Amrita by Banana Yoshimoto

Amrita: the water that gives immortality to the gods.

This was the only book by Banana (yes, that's actually her pen name!) I had on my bookcase but hadn't read, since it's a bit bigger than what she usually writes. I read Kitchen about five years ago and was really captured by the warmth and gentleness of it. I quickly read all of her stuff I could find.

To be honest, starting Amrita years later was a shock. During the first pages I couldn't believe how dull and poor the writing seemed to me. If I had no previous contact with her writing I would have probably sent this to the recycling bin (poor prose was the reason I couldn't even read through half of the first Tales of the Otori book, it was horrible). But thinking I just probably had overrated her back then, I went on reading, waiting to experience the familiar feelings even without much of the awe they first caused me.

And it was rewarding. All the Banana patterns were there: 

a woman protagonist, unsure of where her life was going; 

odd families, composed of a strange combination of lovely people; 

warm, fluid, blurred sexuality; 

the loss of a loved one, suicide; 

memories swarming, searching for lost time;

spiritual, paranormal things we really can't explain but it's enough they're there. 

Yes, it's Banana.

Since she is considered a pulp writer in Japan I suppose the prose isn't that good anyway. Yes, it's not as refined as Murakami's, but the latter did not achieve to pierce a hole through my heart as Banana did, every single time, even with her sometimes not very well-chosen words. Murakami is too pretentious, absorbed in his own little world and so are his characters. Suicide is to him a deep, unsolved mystery; suicide is for Banana like the loss of one's own limb. How does one cope with loss? How does one cope with never being whole again? Her answer could be something like "We're full of holes anyway, so it must mean something. Perhaps that's the proper way of being, not the other way round".

This is a book about a woman who loses her memory and has to rediscover, along with it, herself. Aren't memories that make us who we are? Is it not our past that defines us? I was reading this while I was recovering from a health problem that nearly cost me my life. I felt lost and unsure, I was thinking "If I died today, all I am would stop here. So what am I?". I was crying while reading Amrita, not because it was sad but because it was so extraordinairily, inexorably human. I fell asleep each night with a warm feeling, one that helped me slowly get back on my feet again.

Death is part of life; not its opposite.

Her books will make you miss things you've never lived.

You can buy Amrita here.

Beautiful artwork by http://society6.com/artist/huebucket.