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Banana Yoshimoto's novels of young life in Japan have made her an international sensation. Goodbye Tsugumi is an offbeat story of a deep and complicated friendship between two female cousins that ranks among her best work. Maria is the only daughter of an unmarried woman. She has grown up at the seaside alongside her cousin Tsugumi, a lifelong invalid, charismatic, spoiled, and occasionally cruel. Now Maria's father is finally able to bring Maria and her mother to Tokyo, ushering Maria into a world of university, impending adulthood, and a "normal" family. When Tsugumi invites Maria to spend a last summer by the sea, a restful idyll becomes a time of dramatic growth as Tsugumi finds love and Maria learns the true meaning of home and family. She also has to confront both Tsugumi's inner strength and the real possibility of losing her. Goodbye Tsugumi is a beguiling, resonant novel from one of the world's finest young writers.… (more)
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Shortly into the novel Maria's family moves to Tokyo where she starts university. Maria is obsessed with her cousin and with the life she left at the seaside inn which will soon be sold to make way for a large hotel complex. She decides to spend one last summer at the inn with her cousins. That summer and the adventures the girls have make up the bulk of the novel. There is a romance with a rich boy, there are two puppies, there is a criminal plot, a picnic on the beach, a near death experience and finally the goodbyes. Just what one would expect in a summer-love type story. The three cousins become even closer friends, just as they are about to drift apart into adulthood.
The character of Tsugumi is what separates this novel from its more pedestrian relations. When one of the dogs is kidnapped by local thugs, she is the one who becomes obsessed with not just getting the dog back but with getting revenge. She hatches a complicated plot that the others think goes too far and I thought was hard to believe such a frail person could pull off. (I won't give it away here but it involves a lot of digging, more than I could probably do and I would not describe myself as frail.) Tsugumi remains an unpleasant young woman throughout the novel, though she is the one who has the romance with the rich boy, and it's not exactly clear if she has learned her lesson by the end. In a more typical summer at the seaside story Tsugumi probably would have been the villain instead of one of the three friends.
There is plenty in Goodbye Tsugumi for readers looking to find out what life in modern Japan is like. The characters are not exotic, so we get to see what life is like for everyday folk in Japan. It was interesting, for example, to see how difficult it can be to end a marriage. Maria's father faced a difficult period trying to get a divorce from his wife so he could be with Maria and her mother. Along with a look into two different Japanese families we get a look into Japanese schools and universities. I found the details here to be interesting without getting in the way of the story. In Goodbye Tsugumi the reader can pick up quite a lot about Japan without realizing it. (I am trusting that Ms. Yoshimoto's depiction of Japan is an honest one.)
But in the end, it all must come back to the unpleasant young woman Tsugumi. Frankly, I just didn't really like her much. It was difficult for me to see what Maria saw in her. I understand the blood ties of family relationships, but once she'd moved to Tokyo with her family I thought she should have said goodbye to Tsugumi. So, in the end, I'm giving Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto three out of five stars.
Deliberately paced, with very little emphasis on plot, Goodbye, Tsugumi is a delicate character study. Some awkwardness in sentence structure can perhaps be blamed on the translation from Japanese. For those readers who enjoy quiet, lyrical works and are willing to forego action for insight.
In this story, Maria, a year older than Tsugumi, comes back to the oceanside Japanese town in which she previously lived to spend one last summer at the inn which Tsugumi’s parents run. Maria, for some odd reason, actually enjoys the company of Tsugumi. Maria also spends time in the company of Yoko, Tsugumi’s older sister, and Kyoichi, Tsugumi’s boy-friend. Not much happens in this story other than the kidnapping of a dog. Yes, I think that’s the highlight of this story.
There’s another lowlight, but I’ll leave that for you to discover should you decide to read this book. What happened was truly not believable so I was rather glad to finish this book and move on to something else.
The actual story begins when Maria, who attends university in Tokyo, goes back to visit the seaside town in note of the last summer of the inn before its imminent closure. Through Maria's eyes and reminiscence we see a different Tsugumi, someone who if not in a fits of spleen and cruelty can love and embrace those around her. A dogfight on the embankment chances Tsugumi's encounter with Kyoichi, son of a hotel owner. Together they weave a bittersweet and ephemeral love tale. It is through her capacity of love and the blessing of the relationship that keep Tsugumi alive though she lapses into illness occasionally.
"On rainy days like this both the past and future dissolve quietly into the air and hover there."
"Nighttime turns people into friends in next to no time."
Yoshimoto's prose is subtle, fine-tuned, and beguiling. She shrewdly employs beautiful skeins of words that evoke the peaceful, charming, and yet melancholy atmosphere for her backdrop. Yoshimoto achieves a fine balance between a carefully etched, seemingly unlikable character to which readers will have sympathy and like. Not until the end would the readers fully appreciate the impact Tsugumi has made and the mark she has left in Maria and others' lives.
Maybe it's the cultural difference or language barrier, the English translation, however excellent and thorough, inevitably (as is usual case for translated literature) loses some vernacular essence and connotation. This subtlety, however, should not undermine the pleasant reading experience Yoshimoto has to offer.
In one of those strange twists, I liked this book a lot more while I was reading it, but after, it seems rather meh. It's either not very good, or something was profoundly wrong with the translation, and I generally like Yoshimoto's work. The story is told by a young
Grade: B- Yoshimoto is pretty good all around, and the writing is still great at evoking sharp, unusual images so that's all good, but the ultra-sugary descriptions of dire yet attractive illness on every page were tiresome, to say the least.
Recommended: to people looking for posh tips about grooming and accessorizing their mysterious illness for the maximum aesthetic advantage.
It's about 3 girls - Tsugumi, Maria and Yoko. Tsugumi and Yoko are sisters and Maria their cousin
I'd like to read her other work, in time. I don't feel I could rush out and read something else by her right now. This book will stay in my memory as a lovely little tale.
It speaks of transitions of life and it resounds so deeply within me and I feel like shouting yes, that was exactly how I felt each time there has been a change in my life. Absolutely
As well the above, it is also about life (as opposed to death) and one's will to live and what to make of that life. How life changing a brush with death could be.
We get to know Tsugumi, Maria's cousin, who is a girl with a strong character but a weak body. Tsugumi gets ill a lot. With every little exertion a fever puts her to bed. Tsugumi is said to die a young age. Nonetheless she behaves like a bully and makes her family feel uncomfortable with her gift of the gab and other vulgarities.
First I thought Tsugumi troubles the people in her reach to make a difference in their lives, that when she is gone people won't forget her. But when I got closer to the end I changed my mind. I think her motives lay in opening the eyes of the others; trying to make it easier for them.
"Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves."
Death again is a motive in this work, it's a constant thread to Tsugumi, which it seems she wants to shy away with her boldness. I think it is one of the author's messages in general: to not shy away from life even when facing death like strong Tsugumi.
Yoshimoto's style is "easy-to-read" and she tends to use common language. It is refreshing and youthful. Dialogues often follow a scheme not like one character telleing something and the other inquiring further but as if characters knew each other so well, they would not need to ask for more details to give an appropriate answer.
As I tend to get a lot out of Yoshimoto's works right now I lined up another book by her for a near future read already. It's going to be Lizard.
The title character, the friend and cousin of the narrator is talking about her grudging fondness for a dog, Pooch. "It's no joke, kid. This is the pits. I feel like some sort of Don Juan who's gotten himself all tangled up in the passions of one of his young virgins and accidentally ended up married... But you see nasty people have a special kind of nasty-people philosophy. This business with the mutt goes against that... The idea is I want to be the kind of jerk who could kill Pooch and eat him if it got like that-to a point where there was really nothing left to eat anymore-and not feel anything. Of course I don't mean one of these half-baked jerks who'd shed a little tear afterward and then go put up a tombstone and whisper to it, 'I'm so sorry it had to be this way, Pooch, but thanks to you maybe the rest of us will survive.' I'm not talking about the kind of person who'd take a little chip of bone and make it into a pendant and wear it wherever she went. I want to be able to just laugh and say, 'Wow, that Pooch sure was delicious!' and i want to be able to feel really calm as I say it, and if possible I don't want to feel any regret or any twinges of conscience, you see? Of course that's just an example."
there's more, i could type half the book out, but i won't. but i am going to go reread all the yoshimoto books i do have looking for a specific quote about family i halfremember.