The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto (trans. from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich, Melville House, 2011)

The Lake confirmed the impression I was left with after having read Asleep and N. P.: Yoshimoto is one of those contemporary writers situated at the border between what one could call (for lack of a better word) “serious” literature and pop fiction. The fact that The Lake was better received than N.P. in this country is at least in part due to the fact that its translator, Michael Emmerich, is considerably more skilled than N. P.’s translator. Still, while reading The Lake, I felt, as I often do when I read translations from the Japanese or the Chinese, that the language shifts in abrupt ways, from the very casual to the very poetic. I know that Yoshimoto has been praised for both her poetic language and her hipness (expressed in the very contemporary style of her dialogues), but I wonder if certain awkward transitions sound the same in the original.

I confess that my feelings about Yoshimoto in general and this book in particular are ambivalent. On the one hand, she does have a gift for creating atmosphere and identifiable characters with only a few simple strokes. She gives the impression that she has hurriedly jotted down some notes, which grab the reader in spite of herself. But then, one also finds passages that seem taken from some teenager’s blog—which may explain the huge following the writer has among young people.

The novel’s plot is simple: a young woman whose mother has recently died begins a relationship with a mysterious young man about whom she knows that he had suffered a big trauma in his childhood. Yoshimoto is very skilled at maintaining the suspense until the very end, when she reveals what had happened in the man’s childhood. More than anything, Yoshimoto’s enormous success among the Japanese comes, I think, from her strong sensibility whose dark side is popular not only for its “gothic” associations, but also because in traditional Japanese culture there is something noble about melancholy and sadness. The same fascination with melancholy characters and a dreamlike atmosphere can be found in Yoko Ogawa’s books, but the latter is a much better writer than Yoshimoto.