POSTHUMANISM AND YOSHIMOTO BANANA

Since her early books, Yoshimoto Banana has increasingly explored a posthuman world in which human characters interact with non-human characters such as ‘intelligent plants’ and animals. In literary terms, Yoshimoto has often described her writing as ‘fables’. The fable has a long and rich tradition in the West and is a genre that has been used by Japanese writers such as Miyazawa Kenji. There is a significant difference, however, in the way Yoshimoto writes about animals compared with Miyazawa. Miyazawa Kenji wrote traditional fables using animals instead of human characters for a moral purpose. For example, in Miyazawa’s short story ‘The Fire Stone’ (1992), a hare by the name of Homoi rescues a baby lark from drowning. In return, the king of the larks presents Homoi with a jewel (107). At first Homoi is pleased but with the jewel comes great responsibility. Because of his personal failings, a speck appears on the stone and at the end of the story it flies away (132). This fable teaches the reader a lesson about humility. The animals in this story are to all intents and purposes human beings in disguise. Yoshimoto, however, is more interested in exploring a world of the senses in which her human characters, animals and plants are equal. She is not writing allegories. And so, she is free to create new ways of being which are not bound by a humanistic framework.

 

Yoshimoto is not the first writer, however, to explore a posthuman world. Westerling notes that in Virginia Woolf’s 1941 novel Between the Acts, ‘Animal voices interweave with the human voices in the conversation that opens the novel’ (2006, 40). In doing so, Westerling argues that Woolf ‘restored human affairs to their embedded place in the wider community of earth’s beings and forces’ (41). Given the emergence of ecocriticism in literature which seeks to move beyond a humancentric view of the world, Westerling is excited by the possibilities that ecocriticism offers ‘at the beginning of a dangerous new millenium’. According to Westerling, literature can help bring the voices that French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote were ‘assumed to be silenced’ into ‘presence for a post-humanist future’ (44). Yoshimoto, it can be argued, is exploring these same possibilities in her writing.

 

Yoshimoto’s human characters claim they are able to communicate with animals in novels such as Honeymoon (1997). In Honeymoon, Hiroshi, who has been abandoned by his parents and is the victim of bullying, is described as liking dogs more than people (17). He also says that he can sometimes ‘understand’ animals. Manaka, the protagonist and his bride, thinks he is being stupid. She tells him sarcastically that when they go and see the koalas he can tell her what they are thinking (129). However, when Manaka and Hiroshi take a boat trip to see the dolphins, they see lots of ‘magnanimous’ dolphins who ‘deign’ to play with the humans. It is observed that from God’s eyes, human beings are like dolphins playing ‘wild’ and ‘primitive’ games. By watching the dolphins, Manaka and Hiroshi learn to see themselves in a new way and find a sense of meaning and purpose in life that has escaped them in Tokyo (149 - 154). Observing animals in the wild helps Manaka and Hiroshi discover this new sense of being.

 Yoshimoto often depicts human and animal interaction in a positive light which is in stark contrast to the many examples of destructive human behaviour which are referred to in her writing. In Mizuumi (The Lake) (2005b), Chihiro, the narrator, sleeps with Nakashima-kun and suspects that he has been sexually abused because he treats sex as if it is a ‘bad thing’ (40). Later, she learns that he was kidnapped by a religious cult when he was a child. When he escaped from the cult he remembers walking past a farm where he saw some horses. Significantly, they were not scared by him and gradually he felt better until he patted them. He describes their eyes as being like the sea, ‘pretty and engulfing everything’. Nakashima-kun cried and was thankful to the horses whose wild eyes returned him to himself (192). Together he and Chihiro plan to return to Shimoda to thank the horses (204).

 Animals are important because of the role they often play in the rehabilitation of Yoshimoto’s characters. In Niji (2002a), the narrator known as Watashi (I) is given a job looking after some animals and a garden after her third nervous breakdown. After her initial reticence towards them, Watashi begins to realise that they are helping her rehabilitation (68). Having lost her zest for life she is surprised by their vigour and strength and feels guilty that they are giving her so much strength. The effect of this interaction on Watashi is not surprising given the observation by Fox that:

 

Humans relax when there are animals around – just seeing them lowers the blood pressure – and this mix of human and animal has an ancient, primitive feel to it in a world where separation of man and beast, coupled with a kind of enforced sterility, is the order of the day (Fox, 2002, 52).

Estes argues that dogs ‘are the magicians of the universe’. ‘By their presence alone’, she suggests, ‘they transform grumpy people into grinning people, sad people into less sad people…’ (1997, 130).

 Yoshimoto depicts animal human interaction on an even higher level than this, however. In her stories, animals like plants, are capable of interacting and communicating with human characters. Thus, in Honeymoon, on the night that Olive died, Manaka recalls taking her for a walk. There was a strange feeling in the air that Olive was going to die (28 – 33). In Argentine Hag (2002), Mitsuko’s father makes a tombstone for his wife in the shape of a dolphin. When she sees what he is doing, Mitsuko says, ‘I forgive my father for not being present at mum’s death. Totally.’ The dolphin tells her ‘firmly’ that it is much harder for him because he was not there (85). This is one of a number of scenes in Yoshimoto’s writing, both fiction and biographical, where dolphins and humans are shown having this kind of interaction. Even more so than other animals, dolphins have an added significance in New Age thinking. David Tacey writes in his study Jung and the New Age

It is little wonder that the dolphin and the whale have become key symbols of the New Age, because they express perfectly the condition of oceanic engagement and at-one-ment to which the New Age aspires (Tacey, 2002, 55).

Oceanic engagement is also at the heart of Miyazaki Hayao's 2008 animated film Gake no Ue on Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff) which is a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's 1836 fairy tale The Little Mermaid. In a recent interview, Miyazaki stressed the importance of this theme saying:

"It's my personal belief that you can't separate yourself from nature. As you dig further

into yourself, you would eventually reach the popint of returning to the ocean.

You're connected" (Miyazaki, Quoted in barlow, 20089 The Age EG 4).

 

Dolphins and humans experience at-one-ment in a number of scenes in Yoshimoto’s books. Apart from the dolphins appearing in the wild in Honeymoon (1997) and the statue of a dolphin that urges Mitsuko to forgive her father for his absence at her mother’s death in Argentine Hag (2002), in the novel Iruka (Dolphin), published in 2006, Kimiko visits an aquarium with her boyfriend on their first date. She later recalls watching the dolphins play not yet realising that she is pregnant (42). When she realises and tells Goro, her boyfriend, Kimiko then visits the aquarium to say farewell with thanks in her heart (219). Her baby is described as being a ‘little baby from the world of dolphins’ (247). It is also described as having moved ‘from the world of water to the world of air’ (252).

Given the significance of animals in the lives of her human characters, the cruelty of humans toward animals is then especially distressing in Yoshimoto’s writing. In Iruka (Dolphin) (2006), Goro’s friends take him to visit a taxidermist’s shop in Bali, where they see some illegally stuffed gorillas with glass eyes that seemed to follow them around the shop. Later, Goro and Yukiko take it in turns to throw up in their hotel room (58). Unlike the idealised restaurant and shops where Yoshimoto’s heroines work, the taxidermy shop is not a healthy environment and the shop assistants look like they too have been ‘stuffed’ (59). Later in the novel, Kimiko moves into a friend’s house where she feels ‘something bad’ (91). In the closet she finds a stuffed tanuki (badger) and pheasant in a plastic bag. She cannot understand why people stuff animals, as a trophy or otherwise. In her dreams she is warned repeatedly that there is something evil in the house. She finds more stuffed animals in the attic and when the psychic, Mami, comes to tell her that she is pregnant, they bury the animals in the garden (146). Yoshimoto is clearly concerned about the treatment of the animals and as Yukiko tells Goro in Bali, ‘all living things feel regret’ (59).

Yoshimoto’s exploration of these New Age themes has not escaped critical attention. Apart from Ann Sherif (1999), Yumiyama Tatsuya (1995) provides a general social context for Yoshimoto’s interest in healing in his paper “Varieties of Healing in Present-Day Japan”. Yumiyama writes that interest has been growing in Japan in healing since the 1970s. Three factors have spurred this interest including the oil shock in 1973, the publication of Shirley MacLaine’s book Out on a Limb in Japanese in 1986 and the collapse of the bubble economy in the late 1980s. Yumiyama notes that defining the term healing is difficult especially since its contemporary usage applies not only to a sense of harmony between body, spirit and nature, as well as having an individual focus. Yumiyama argues that healing also embraces interpersonal relationships as well as the environment and world peace. Yoshimoto’s interest in the New Age can be seen as part of a general trend in japan from the 1970s onwards.

Of interest to this discussion is a series of letters written by Yoshimoto Banana and Patrice Julien, an Italian chef living in Tokyo, published as News From Paradise (2005). On the 6^th of June, 2003, Yoshimoto wrote to Julien that soon after she had become pregnant, she had a dream in which a dolphin played with her and looked like it wanted to tell her something. She suggests that the dolphin wanted to let her know that she was pregnant (29). Clearly, Yoshimoto is not only interested in establishing links between the human and animal worlds, but also blurs the boundaries between the worlds of her fiction and her own life.

Finally, in her depiction of equitable interaction between animals and humans, Yoshimoto shares a similar sensibility with Japanese choreographer Teshigawara Saburo. Teshigawara’s dance company, Karas, performs a piece called Green, which features a cow performing a duet with a guitarist, geese marching behind a trombonist, dancing goats and frolicking rabbits, dancers and a live band. Teshigawara sees both the dancers and animals as being ‘living, breathing creatures who will respond to the music and each other’. Sato Rihoko, a dancer with the company explains, human beings ‘are animals too and everything around us is artificial, so we have lost our connection with nature’ (Young, 2005).