I have a morning routine I try to keep to. Sometimes I’m too pressed to do much more than turn off the alarm, sigh and get up. But if I can, I wake up before dawn and wash my face, make a cup of tea, meditate for a while as the tea cools, do Wordle, then read a short story. For a couple of years, it was a poem. But the rule is, I can’t read part of a long book, especially if it’s research for something I’m writing. 

Recently, I read something wonderful: Banana Yoshimoto’s short story collection, Dead-End Memories. It just came out in English this year, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda, although it was originally published in Japan in 2003. 

Yoshimoto’s stories are exactly the way you want to begin a day, with a feeling of hope and compassion. What’s both unusual and unifying about the collection is its tone, which is consistently forgiving. Critics usually talk about a collection being tied together in terms of characters, theme or the use of language; either the structure or the fragmentation of the prose. Here, the feather-light, bone-deep, reverberating tone is what makes the stories into a whole that feels entirely satisfying.

All five stories in Dead-End Memories are about young women to whom something big happens. Something out of the blue. One is poisoned in the company cafeteria by a laid-off employee who puts an overdose of cough and cold medication in the curry. Another sees ghosts in the apartment of a man she might or might not be attracted to. Yet these dramatic events don’t come at the climax of the stories, and not always at the beginning, either. Instead, the stories encompass the drama, reporting what happens and then staying with the characters afterward as they try to work out whether to let the experience change them. More important, whether it’s possible not to change. And whether the changes they go through really make much difference in their lives. 

I think my favourite story is the first, House of Ghosts. Like many of the young women portrayed in the collection, Secchan leads a humdrum life. She’s a student at a small college who intends to work in her family’s restaurant after she graduates and take it over when her parents retire. It’s a popular but modest yoshoku restaurant started by her grandparents. Not, she notes, a place where people stretch their budgets to eat French cuisine. Secchan has no plans to change this, hoping instead that she can learn to replicate the menu created by her father. Then she realizes something quietly profound when her grandmother dies.

“At the funeral, middle-aged men whom Grandma had fed and counseled when they were young men turned up in black suits and told stories about times they brought their dates for meals at the restaurant, or how she comforted them with fried prawns when their girlfriends broke up with them. 

“For the first time, I saw the difference we made by being there for people over the years, in the background of their lives.

“The utensils and fittings we handled every day took on deeper colours the more we used and polished them. In the same way, Grandma’s life—which until then I’d only pictured as day after day at the same restaurant, serving the same dishes—suddenly seemed to have more depth than I could fathom. 

“I couldn’t imagine anything in the world more meaningful than that.”

Secchan gets to know Iwakura, a student at the same college. Iwakura lives in a derelict apartment building that’s going to be demolished. He doesn’t care about its condition. His parents own a famous bakery where they sell cake rolls, and although they want him to take over the family business, he’s living cheaply so he can go to France. He wants to study cookery there, although he doesn’t want to take over the bakery and might not come back. So he’s like Secchan in background, but unlike her in wanting to leave.

At first Secchan feels a friendly connection to Iwakura, nothing romantic, and offers to cook him a family dish in his apartment. She likes it there, despite the dereliction, noting that there’s something unusually calm about the apartment. Iwakura agrees, and mentions that the former tenants like it so much they still live there, too. “They’re dead,’” he says, “’but they don’t seem to have noticed.’” He sometimes sees them going about their daily business: the woman preparing rice, her husband doing his exercises to the radio. Secchan is a little perturbed, but nothing more.

“’Shouldn’t you get the place cleansed, or something?’

“’But the whole building’s going to be gone soon. I don’t think there’s any harm in it,’ Iwakura said. ‘They look happy here.’

“This was precisely what made him so nice. He was even considerate to ghosts.”

It’s a long story. I didn’t finish it in one reading, which is true of the four other stories in the book. House of Ghosts rambles the way life does. Secchan and Iwakura rather awkwardly become lovers. I presume it’s a correct translation and not a stumble-step to have a nerdy guy speak of his attraction to Secchan’s “hole.” Iwakura goes to France and stays there for eight years, becoming a chef, and returning only for his mother’s funeral. Secchan and he run into each other by chance, and the question is whether he’ll stay in Japan and they’ll get together permanently. Another question in Secchan’s mind is whether they would have got together in the first place if she hadn’t also seen the ghosts in his derelict apartment, or if she hadn’t left food as an offering to prepare them to leave, the way Iwakura was about to leave, since at that point the building was about to be torn down.

This is the degree of drama in a story about ghosts, and it’s a fair representation of Yoshimoto’s work, which is distinctive enough that publication in 1988 of her first, very slim novel, Kitchen, made her famous in Japan. I got the English translation of Kitchen for my birthday and look forward to reading it during my mornings, since it’s slender enough to qualify as a long short story, especially since it’s packaged in its most recent English paperback edition with a regular-sized story called Moonlight Shadow. 

At the moment, on a binge, I’m reading Yoshimoto’s story collection Lizard from 1993. I can recommend the first couple of stories, in a translation by Ann Sherif. They’re less controlled than the ones in Dead-End Memories. Presumably her writing practice is making her more perfect, although it’s hard to find out too much personally about Yoshimoto in English. Noodling around, I found that her birth name was Yoshimoto Mahoko, that she was born in 1964 and that her father was an intellectual and leader of the radical student movement of the 1960s. Otherwise, an online Brittanica entry notes that despite her immense popularity in Japan, some Western critics call Yoshimoto’s writing “superficial and simplistic and her characters unbelievable.” I don’t think so. I would use the word evanescent, and find the work can leave me thinking about it all day.  

Dead-End Memories is published in English by Counterpoint, and both Lizard and Kitchen (translated by Megan Backus) by Grove Press.

Lesley Krueger is the author of the story collections Hard Travel and The Necessary Havoc of Love.