About The Book

Banana Yoshimoto’s warm, witty, and heartfelt depictions of the lives of young Japanese have earned her international acclaim and best-seller status. In Hardboiled, the unnamed narrator is hiking in the mountains on an anniversary she has forgotten about, the anniversary of her ex-lover’s death. As she nears her hotel–stopping on the way at a hillside shrine and a strange soba shop–a sense of haunting falls over her. Perhaps these eerie events will help her make peace with her loss. Hard Luck is about another young woman, whose sister is dying and lies in a coma. Kuni’s fianc” left her after the accident, but his brother Sakai continues to visit, and the two of them gradually grow closer as they make peace with the impending loss of their loved one. Yoshimoto’s voice is clear, assured, and deeply moving, displaying again why she is one of Japan’s, and the world’s, most beloved writers.

Praise

“A pair of lean, lambent novellas . . . The first . . . reads like a new-fashioned ghost story, tingling the spine while offering shimmering, stop-time glimpses into a strange, seductive world straddling dream like and reality.” –Lisa Shea, Elle

“Banana Yoshimoto is doing her part to keep the novella tradition alive. . . . Exciting . . . Despite the somber nature of the subject matter, these are not depressing stories; Yoshimoto manages to find hope amid her characters’ sadness. Taken together, these two novellas form a sparkling book.” –Andrew Ervin, Washington Post

“Ghostly visitations cause the novellas to linger on the mental palate, an effect made all the more striking by the fact that Yoshimoto is not an especially complex stylist. Michael Emmerich has transformed her Japanese into a noirlike English composed of short sentences and broad brush strokes. . . . In Yoshimoto’s world, regret becomes a fugue state with its own circadian rhythms. It casts such a nightmarish spell that Grove should sell it with a pocket packet of Valium.” –John Freeman, Time Out New York