Author banana yoshimoto5/28/2023 For example, Michael Emmerich’s compelling translation of her 1989 story collection Asleep wasn’t released until 2002. Unlike many Japanese writers active in the last decade, Yoshimoto’s translations into English tend to lag five to ten years behind their original publication date. The history of her work in English translation may well create an illusion of eternal youth in the Anglosphere. Her most enduring stories date to the late 80s and early 90s. Banana Yoshimoto was in her early 20s when she published Kitchen, her most famous novel in Japan and internationally. This was, perhaps, an overpowered attack by a senior statesman of letters against an author whose work had only been in print for four years. Kenzaburō Ōe, today Japan’s only living Nobel laureate for literature, continued that, “Murakami and Yoshimoto convey the experience of a youth politically uninvolved or disaffected, content to exist within a late adolescent or post adolescent subculture.” In a famous 1990 essay, one of the most respected living writers in Japan lamented that, “Serious literature and a literary readership have gone into a chronic decline, while a new tendency has emerged over the last several years … a largely economic one … reflected in the fact that the novels of certain young writers like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto each sells several hundred thousand copies.”
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