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.