Amrita by Banana Yashimoto

I wonder why I notice the translator of this book - in fact I checked back to see if this book was translated by the same person that translated Banana Yashimoto's first book Kitchen. As I suspected, all of Yashimoto's books have been translated by different people. Her writing style is so lyrical and poetic that I kept wondering with Amrita if some of the nuance hadn't somehow gotten lost.

No real way for me to check, after all, since I don't read Japanese and the only comments I could find from other readers of Yashimoto's books is that someone Japanese didn't like the translation of Kitchen, done by Megan Backus. That is the only translation I did like. Russell F. Wasden, who translated Amrita, used some turns of phrases now and then that seemed to me so unlikely, so formal in the middle of a conversational ramble, out of sync as it were. But I do have to blame the author herself for some of the failings of this book - I wish she'd stop putting disclaimers at the back of her books making it perfectly clear she knows exactly what she has done wrong. This one says that she knows the book is naive but she is very proud that it is very long. Makes one feel so guilty for ever being annoyed while reading it, because we do end up feeling that we know Banana Yashimoto as well as someone in our own family. So disloyal to skip pages!

The novel follows the life of a young woman who has lost her memory, an accident that occurs shortly after her sister has committed suicide. Her young half-brother is going through angst as he discovers he is clairvoyant. As Sakumi struggles to help her brother and to recover her memory she thinks a LOT and tries to describe many fleeting feelings in great detail. And to be honest, I was fooled - I didn't realize this was a tale designed to show the cycles we experience in life (as our author points out so kindly in her disclaimer) but had a fantasy that in fact Sakumi had been half-possessed by her dead sister, hence the interest in sleeping with her sister's lover - but *poof* I was wrong - that was NOT the plot. I'd spent a lot of time finding clues that her sister's memories were scrambling in her brain with her own, all to no purpose. My plot was so exciting that I was sorry to have to give it up for the rather more spontaneous and existential story line that was in store for me.

The paranormal nuances involved in the brother's plotline were very matter-of-fact and dare I say realistic? Well, if you know my brother you'll understand why I think that. Somehow reading these passages triggered many thoughts and I found myself getting agitated and getting up to write down dreams I'd forgotten, also coincidences suddenly popped into my head, all disturbing the course of my reading but leading me to wonder what had triggered these flashes of insight. I really like Banana Yashimoto and Kitchen was a true revelation for me so I forgive her any philosophical experiments and recommend this book just for its floating, hypnotic quality.

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