Sakumi has inherited her dead sister’s boyfriend, a writer called Ryuichiro, who takes her to the island of Saipan with two psychic friends of his. Cousin Mikiko gets terribly excited when the two of them go on a diet: “Don’t you think this is great? Strolling home in the middle of the night and talking about how we’re going to lose weight? Just thinking about it gives me goose-bumps.”As the baffled reader is feeling left behind by all this joy – it’s a bit like watching stoned people laugh at their own jokes (and there is no shortage of oh-wowing) – along comes brother Yoshio to wax “extra-sensory” And he is not the only one. Red patches forming in the corners of her half-cut girlfriend’s eyes enchant her: “she was on her third beer and the flush from the alcohol was beautiful.” “Swimming was so much fun, we could hardly stand it.” This degree of enthusiasm is unaccountably catching. Her mother, who is once widowed and once divorced, has swelled the household with various female lame ducks, who all seem to make a virtue of staying up until the wee hours, drinking lots of beer and coffee.
Just to clinch it, Sakumi falls down a stone staircase, splits open her head, is rushed into brain surgery and loses her memory.
Sakumi’s consciousness is now a tabula rasa, and she takes to marvelling at the banal. Her 11- year-old brother is becoming unnervingly tele-pathic. Sakumi’s beautiful actress sister, Mayu, has recently committed suicide. She brings her heroine to the edge of more than one precipice, and not so gently nudges her over. Yoshimoto is intent upon capturing the dizziness of youth, and deals with a wide spectrum of mental disarray. Somewhere in the serving up of visual effects on the page which is a technique of written Japanese (a writer may plump for a word simply because it looks good) and somewhere, too, in the very American translation, a great deal of rum verbiage turns up in English.
From The Ideal Home through the 20th Century by Deborah S Ryan (Hazar pounds 17.99).. If anything ever got lost in the translation, it must be in the prose of Banana Yoshimoto. Historical or moral tides punctually turn, and Slav clouds appear on Austrian horizons. The fires of dissent “smoulder and burst into flame”, though “the fires of nationalism” are quenched Hotbeds of revolt inevitably seethe. The Tsar “bows to the storm”, while the Kaiser blows hot, then blows cold. Gilbert has toiled mightily (and even expects credit for the fact that the index is “compiled by the author”), but the result, I fear, is a triumph of a manual not mental labour.O brave new world, that has such gadgets in it: (above) demonstrating the Sunbeam Mixmaster at the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1934; (below) the vehicle which went in the garage of 1928’s House of the Future, a car which incorporates aeroplane and boat. Though not looking out for errors, I couldn’t help noticing that he misquotes the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, attributes the tubular steel chair (another of the century’s dubious legacies) to Charles not Marcel Breuer, and does not understand Australia’s federal constitution.Gilbert’s style is already fatigued.
