N.P.
Ratings10
Average rating3.4
In *N.P.*, Banana Yoshimoto’s enchanting novel of uncanny subtlety, style, magic, and mystery, a celebrated Japanese writer has committed suicide, leaving behind a collection of stories written in English. But the book, itself titled *N.P.*, may never be published in his native Japan: each translator who takes up the ninety-eighth story chooses death too—including Kazami Kano’s boyfriend, Shoji. Haunted by Shoji’s death, Kazami is inexorably drawn to three young people whose lives are intimately bound to the late writer and his work. Over the course of an astonishing summer, she will discover the truth behind the ninety-eighth story—and she will come to believe that “everything that had happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy.”
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I wish there had a been more of the curse. I think I wanted this to be more horror, and it really isn't. It's more...navel-gazey? The writing is sparse, and it flows well and quickly. It's almost Merchant Ivory in its subtlety. The characters–of which there are only about six (and two of them appear only briefly)–are almost manic pixie Gen Xers figuring out there strange lives together and apart. Our narrator Kazami had a relationship with an older man who committed suicide whilst translating the lost short story of a Japanese writer who lived in America. The novel follows her, a few years later, after she runs into his twin children and begins friendships with them both over the course of a summer.
I find it difficult to say too much about this novel, because very little action happens. Everything occurs in the psyche of the characters, and everything is about how Kazami relates to them over the course of her summer. There is lesbian tension, there is incest, and there is existential rumination, and all in under 200 pages. I quite enjoyed it.
I just wish it had been horror. But that's just me.
‰ЫПYou know how they say that if you‰ЫЄre sitting around a bonfire on a hot summer night, telling one ghost story after another, something mysterious is bound to happen once you‰ЫЄve reached the one-hundredth. Well, last summer, that happened to me.‰Ыќ
