Book Review: Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto

My copy of Goodbye Tsugumi - the colour looks

a bit different in real life.

A few years ago, probably when I was around the age of 16 or 17, I became mildly obsessed with the novel Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. Somehow this fixation managed to develop without my having actually read or even bought a copy of the book. Maybe I was afraid that the experience of reading it wouldn't live up to my expectations of Kitchen, but when I finally did I was relieved to find that it was everything I'd hoped for. It was beautiful, sensitive, and powerful, and it immediately made me want to go and read everything else Yoshimoto had ever written. And then I didn't.

Aside from one short story of hers (Newlywed), I didn't get around to reading anything else by Yoshimoto until just last month, when I finally bought a copy of another one of her novels: Goodbye Tsugumi. If anticipation of disappointment was what kept me from reading Kitchen originally, it was definitely still in the back of my mind when reading Goodbye Tsugumi. Nothing could change how much I'd loved Kitchen, but what if I hated this other novel so much that my opinion of the author was forever changed? Luckily, I'm glad that I took the risk and did read it.

Before I get into what I thought of the book, I'd like to give a little background. First of all, if you were not already aware, Banana Yoshimoto is a Japanese author. I don't read any more than a tiny amount of Japanese, so I have always read the English translations of her work rather than the originals - a habit that can come with its own issues, as I will address later. As far as I can tell, Goodbye Tsugumi (called simply Tsugumi or TUGUMI in Japanese, I think) is her fourth novel, having been published in 1989 but only translated into English in 2002. The edition I read was published by Faber and Faber with a translation by Michael Emmerich. 

Speaking of my edition of the book: I personally think that the Faber and Faber editions of Yoshimoto's novels are really lovely, which is especially notable given that it's become a sort of running joke that the international editions of her work are often given bizarre or unappealing covers, to the point that she actually has a gallery of some of these on her website. The Faber and Faber covers are simple but beautiful, done in blocks of colour with the original title of the book in Japanese characters on the front - thank you to Didier for translating the kanji on the front of Goodbye Tsugumi, by the way. My copy of Kitchen is also from this collection, and it's a vibrant pink colour that goes nicely with GT's dark purple. You can see a photo of the Faber and Faber edition of GT near the beginning of this post, although I suggest googling more photos if you want to get a better idea of the colour - I took that photo in artificial light and the shades came out a bit strange.

Moving on to the content of the book now. There's actually not that much I have to say about GT, because I genuinely loved it. When I respect and admire an author, I find it hard to write a review for their books, mostly because I feel I am somehow unworthy of passing judgement on their work. This obviously wasn't the case in my review of American Psycho, but it is true here. 

It has been a while since I last read Kitchen, but I can say that GT shares many similar themes with its predecessor, which I get the sense might recur throughout Yoshimoto's work: grief, nostalgia, ideas of home and family, and of course youth. There is a reason why Yoshimoto has been referred to as "the voice of young Japan", after all, and I think it's because she is so good at depicting that peculiar uncertainty which comes with early adulthood, which is important in both Kitchen and Goodbye Tsugumi.

There is another emotion that Yoshimoto is brilliant at depicting, and that is something which I believe is known in Japanese as mono no aware. This is apparently translated to English as "the pathos of things", and I've seen it compared to the concepts of memento mori and lacrimae rerum, similarly evocative but untranslatable phrases. I apologise if I'm butchering the meaning here, and I am very willing to be corrected by someone who knows more about Japanese culture and language, but my understanding is that mono no aware is a sense of sadness or melancholy felt when confronted with impermanence, be it in life or the material world around us. 

Goodbye Tsugumi is suffused with this type of feeling, of nostalgia and a bittersweet type of happiness, where joy is tinged with sadness by the knowledge that whatever happy experience is happening now must eventually come to an end. That this would be the most prominent emotion in GT makes sense, given that its plot follows a Tokyo university student named Maria who returns to her childhood home to spend one last summer with her cousin, the titular Tsugumi, whose family run a seaside inn. Tsugumi is chronically ill with an unnamed condition, and the threat of her death constantly hangs over her family and friends. They all live alongside Tsugumi with the knowledge that each day could possibly be her last. At the same time, Tsugumi's parents have decided to sell the family inn and retire away from the town in which Maria and Tsugumi have grown up. So when Maria returns to the town for one last summer, it is with a mix of nostalgia and a constant sense of impending loss. Although she has a seemingly bright future ahead of her, living in Tokyo with her parents, Maria is always aware that she is about to lose her childhood home and possibly to lose Tsugumi, her childhood best friend. 

The beauty of Yoshimoto's writing is that she succeeds again and again in making the personal, universal. While Maria's situation is unique - the family inn, growing up in a seaside town, having a terminally ill cousin - we can all relate to the emotions she feels. No doubt most of us have experienced that kind of half-melancholy, the pre-emptive nostalgia of being happy and yet knowing that it inevitably can't last. I've seen a few novels attempt to depict this feeling, and I know even fewer that have done it well. Some books fall into the trap of over-idealising the past or jumping straight to tragedy. Yoshimoto's skill lies in her ability to portray complex emotions in a way that is both delicate and moving, and in Goodbye Tsugumi she does that brilliantly. 

I only have one minor criticism of the book, and it is to do with the translation. Or at least, I think it is. The trouble with reading works in translation is that you are aware that you are not experiencing a text in the exact words of the author but rather through the eyes of a translator, and if you cannot read the original version as well as the translation, you are left wondering where the author's writing ends and the translator's interpretation begins. This is my problem with Goodbye Tsugumi, specifically with its dialogue, and particularly with the dialogue of the character of Tsugumi. I believe that in the original text Tsugumi must have spoken in a way that was very informal and borderline disrespectful to her elders, which was no doubt a challenge for Emmerich to translate. Unfortunately, Emmerich seems to have tried to solve the problem by making Tsugumi speak like a parody of an American teenager. She calls people "kid" and "babe" and uses phrases like "this is the pits" and "talk about dumb with a capital D". I understand that translating what was likely colloquial Japanese would have been hard, but the (to me) obvious Americanness of Tsugumi's dialogue is rather jarring. Funnily enough, I had this exact same problem with the novel Naoko by Keigo Higashino, which was translated by Kerim Yasar, so perhaps this a standard translation practice when going from Japanese to English? I wouldn't dismiss GT based on this one issue, especially as I believe it is a translation problem rather than the fault of the author, and to be honest I did become less aware of it as the novel went on. That said, I'm still very curious about why this happens in translations of Japanese novels and if it is widespread and/or intentional. I'm probably going to try to research this in the future, so if I find out anything enlightening I'll add a note to this post.

Verdict: Goodbye Tsugumi is another brilliant novel by Banana Yoshimoto, one which might well challenge Kitchen's place in my heart if I didn't believe I had enough room in there for the both of them. Although the English rendering of Tsugumi's dialogue is distracting at best, it wasn't enough to prevent me from enjoying this otherwise wonderful depiction of nostalgia, love, and the passage of time.