THE 'RETIREMENT' OF YOSHIMOTO BANANA AND THE RISE OF A NEW GENERATION...

PART ONE: YOSHIMOTO BANA AND THE 'NEW BREED'

There has been a generational change in Japanese literature. In 2021 Banana Yoshimoto published a new collection of short stories declaring that she is happy to consider 'retirement' at this point. This, after a career spanning more than three decades.

The daughter of literary critic and poet Yoshimoto Takaki, Banana Yoshinoto embraced popular culture and made literature accessible to readers alienated by a masculine literary culture dominated by politics, history and an engagement with a 'serious' existential angst that inevitably led to nihilism and annihilation of the self. In its place Yoshimoto focused instead on healing, recovery and mental health.

As a voice for her generation Yoshimoto Banana created a more feminine rather than feminist approach that avoided politics and embraced the connection between human beings and the environment. In a world of increasingly fluid gender identities her's was a voice in the right place at the right time.

As a consequence of Yoshimoto's success, a rearguard action was fought in literary circles. Perceived as a threat, she was accused of lowering literary standards. Junsuibungaku (pure literature) was seen to be at risk from this 'new wave' of popular fiction that masqueraded as 'literature'. Yoshimoto Banana was further blamed for the alleged 'feminisation' of Japanese literature. The masculine literary culture based on the works of writers like Soseki,Tanizaki, Kawabata and Mishima was seen as the foundation for modern Japan's national identity in literature. The fact that the foundations for this national identity were built on tradional gender binary constructs andcracial views that promoted a sense of Japanese uniqueness was largely ignored until the post-war period when the dismantling of this system became inevitable. The fact that a 'masculine' culture could be so easily feminised was a shock. The idea that young women putting on their make-up on a train in public could become a topic for national debate was astounding.

In the wake of the success of the so-called 'New Breed' writers (Shinjinrui) like Yoshimoto Banana, Murakami Haruki, Murakami Ryu and Shimada Masahiko, there was a redefining of contemporary Japanese literature. Subsequently, writers like Kanehara Hitomi, following in the footsteps of Yamada Emi, have pushed the boundaries further redefining women's writing, giving graphic accounts of sex that rival those of their male counterparts. As a result, visiting a Kinokuniya bookstore in Japan, in September 2022, is a very different experience compared to what it used to be. Books by 'male' writers and 'female' writers used to be placed on different shelves. To day they are all on the same shelf.

Which brings me back up Yoshimoto Banana who has built on a legacy created by female writers in Japan going all the way back to the Heian Jidai period (Murashiki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon). Like those earlier writers who broke the mould of a serious masculine culture based on Chinese learning, Yoshimoto broke the mould in the 1980s by liberating literature from an equally stagnant 'masculine' culture. She helped drag literature instead into a newly emerging world of fluid gender identity. The decades of self sacrifice for the nation comprised of an army of  salarymen and O.L.s were over. A new time for healing andxself-expression had begun.

For over thirty years Yoshimoto Banana has been a prolific writer of novels, short stories and essays. The shock of the new wore off over this period of time and Japan today is in many ways a different country. Despite the fact that Japan is the only G7 country in which... there is a growing recognition of individual difference and discussion in the media of a broad range of topics ranging from kinetic violence to transgender identity to racism. Significantly, the assassination of former prome-minister Shinzo Abe has raised new questions about the influence of cult-like religious groups.

In his essay on 'white magic', Murakami Haruki argued that he was using his powers as a writer to wrestle with the 'black magic' of cult leaders like Asa Shoryu to win the hearts and minds of young Japanese people during period of the 'bubble economy' and after itsxsubsequent bursting. This was a period of spectacular economic growth and material prosperity but it also produced a spiritual vacuum in which young Japanese professionals were vulnerable to various cults that thrived at this time.

Like Murakami, Yoshimoto Banana's writing was a response to this spiritual vacuum and her 'retirement' can be seen as the beginning of a new phase in Japanese history in which the role of women advances while men struggle adapt to the changes.

PART TWO: KAWAKAMI MIEKO AND A NEW GENERATION

Today in Japan with its ageing population and low birth rate a number of conservative politicians still argue that a woman's function is to breed healthy babies for the nation. New generational writer Kawakami Mieko questions this narrative examining the biological and social consequences of being born a woman in Japan. Unlike Yoshimoto Banana whose focus was on the healing of the individual, Kawakami is more focused on the choices available to women in their lives and the consequences of those choices.

In the Akutagawa Prize winning novel 'Breasts and Eggs' Kawakami debates the rights and responsibilities of sperm donors and those who are born in IVF programs. In the novel 'All the Lovers in the Night', (prefaced with a quote from manga writer Ooshima Yumiko, a major influence on Yoshimoto Banana), Fuyuko, the protagonist, is a freelance proofreader who eliminates mistakes from books before they are published. Resisting the need to make choices regarding herself she chooses instead to observe the choices made by other women.

Whilst her social interactions are limited, Fuyuko does gradually come to spend time with her boss Hijiri. Hijiri complains to Fuyuko about the 'heartless women' she has to work with. "All they want is power and recognition. It's all they ever dream about, all they want, and they can never get enough, but they'll look at you like the thought's never even crossed their mind (39). While Hijiri is critical of 'heartless women' Fuyuko's former colleague Kyoko, describes Hijiri as, "a real piece of work" (131). She tells Fuyuko that people like Hijiri, "use people like you to validate themselves." (132) Ironically the gift that Kyoko gives Fuyuko is the same brand of perfume that Hijiri gives her.

The idea of choice and the consequences of choice is central to the novel. And central to the choices made by these women is a debate about the joys of womanhood - what a woman has to give up to get married to "embrace the joys of womanhood to the fullest" versus the benefits of living an independent life. In a book shop Fuyuko observes a group of girls looking through the books. Significantly Fukuyo notices that: "At some point, I felt as though I was being watched and looked up to find a girl looking back at me. She was part of a different group from earlier, but essentially the same kind of girl"(85).

Kawakami suggests that it is through these observations of each other that women place their own lives into perspective. And their assessments of each other are often brutal.  Of the original group of young women in the book shop, Fuyuko observes that, "All the girls had dyed their hair the same shade of brown and wore it in the same style. Their make-up was even the same, like they were on some kind of a team. Their tops revealed so much cleavage that I was worried that their breasts would spill out as soon as they bent over, but they didn't seem the least bit concerned, so I felt sort of ashamed for having thought of such a thing." (85)

Early in the novel, Fuyuko is given the opportunity to go freelance and she starts working from home. Her job, she explains to Mitsutake, a man she meets at a culture centre, is eliminating mistakes in books before they are published. "Books are so full of mistakes, it almost makes me wonder if they only exist so that the mistakes can pass their genes on to another generation." (97)

This view of 'mistakes' is presumably at the centre of Fuyuko's decision not to make choices in her life. And in this way she eliminates the need for any proofreading of her life. While she struggles with alcohol and refuses to make choices her reluctance to engage with people is never really explained. When Fuyuko describes her experience of rape at high school, Kawakami frames this experience in terms of 'choice'.

Fuyuko was raped by Mizuno, a classmate.
Afterwards Mizuno apologised in a voice that Fuyuko says was barely loud enough to hear. Having told Fuyuko earlier about his plans to study in Tokyo she then asks him if what just happened was also a 'decision' he had made?
Infuriated, he says he has no idea what she is talking about. He then says, "Know what? I take back my apology... You chose to come over, and you were part of what we did, same as me." Fuyuko reflects, "It was true that I came here by choice. I came to his house, took off my sandals and went up to his room. That was what happened." Significantly, Kawakami frames this experience in terms of 'choice'.

After the breakdown of her relationship with Mitsutake, Fuyuko stops answering the phone and rarely leaves her apartment. Inevitably she questions the decisions she has made in her life. "Had I ever chosen anything? Had I made some kind of choice that led me here? Thinking it over, I stared at the cell phone in my hands. The job that I was doing, the place where I was living, the fact that I was all alone and had no one to talk to. Could these have been the result of some decision I had made?" (182)

In order to find resolution to Fuyuko's dilemma, Kawakami advances the plot. In the final scene, which takes place three years later, Hijiri is now seven months pregnant. Fuyuko listens as Hijiri explains that she will become a single mother. "The guy evidently wasn't interested in having kids, so she thanked him for clarifying and broke up with him on the spot, resolved to have the child on her own" (315).

Where Yoshimoto Banana focuses on the healing of her female characters, especially through their interaction with nature, Kawakami focuses on the relationships women have with each other. Her focus is on how these female characters view each other and subsequently how they view themselves. While Fuyuko chooses to drink alcohol and avoids interacting with the people around her, she is free to observe characters like Hijiri who chooses to become a single mother to the chagrin of her own mother. Evidence of generational change. But given her job, Hijiri has a degree of economic independence that allows her to make this choice. With men reduced to the periphery, the women are free to make meaning for their own lives. And while Fuyuko may be hamstrung by the fear of making mistakes, she watches the women around her as they make meaning of their own lives in a contested space where men are reduced to the periphery.

FICTION AND FUROSHA: VISIBILITY IN JAPAN

 

Arriving in Japan during the period of the bubble economy, in the 1980s, I was struck by the technology and the fast pace of life. I had already discovered the literature of Tanizaki and Soseki, Kawabata and Mishima, not to mention the films of Akira Kurosawa. The prescient anime Akira (1988) with its howling mobs, crazy cults and corrupt politicians had not yet been made so my knowledge of anime was restricted to the likes of childhood favourites like Atom Boy (1963), Gigantor (1963) and Prince Planet (1965). Later came the animation of Ghibli Studio especially the gentle film Tottoro (1988), which generated a nostalgia for a simpler time. The Ghibli film Hotaru no Haka (1988), however, was a warning that not everything in the past would allow for an easy exercise in nostalgia. This was a bleak look at the devastation of war framed by a narrative centred on two homeless, starving children.

Exploring the city on the various train networks, I found my way to coastal areas, mountain areas, huge parklands, dormitory suburbs where housewives aired the bedding on tiny balconies attached to their apartments and bustling shopping strips hidden in tiny streets in the older parts of town. The dormitory suburbs were by and large defined by the tower blocks built in close proximity to the stations. These were generally devoid of life during the day. The older parts of the city, however, had their own very much lived in character. Where new towns are defined by absence the old towns are defined by the presence of people whose lives blend in with the graffiti and the ancient electrical and plumbing installations that draw photographers looking to capture the soul of the city.

It wasn’t long before I noticed how the homeless congregated in the railway stations and parks, sitting out the days while the world carried on around them. There was little or no interaction between them and the busy commuters or shoppers. If one of the homeless collapsed at the foot of an escalator the commuters just lifted their legs a little higher as they got off to avoid contact. Each and every person seemed to exist independently in their own bubble sealed off from the world by their Sony walkman. No-one else existed except as some kind of object like a power pole that needed to be avoided or a pedestrian crossing that needed to obeyed. If contact was made then a quick bow sufficed and off they went. It was a wordless environment.

I caught a train into Tokyo one morning from a dormitory town in a nearby prefecture. For part of the journey, there were plenty of seats and I read my book. Then the carriage filled up. The young woman in front of me, dressed in the attire of an office lady, was pressed closer and closer towards me by the weight of the other passengers. Eventually, after I had put my book down, she was pressed hard against me and so we shared our body temperatures, our breathing and our sweat as we stayed glued to each other until we arrived at Tokyo station. Not a word was spoken. It was an intimate encounter that stayed with me long after she left with the other passengers. I sat in my seat watching the perspiration dropping from the windows before I felt ready to confront the crowds outside.

It is not just adults who ride the trains, however. One day a young school girl was being harassed on the train by an older Japanese man. The man was well dressed and should have known better. But in this wordless environment he was in free fall.  And nobody said anything. He was just a figure in a passing carriage glimpsed through a window. Was it really happening? Most of the other passengers were asleep or listening to their Walkman as he groped the young girl in a sickening cocoon of silence until a foreign woman got out of her seat and intervened. Whatever code of silence operated on Japanese trains, she wasn't having a bar of it. She forced the man to leave the girl alone and then got off the train at her usual stop. The next day, when she got off the train, there was the girl with her mother waiting at the gate to thank her.

One day passing through a busy station two homeless men stopped the endless parade of passing commuters in their tracks. They had seen each other in the distance and had started calling out. They then began crawling towards each other across the crowded expanse. Wordlessly, the crowd parted to let them through. It was like the last request being given to a condemned man. The crowd formed a circle and watched as the two men laboriously made their way to the centre and then embraced. Show over, the crowd weren't interested in the formalities that followed. The spell broken, they dispersed following timetables that had been temporarily suspended as if there had been an earthquake or flooding from a typhoon. The bubble economy and the pursuit of unending economic growth had been briefly punctured by the ‘real world’ but required no comment.

In the post-bubble world, the sleepwalkers have awakened. The reality that they have awakened to is that economic miracle has ended. In its place there are significant social issues that need to be dealt with such as; social withdrawal, the ageing population, the falling birth rate, the rights of the LGBT community and the rise of China. The vagabond and the beggar who had symbolised the poverty of the post-war years following defeat in World War Two were back. But they weren't the ghosts of the past, they were real and they represented the failings of the present not the past.

The tramp and the vagabond had been dismissed during the years of economic growth as a necessary sacrifice. They were the equivalent of the loveable Tora San, who hadn't been able to keep up with the times. Tora san, the Chaplinesque figure who couldn’t settle down. The black sheep of the family doomed to spend his life looking in from the outside at family life and the beginnings of a new prosperity in the post-war democratic era. In this new world the Samurai put down their swords and emerged as an army of salary men giving total obedience to their companies. After the failures of World War Two and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, this was a chance for redemption. Conformity was taken to a new level and no sacrifice was too great. Tora san and a more innocent world was left behind and his audiences shed vast quantities of tears for him (and themselves).

In the post-bubble period, the relationship between Literature and popular culture has become closer as they engage with the lives of strugglers and the battlers rather heroic or epic narratives that lend themselves to nation building. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995), Haruki Murakami Haruki looked at the horrors of the war in Manchuria. He poked and sniffed around disturbing the national amnesia that was the preference of the ruling political classes. In Almost Transparent Blue (1976) his contemporary Ryu Murakami had taken a confronting look at drug taking and sexual relationships between Japanese women and a group of African American soldiers on a base located near Tokyo. Later came his opus From the Fatherland With Love (1984) about the invasion of Kyushu by North Korean forces who make the Japanese authorities look weak and devoid of spirit. It is the homeless and the vagabonds who find the strength necessary to push back the invaders.

Apart from these masculinist tusslings, the novelist Banana Yoshimoto has made a career of writing about healing since the novel Kitchen was first published in 1988. Together with the psychologist Kawaii Hayao, she has a shared interested in the writings of Carl Jung, especially in his prescription for people to reconnect with nature to in order to cure neurosis. The disconnection from nature, they argue, has led to a spiritual emptiness in urban Japan. Hence, despite material prosperity, the society has suffered in a moral vacuum due to problems like social withdrawal, the prostitution of school girls and acts of significant violence. Alarmingly, the spiritual vacuum was filled during the 1990s by the rise of cults like Aum Shinri Kyo. The film-maker Juzo Itami parodied this phenomenon in the satirical film A Taxing Woman 2 in 1987. His death in 1997, which may been have been the result of gang violence due to his satirical films about the yakuza heralded the arrival of Beat Takeshi, a television comedian, whose violent films restored the honour and dignity of the yakuza. Meanwhile, harder-edged female novelists from Amy Yamada Amy to Hitomi Kanehara engaged with the ‘reality’ of modern life while Yoshimoto pursued a gentler approach focussed on healing.

Fast forward to 2020 and the economic miracle has been well and truly left behind and the homeless, in particular, are now no longer invisible. In the late 1990s I took a book of photographs by the photographer Hiroshi Hamaya into some Junior High School classrooms. Hamaya had travelled the country in the post-war period photographing the lifestyle of local communities before they disappeared during the reconstruction period of the economic miracle. One book featured the games that children played. The children were poor and had no shoes on their feet. Forty years later, on the other side of the economic miracle, their grandchildren thought they were Chinese. Prosperity alienated them from the generation of their grandparents. They couldn’t recognise images of their own country.

In recent years, poverty and homelessness are once again the subject of literature and are being featured on the big screen. In 2003, Kon Satoshi’s anime Tokyo Godfathers focussed on a bunch of homeless misfits who create their own family unit to provide a sense of belonging in a harsh and uncaring world. When they find a baby in the trash they take on the responsibility of returning the baby to its parents.The films of Kore-Eda Hirokazu such as Nobody Knows (2004) and Shoplifters (2018) have also focussed on the lives of the homeless and struggle for survival in an urban environment that pays them little attention. The novel The Homeless Student (2007), was based on the experience of a thirteen year old living on the streets. It was a massive bestseller and was followed by a manga and a number of film adaptations. In 2008, Kawakami Mieko wrote about the challenges faced by Japanese women. Her novel Breasts and Eggs drew attention to the challenges of pregnancy and the alienation that women experience living in their own bodies. And in The Convenience Store Woman (2016), Murata Sayaka looked at the pressure put on women to conform to socially prescribed gender expectations. As the protagonist is pressured to conform, it is the duplicity of the people around her which is most apparent.

During the economic miracle the homeless were begrudgingly allowed to build their cardboard homes in Shinjuku station until they caught fire. They then went back to being ‘homeless’. Back to being invisible, they were shunned like the burakumin in the Edo Period and the Korean labourers forced to work and live in Japan during and after World War Two. Like the Comfort Women, forced to provide for the sexual needs of Japanese soldiers during the war, they were an inconvenient truth. Now there is no ignoring them as film and literature focus on them in an attempt to understand a changing, post-bubble, society.

While the Japanese celebrate their ability in 2020 to protect the elderly from the Corona virus, social conformity has been exposed as a double edged sword. With the shrinking of the economy and the shrinking of the population, Japanese society is ageing at an ever faster rate and regional areas and smaller islands are becoming depopulated.  When sacrifices were made for economic growth, not all of those who made sacrifices were acknowledged. Fighting for recognition in a nation obsessed with animation and children with magic powers, the invisibles are making a reappearance. And the children will be relieved. They have been carrying the burden for too long. The burden of living in a society that doesn’t care.

And since the earthquake in Kobe (1995), and the tsunami in Tohoku (2011), the Japanese have come to see how thin the veneer of safety is in the modern world. Climate change has opened everyone’s eyes to how vulnerable we are in the face of bushfires, drought or typhoons. We can all become homeless overnight. The economic miracle and the illusion of endless growth has been shattered. The spell has been broken and the challenge now is to look after ourselves and to look after the environment.

BACK TO FEUDALISM

In the land of the of the Rising Sun people are facing the spectre of No Future. After two and and fifty years of isolation in the pre-modern period, the nation made modern technology their own. Despite the military period that ended in atomic catastrophe, they arose from the ashes phoenix-like and triumphed. That is now all in the past. A twenty year recession followed the bubble and the dream of holding the Olympics a second time looks unlikely. Any talk of it being merely postponed is questioned by a dubious population with little faith in their leaders. This lack of faith has plummeted even further with prime minister Shinzo Abe, who had the big idea to post two face mask to each and every person to lower infection rates during the virus. But, due to poor quality, these have had to be recalled. The country is in a shambles due to the government's ineffectiveness in the face of the virus. Some pachinko parlour are still open despite infection rates soaring in Tokyo. Imagining a return to normal on the other side is now becoming difficult. The government has also offered each person a thousand dollars to tide them through the crisis. But this is not enough. Especially compared to the one thousand, five hundred dollars being given to businesses for workers stood down during the crisis in Australia and New Zealand. The land of the Rising Sun, the locals argue, will no longer qualify as a developed country. The pace of life will slow down as they ease into life as a backwater not unlike the period of self-isolation in pre-modern times. Some would argue, however, this was the period of their greatest cultural achievements. It remains to be seen. Not sure what Godzilla would have to say! No more nukes!

SAYAKA MURATA'S 'CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN'

The idea of someone working in a convenience and finding this is the place where they feel most comfortable is a revelation. Going to Japan for the first time recently a young friend listed the following items as what they would  like to bring home with them to Australia; convenience stores, vending machines and onsen.

The convenience store in Murata's novel is not just a haven for foreigner's looking for snacks, however, it is also a haven for those Japanese who don't fit in. For their former school mates and families it is incomprehensible that this kind of shift work for high school and college students can become a fulfilling job for an adult.

The work itself is menial and low-skilled. Shift workers need only memorise where the products go on the shelves, how to manage the register during rush hour and how to speak to customers. To do these things with any more than basic zeal or diligence is absurd. There are no plaudits to be won by excelling in the job. In fact to excel this kind of jobmis to be marked out as one of the strange ones. And in Japanese society this must be avoided atcall costs.

This bleak commentary on so-called 'normal' society in Japan is not bitter. It is life affirming and the protagonist Keiko has an answer for most of the problems her friends and family present her with. In fact, it is Keiko who proves resourceful when others struggle. Shiraha observes that, "we are all animals..." and that "this is a dysfunctional society. And since it's defective, I'm treated unfairly."

Keiko notices 'water dripping through his fingers' and takes him to a nearby family restaurant. She gets him a jasmine tea but only drinks hot water herself because she 'didn't really feel any need to drink flavored liquid.' Later he is angry at her because he wanted coffee.

Keiko is as distanced from any need for self pity as she is from the basic comforts that the people around her need. Keiko exists in splendid isolation but makes herself essential at work and is happy to play the part of the 'convenience store worker'. When she proposes to Shiraha to solve both their problems. She is sick of being asked when she was going to get bbn married. Shiraha is resentful but moves in with her. Keiko is bbn glad when he has a shower because he stinks.

OSONAE

A big lipsticked face appears
In front of your eyes,
Your ears twitch
But you remain resigned.
The face buries itself in your fur,
It wants a kiss -
Unblinking you stare into space.
The face withdraws,
In its place, a green vegetable
Is put in your cage.

The crowds gather
At the big Buddha
Down by the sea,
They leave their votive offerings;
Sake and rice wine
Oranges and green tea.
The Big Buddha
Stares unmoved,
The crowd swells
As more people arrive.

YOSHIMOTO BANANA AND ME

'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.

SUKITA MASAYOSHI: THE SHOOT MUST GO ON

The Japanese film festival is on again and this year one of the highlights is the documentary The Shoot Must Go On about the eighty year old Japanese photographer Sukita Masayoshi. Born in Nogata, a small mining town in Fukuoka prefecture on the island of Kyushu, Sukita moved to Osaka and became a photographer before moving to Tokyo. He was however to be drawn to London by his love of music and the emerging glam scene created by musicians like Marc Bolan – here of course he discovered the great inspiration of his life, David Bowie. There are the photos from 1972 of David at the Rainbow theatre and then later on, in Berlin and later on, on tour in New York. There are also the photographs of David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Japan in 1977. There are lots of photos on the Hankyu train line between Osaka and Kyoto as well as photographs taken in and around the city of Kyoto that Bowie came to love. There are also photographs from the set for the Jim Jarmusch film Mystery Train and interviews with YMO whose album cover for Solid State Survivor was created on mahjong table at Sukita's studio. This game was big at the time so, in bright red uniforms designed by Takahashi Yukihiro, they sat down at the mahjong table but as there were only three of them Sukita brought in a human mannequin to be the fourth player.

Out of all his photographs, including the photographs of Bolan, Bowie and Iggy Pop not to mention a procession of various Japanese rock stars, it is a photo Sukita took of his mother sitting outside the family home in Nogata before going to participate in the local summer festival of which he is most proud. She is wearing a sedge hat and yukata, the profile is from the side and you can’t see her face. But this is the one photograph that he says brings together the best elements of his photography in a single image.

At age eighty Sukita is thinking of retiring. He might go back to Kyushu and live. In a 2016 shoot at the Royal Albert Hall he took photos of Iggy Pop's final tour for Post Pop Depression. Iggy stayed after the show for photos with the fans and he was praised in the media for turning the Albert Hall into an intimate club for the night. Sukita observed that in the early days photographing Bowie it was amazing how close the fans could get to him. There were shots of him performing in his underwear with the fans literally at his feet. By the eighties there were cameras with cranes going backwards and forwards in front of the stage and a huge distance had opened up between the performers and their audience. For Sukita who liked to photograph the interaction between the artist and their audience this was a cause for regret.