'NEW WAYS OF BEING' : WHY YOSHIMOTO BANANA MATTERS FROM AN AUSTRALIAN PERSPECTIVE
When I first read Yoshimoto Banana"s 'Kitchen' it was a book that immedately drew attention to itself because it covered theses such as sexual diversity, alienation and coming of age. I read the book in English and after studying Japanese at university and living and working in Japan for a couple of years I read the book in Japanese. I started a Masters degree and decided to make a comparison of the original text and the English translation. The point of the comparison was to look at how a story changes when it is translated from one language to another. How we speak is central to how we communicate.
By this stage in my life I was working full time as a high school teacher and had married. My wife was from Osaka in Japan. The school I was teaching at had many students from an Arabic background. There was a lot of tension in the Australian community and media at the time due to the first Gulf War. Teaching was a challenge and as the school struggled with the racial mix of the student population I continued with my Japaese studies at Swinburne University.
At that time schools and the wider Australian society were very conservative. Issues to do with bullying, sexism and sexual diversity were not well understood and generally hidden. To be called a 'fag' was a common insult and the word 'gay' was used as a general term of disparagement. It was a bleak environment in terms of sexual diversity. And yet the great irony is that the Arabic Australian community was under seige. By the time the second Gulf War came along and especially after the terrorist attacks on the WTO towers in New York Islam was the most feared religion in Australia. Muslim girls had their scarves pulled off in public and were spat upon. Banana Yoshimoto's novel seemed like it had come from another world and yet things were slowly changing.
Capital punishment had been banned and homosexuality decriminalised and anti-discrimination laws were passed in the 1970s but schools were still very traditional institutions in which boys were boys, girls were girls and 'fags' despised. Teachers saw their role as being defined by the subjects they taught and there was only limited attention paid to the well being of students.
The big change came in the new millenium. The school I had spent fifteen years in finally closed. It had been shrinking each year during that time and a relocation and three name changes and two separate mergers had done little to change public perceptions about the school. It was still known as 'Beirut High School' and Anglo families sent their children to different schools. It had effectively become a ghetto. Eventually right wing commentators in the media sniffed that something was up and Andrew Bolt used the school to make one of his attacks on Muslims on the Herald Sun newspaper. It was a relief when the school community voted to close the school.
At my new school which was three kilometers away things were very different. The students achieved good results and the community valued the school. The whole school felt calm and there was no need for a police presence to help build better comminity relations. After the Cronulla race riots in Sydney there was also a perveption more needed to be done to build a cohesive society. When students started celebrating sexual diversity on 'Rainbow Day' I had my doubts but change was the order of the day. Change that Yodhimoto had written about in her novels fifteen years earlier.
'Rainbow Day' is a celebration of sexual diversity. When students supported by shool services started celebrating this day I was sceptical. The world Banana Yoshimoto explored in her novels seemed very distant to the world I was living in. The characters in novels like 'Kitchen' seemed isolated and their concerns far removed from the mainstream. Little by little, over a ten year period, I realised that Rainbow Day was far from being of limited interest to only a few. The Safe Schools coalition and Same Sex Marriage plebiscite showed that there were huge social changes taking place in Australia. In surveys young people saw equal marriage rights as their number one political priority. Some heterosexual couples even argued against marriage unless everybody enjoyed the same rights.
With the advent of 'Rainbow Day" and the Safe School coalition there are also more fundamental changes to the way schools work as institutions. The idea that boys are boys and girls are girls was being questioned. Yoshimoto Banana identified and explired these issues three decades ago. And while I first read the books and responded to them on an rmotional level, my focus in my Ph D thesis was on the ecocritical aspects of her writing in her later work. Looking at 'new ways of being' from a post-human perspective. A better topic would have been to explore the ways in which these novels were exploring new ways of being in terms of exual diversity and how social change allowed society to be more flexible and recognise the rights of individuals even in conservative rule based settings like schools. In Australia, the issues Yoshimoto Banana explores in relation to sexual diversity, domestic violence and abuse and the need to focus on well being and healing are now core issues rather than add ons that schools struggle to address.
When I started teaching in 1989, teachers focussed mainly on the content of their subject areas. Today teachers are expected to consider the whole child. The well being of the child is seen as being central to their academic progress. This means more than just expecting a student to ignore bullies or sexual harassment. There are now expectations that teachers create a learning environment that supports all students. To do this teachers are now asked to start using non- genderbinary pronouns in classrooms. They are also expected to recognise that not all students come from traditional families. Teachers are also expected to recognise signs of bullyong and take steps to prevent this from happening. They are expected to educate students about the importance of schools being safe for all students and caution them about the use of homophobic language. Uniforms are no longer labelled as 'boys' and 'girls' uniforms but as 'summer' and 'winter' uniforms. Finally there are toilets labelled 'boys', 'girls' and 'unisex' for those students who identify with neither gender or are transitioning.
And so the world I live and work in in Australia has slowly started to recognise the 'new ways of being' that Yoshimoto Banana started to explore iin her writing in the late 1980s. When I first read her work there was some reluctance to take it seriously as literature. It was criticised for being 'lightweigth' and superficial.. After discussions with my Ph D suprrvisor Darren Tofts at Swinnurne University I argued that her writing should be seen as an example of a relatively new genre that had emerged in the postmodern landscspe referred to as 'paraliterature'. It engaged with ideas like literature but in a language close to that of everyday use. My focus was on the reconnection with nature in her later writing due to the negative affects of living in modern urban environments. Now, based on my experiences teaching in high schools for the last thirty years, I think it is the 'new ways of being' that she explored so early in her career that are the most relevants aspects of her writing given the social changes that have occurred in recent years. In Australia these are social changes that I could not imagine wgen I first started reading Yoshimoto Banana. This is why I believe she is the biggest selling Japanese novelistr in the Heisei period. Her achievement is far more substantial than her critics first imagined.
