An eerie yet familiar ethereal quality infuses the three stories of Banana Yoshimoto’s Asleep. The first-person narrator of each is a border person, existing on the cusp between wakefulness and sleep, life and death, periodically crossing over and crossing back.
In “Night and Night’s Travelers” the death of Yoshihiro, the brother of the narrator, transfixes the lives of his sister, Shibami, his girlfriend at the time of his death, Mari, and the young American exchange student, Sarah, with whom he earlier fallen in love and later abandoned. Mari cannot sleep. Sarah cannot let go. Both have enduring mementos of their relationship with Yoshihiro. It is left to Shibami to serve as their medium, between each other and with the spirit of Yoshihiro.
In “Love Songs”, two women vying for the same man form a relationship so intense, yet unspoken, that it might be love. The death of the older woman, Haru, cements the bond somehow. The younger woman begins taking on some of Haru’s characteristics and is even visited by what she believes is Haru’s spirit. Her purposeful confrontation with the spirit is the necessary next step in her own transformation and broader understanding of love in its many forms.
Death also troubles “Asleep,” with the suicide of the former flat-mate of the narrator, Terako. Her death and the transitional state between life and death of the wife of the Terako’s boyfriend, trapped in a permanent coma, begin to sap the life force of Terako. She visibly loses her will to live, embracing exhaustion and sleeping for increasing numbers of hours, so deeply that she cannot even hear a telephone ring. Again, a visitation from the spirit realm triggers Terako’s rescue.
The themes of death, loss of will, and love permeate these stories. Tone is more important than action. Anxiety, perhaps about the transition to adulthood (most of the characters seem to exist in a state of perpetual late adolescence), dominates. Age or cultural distance may be a barrier to embracing the objects of Yoshimoto’s concern, but her writing itself is well worth reading.