year in which the above extract was published, 1964, and, in the second phase of her career, she is clearly interested in exploring people’s relationship with the environment in ways which Jung claims have vanished due to ‘scientific thinking’. As a result, Yoshimoto’s characters communicate with plants and animals and, as is the case in Hard Boiled, stones do still speak to man. In the world of Yoshimoto’s writing, her characters are increasingly turning away from the sterility of modern urban life and traditional social structures and seeking healing and a sense of well-being from the natural world.

Dreams are also an important part of Yoshimoto's despite her professing not to know what they mean. Carl Jung wrote that having spent half a century investigating natural symbols, he had come to the conclusion that dreams and their symbols were not ‘stupid and meaningless’. In fact, Jung argues that dreams have much to tell those who try to understand their symbols. In Kitchen, Mikage dreams that she and Yuichi are climbing a ladder. Together, they peer into a ‘cauldron of hell’. Recounting her dream, Mikage wonders:

But I wonder, as I look at his uneasy profile blazingly illuminated by the hellish fire, although we have always acted like brother and sister, aren’t we really man and woman in the primordial sense, and don’t we think of each other that way? (Kitchen, 66).

This mythic conception of themselves (Yoshimoto's equivalent to Jung's archetypes) allows Mikage to see herself and Yuichi free of the social confines to which both Okuno and Sotaro want her to adhere. It is interesting to compare Yoshimoto’s description of Mikage’s dream with an account of a similar dream by Jung. Jung describes the dreamer as a woman with a ‘highly cultivated style of life’. Her dream, however, takes her to a ‘prehistoric period’ in which ‘she sees a huge crater of an extinct volcano, which has been the channel for a violent eruption of fire from the deepest layers of the earth’. Jung argues that this refers to a ‘traumatic experience… a personal experience early in her life when she had felt the destructive, yet creative, force of her passions… she needed to break away from her family’s excessively conventional social pattern’ (153). Mikage, it could be argued, is also experiencing the need to break away from an ‘excessively conventional pattern’. During such a crisis, the Jungian psycho-analyst M.-L.von Franz (1964) writes that ‘all well-meant, sensible advice is completely useless’. Thus the arguments that Sotaro and Okuno use to persuade Mikage to drop her independence fail. Von Franz argues:

There is only one thing that seems to work; and that is to turn directly toward the approaching darkness without prejudice and totally naively, and to try to find out what its secret aim is and what it wants from you  (M. –L von Franz, 1964, 167).

Yoshimoto’s characters share the same need for certainty in an uncertain world. In the short story collection Asleep, in the story ‘Love Songs’, Fumi describes Haru as the ‘embodiment of the diaphanous image, of Woman herself, come shakily to life, stumbling around’ (85). The glimpses Yoshimoto’s characters catch of each other as archetypal men and women transcend the moment and give them a sense of identity that is more deeply grounded than the roles created by society. In the short story collection Lizard, in the story ‘Helix’, the narrator’s girlfriend reassures him that she will not forget about their relationship, ‘All thousand years of it’ she says as if for eternity.

There are many other examples of Jung's teachings that can be seen in Yoshimoto's writing. This is not perhaps surprising when considered in the light of Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing's comments that, she likes Jung "as all artists do". And when Yoshimoto compares the Jungian psychologist Kawai Hayao to an elder in a Native American village, I think we understand that Yoshimoto's yearning for intuitive understanding and wisdom is what drives her writing closer to Jung's teachings.