Of course, I don’t think I can stop people from killing themselves, but I’d hope that if they read me they might delay their suicide for maybe 10 minutes or a night. That’s how bad the situation is for young people today in Japan. The society now and the feeling of loss that people experience is so strong that, if I were young now, maybe I would have already killed myself. How does that statistic relate to your storytelling? In Japan last year 70 people killed themselves a day, on an average. Everywhere in the world it’s the same, not just in Japan. But it doesn’t change the fact that when someone loses someone they love, they go through a deeply traumatic experience, and the young generation has lost the ability to communicate this experience… Rather than death itself, I write about grieving and losing people. People don’t really know how it actually happens. People died at home, so you’d watch your ancestors dying and know the ways in which they died.

In traditional Japanese culture, death was an intimate event. You’ve said that one of the major themes in your novels is the fatigue of contemporary Japanese youth, and you’ve often delved into the generation and communication gap in your country - how does this relate to the idea of death embodied in Japanese culture, if there’s such a relationship?

They found it difficult to express themselves, so I thought I could write for them… I think the way society is right now is ephemeral reflections of what humans might be, possibilities, so I try to focus instead on the human soul, rather than how a person appears. Growing up as a young adult, I had many friends who were undifferentiated gender wise, not totally men, not totally women. I’m interested in the ways in which people can express their souls. Could you speak about your fascination with gender and why it’s important to your work? In your work, there’s a lot of gender shifting - a man turns into a woman in a subway train, a boy wears his dead girlfriend’s school uniform. She has consistently rejected male and female stereotypes in her work, opting instead for her own whimsical brand of gender-bending ambiguity. Yoshimoto changed her name from Mahoko to Banana because of its androgynous qualities and her love for banana flowers.

She has since produced over 20 books for adults and children. The fictional worlds of Banana Yoshimoto hinge between sleep and waking, fear and dream, loneliness and “the separateness of people.” Her debut novel, Kitchen (1988), sold millions of copies worldwide, and has been made into two feature films.

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