Asleep

  Praise for Asleep:

  “Whether or not you believe in ghosts, Banana Yoshimoto's Asleep . . . will haunt you with its beautiful, pared-down prose.”

  —Seattle Weekly

  “Ethereal, spare [and] startlingly tender . . . It is to Yoshimoto's credit, in this artful translation by Michael Emmerich, that she is able to articulate those physical and emotional states that are more often than not aligned with silence.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Readers everywhere adore her magically real fiction about modern young women. Written in a powerfully sparse, direct prose, she wonderfully conveys compelling dramatic stories and richly nuanced emotional states. . . . Beautifully written and deliciously plotted, believable magic seamlessly enters into Yoshimoto's fictions.”

  —Times Record News

  “Brief but powerful . . . Story passes gracefully into allegory.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “Seductive . . . dreamy evocations of interior lives of contemporary Japanese . . . [Asleep] shows us something real and human about our times.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Intoxicating . . . muted and mesmerizing . . . Yoshimoto's simple language and eerie sensibilities combine to present physical and emotional worlds far richer than in traditional narratives. Melancholy is rarely as clean and beautiful as it is in Yoshimoto's light hand.”

  —Time Out New York

  “Yoshimoto is . . . a poet, a spinner of haikulike sentences and thoughts. . . . Her characters don't forget their pasts; they hold on to their poignant memories. Still Yoshimoto leads them through these emotionally treacherous waters and leaves them dry on the path of life.”

  —Raleigh News & Observer

  Asleep

  ALSO BY BANANA YOSHIMOTO:

  Kitchen

  N.P.

  Lizard

  Amrita

  BANANA

  YOSHIMOTO

  Asleep

  * * *

  Translated from the Japanese

  by Michael Emmerich

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 1989 by Banana Yoshimoto

  Translation copyright © 2000 by Michael Emmerich

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  This translation is based on the first edition of Shirakawa Yofune, but it incorporates a few changes made by Yoshimoto for the Japanese paperback edition. This translation is dedicated to ItŌ Kiyo.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Originally published by Kadokawa Shoten as Shirakawa Yofune.

  FIRST GROVE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-m-Publication Data Yoshimoto, Banana, 1964–

  [Shirakawa yofune. English]

  Asleep / Banana Yoshimoto ; translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0–8021–3820–9 (pbk.)

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9099-4

  I. Emmerich, Michael. II. Title.

  PL835.O7 138 S5415 2000

  895.6'35—dc2l

  99–088699

  Design by Laura Hammond Hough

  Cover design by Charles Rue Woods

  Cover illustration by Paul D’Innocenzo

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  01 02 03 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Night and Night's Travelers

  Love Songs

  Asleep

  Night and Night's Travelers

  * * *

  Dear Sarah,

  It was spring when we went to see my brother off. He and his girlfriends were waiting at the airport when we arrived—yes, he had lots of girlfriends back then—and they were all decked out like flowers. The sky was marvelously clear . . .

  The flood of memories that streamed over me when this draft of an old letter emerged from the depths of one of my drawers was so powerful that for a few moments I stopped cleaning and just sat still. I read through the English text again and again, speaking the words aloud.

  The letter was addressed to a young woman Yoshihiro had dated when he was in high school. Her name was Sarah, and she'd come to Japan as a student. Yoshihiro was my older brother—he'd died a year ago. Almost as soon as Sarah went back to Boston, Yoshihiro had begun talking about how he wanted to see what it was like to live in some other country, saying stuff like that, and then one day he just chased off after her, hardly giving a moment's thought to what he was doing. He worked various part-time jobs there and fooled around doing a little of this and a little of that, and didn't come home for almost a year.

  Yes . . . as I read the letter I remembered more and more about how things were back then. Yoshihiro had gone off so suddenly and contacted us so infrequently that Sarah had worried about it, and she had sent me a letter explaining how things were going in my brother's life. The letter I'd found was my reply to this. I'd been in high school when I wrote it, and it had never even crossed my mind that things might turn out the way they have. I was writing to a real American Girl—a very kind, very pretty American Girl. I flipped through the dictionary as I wrote, quivering with nervous excitement. Yes . . . Sarah was an adorable girl with intelligent blue eyes. Everything Japanese delighted her, and she was always trailing along behind my brother. She'd call his name. Yo-shi-hi-ro. Yo-shi-hi-ro. And her voice would overflow with an earnest love.

  Sarah.

  “If you can't do your English homework, get her to help.”

  Yoshihiro just tossed open the door to my room and said this: that's how casual an introduction he gave Sarah the first time he brought her to see me. She'd gone to the Summer Festival at a local shrine, and on her way home she'd stopped by our house. I happened to be sitting at my desk at the time, attempting to plow my way through several acres of summer homework, and since this sort of thing didn't happen every day, I had her write my English essay. She seemed so eager to help that I felt it would be unkind to refuse her. Really, I'm not lying. English had always been my best subject.

  “I'll let you have her for an hour—but no more. After that I'll walk her home,” Yoshihiro said. Then he went into the living room to watch TV.

  “Sorry to spoil your date like this,” I said in my rather wobbly English, and Sarah replied, “Hey, no problem. It'll take me about five minutes to get this done, and while I'm doing it you can be finishing up your work for some other subject, right?”—or words to that effect. Her English was smooth and easy, her voice was lovely, her blond hair seemed to be streaming down her head. She grinned.

  “Well then—I guess if you could just make up something about ‘A Day in My Life’ and write it out, that would be terrific. If you make the sentences too complicated it'll be obvious that I got someone else to write it for me, so I'd appreciate it if you could make it more or less like the sample they give here,” I said, struggling desperately to form these sentences, to make her understand.

  “Okay. So what time do you get up every day? Do you have a Japanese-style breakfast? Or do you have bread? And what do you do in the afternoon?” She asked these and a few other questions, and suddenly we were finished.

  I looked at the essay she'd written.

  “Oh no! I can't turn it in
like this—your handwriting is too good!” I cried. “I'll have to copy it out in my own ugly scrawl.”

  Sarah burst out laughing.

  Thus, little by little, we began to loosen up, to start feeling comfortable with each other, and we spoke openly about all sorts of different things. The evening was slightly chilly, and the night air shivered with the shrilling of crickets. Sarah sat with one of her elbows propped up on a low table that I'd set out in the middle of my room, continuing to help with my homework. I found myself in a world of wonderful colors—colors that made it seem as if the entire room had been suddenly flooded with light. Blue and gold. Her white, almost transparent skin. The sharp line of her jaw as she gazed straight at me and nodded.

  I thought of the black boat Commodore Perry arrived on when he came to “open” Japan. It was the first time I'd ever talked with someone from a foreign country at such close range, and she'd come whirling into my room so suddenly, so completely unexpectedly. I could hear the thump of drums and the sounds of flutes and a few other instruments out at the festival, ballooning along on the wind. Off in the distance a round moon drifted weightlessly up through the black sky. Every so often a soft breeze would slip in through the open window.

  “Do you like Japan?”

  “Yeah, I'm having a great time. And I've made lots of friends. Friends at school, and then Yoshihiro's friends. I don't think I'll ever forget this year.”

  “What do you like about my brother?”

  “Yo-shi-hi-ro is like this giant ball of energy, you know—I just couldn't keep my eyes off him. I'm not just talking about some sort of physical energy. The thing I felt was something that came bubbling up from inside him, you know, something that will never ran out, something extremely intellectual. I feel like just being with him makes it possible for me to keep changing, turning into something new, like I'll be able to make my way to someplace really far away, but in a way that's totally natural.”

  “What are you studying? Will you go back to school in Boston?”

  “I'm studying Japanese culture. And I'll be going back a year from now. . . . It'll be hard for me to leave Yo-shi-hi-ro, but my parents are completely in love with Japan, they come over all the time, and then Yoshihiro has been saying that he'd like to come to the U.S. sometime, so I'm sure we'll meet again. Right now I'm putting every ounce of energy I have into studying Japanese. Except that for me, studying is basically just something I like to do—a kind of hobby. I'm sure I'll go on studying for the rest of my life, you know, but at the same time I really want to become a good mother, just like my mother. And for that reason I find Japanese women very interesting. I feel the same way about a lot of things as this Japanese Girl you hear so much about, I can sympathize with her more than I do with American girls. Because I think that certain parts of me aren't very American, you know? I guess eventually I'll end up marrying some businessman, maybe someone like my father, an international businessman. And then I want to put together a pleasant, bright, stable household.”

  “Do you think . . . I mean, it's possible my brother will become something international, but do you think he's got what it takes to be a businessman?”

  “You're right, he doesn't. You get the feeling he'd be fired pretty quickly. They wouldn't like it that he's always thinking of himself.”

  “Of course he's still in high school, right? Maybe he'll change. I think it'd be great if he got interested in that kind of work. Maybe you could kind of steer him in that direction . . . ?”

  This was a totally childlike thing to say, a thought even more distant than a dream. But Sarah was still enough of a child that she could have such dreams, and she had enough leeway to do so. The courage of a person who has no fear of the future. She laughed and then started to speak, with a look on her face like she was dreaming. Her eyes were those of someone who's just fallen in love, someone who sees nothing but her lover, someone who has no tear of anything. The eyes of someone who believes that every dream will come true, that reality will move if you just give it a push.

  “Yeah, it would be awesome if it were Yoshihiro, wouldn't it? We could have one house in Japan and one in Boston, and go back and forth between the two. God, that would be so much fun! Because I really love Japan, you know, and if Yoshihiro got to like Boston then it'd be like we each had two countries, that's how we'd think about it! And then our little baby would grow up listening to the languages of two separate countries! And we would all go on trips together. It would be so fantastic. . . .”

  Sarah belonged to a time so long ago that I never thought of her anymore, and I hadn't the slightest idea where she was or what she was doing—she was no longer part of my life. And then in the course of a perfectly ordinary day, as I was going about perfectly ordinary tasks, this letter appeared. It had been lying wadded into a hard little ball in the depths of my desk, in the dark recesses of a drawer I opened. Perhaps all this began when I plucked that wad out of the shadows, wondering what on earth it could be, and uncrinkled it with my fingers. As if some ancient spell had been broken, and was slowly dissolving, drifting out into the open air. . . .

  Dear Sarah,

  It was spring when we went to see my brother off.

  He and his girlfriends were waiting at the airport when we arrived—yes, he had lots of girlfriends back then—and they were all decked out like flowers. The sky was marvelously clear, and my brother was in such a great mood, he was so delighted at the prospect of traveling that the rest of us got carried away too, and we were all happy and laughing. Those were good times. And we were all so glad that you and my brother were in love. It's strange, but somehow my brother just does that to people—all of a sudden you find yourself seeing things the same way he does. But of course you know that!

  The cherry trees were in bloom when my brother left. I remember seeing petals drifting down here and there, like tiny flecks of light.

  My brother doesn't write very often, but I assume that means you're both doing well. I hope you're having a nice time. Come visit us again in Japan.

  I look forward to our next meeting.

  Shibami

  Once, back when I was still a girl, my brother and I and our cousin Mari went for a walk together along a dusk-darkened road. Our relatives had gathered for a memorial service or something like that, and we'd gotten terribly bored and secretly slipped away. We were just out wandering, we had no destination in mind.

  The road stretched along one of the mounded-up banks of a river near the house where my father had grown up. It was that time of the evening, when off in the distance the other bank of the river is just beginning to drop away into the darkness of night. Soon the halo of light that always hung over the town at night would be reflected in the river, and even now the clear air was gradually filling with indigo, the indigo air drifted up, so that you almost felt as if you were seeing the air itself. The sky gleamed ever so faintly with the last traces of daylight, and everything was blurred, difficult to distinguish. Everything was beautiful.

  I don't really remember what we'd been talking about, but I know that my brother said to me, “See, the problem with you is that you aren't bothered enough by what you might call the dirt of life.”

  As I recall, I'd been stating rather insistently that when I was an adult I was either going to be a businesswoman or else marry into some fabulously wealthy family, one or the other, that was absolutely definite, and if they wanted to know why, the reason was that our aunt Reiko—who'd married a businessman from a fabulously wealthy family—had looked simply gorgeous in her black dress, and because her genuine pearl necklace had been so splendid, and I was sure that if I could spend that kind of money on myself I'd look just as elegant as her.

  My brother continued.

  “Listen kiddo, by the time you grow up you'll have collected a whole lot of this ‘dirt of life’ stuff, right, you won't know where it's coming from but it'll pile up, and clothes and pearls won't look as beautiful to you as they do now—that's for sure. The problem is
that dirt, see? You can't ever settle down in one place, you've got to live like you're always, always staring way off into the distance.”

  “Then how come you spend all your time at home?” I asked.

  “You really do a great job of making things difficult, seeing as you know perfectly well what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about the body. Besides, you and I are still just kids, that's why we're still at home. Soon we'll be able to travel as far as we want to.” Yoshihiro grinned.

  And then Mari spoke, sounding dreamy. “Yeah, but I sure would love to marry someone rich . . .”

  “God, the two of you just don't listen, do you?” My brother smiled peevishly.

  “I mean I sort of understand what you're saying,” Mari continued, “but I still think I'd rather just marry into some rich family. After all, I don't really like to travel around too much, and I've got lots of friends I don't want to leave.”

  Mari was three years older than me, and she already looked quite grown up. She could express what she was thinking very clearly, and she never hesitated at all when she spoke. “I just want to fall passionately in love with someone.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” my brother said.

  “Well, it's not likely that I'll end up leading a life that different from the one I'm leading now, is it? So there's nothing for me to do but fall passionately in love. Besides, I just love the idea of having everything fall to pieces. In the end you give in and slink off to get married to someone more appropriate. After all, these passionate love affairs always end badly,” Mari said.

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  “You're a very strange young woman,” my brother said.

  Mari grinned. “But the best of all would be if you'd hurry up and get extraordinarily rich. Then as soon as my passionate love affair ends I can just slink on over to you. It'd be a really nice way of doing things, and since I know the sort of person you are I wouldn't have to worry about anything.”