"Yoshimoto's elegant, fey touch with such weighty themes as despair
and fate, [and] her urban images distilled and shimmering as haiku . .
. continue to make her a welcome and uniquely assured voice." --Paper
magazine
Banana Yoshimoto's warm, witty, and heartfelt depictions of the lives of
young Japanese have earned her international acclaim and best-seller
status, as well as a place among the best of contemporary Japanese
literature. In Lizard, now available in Grove Press paperback,
Yoshimoto deftly fuses traditional and pop culture to create
contemporary portraits of love and life. These six tales explore themes
of time, healing, and fate--and the journeys of self-discovery through
which young urbanites come to terms with them. In "Newlywed," an
unhappily married young man deliberately misses his stop on the train,
only to be questioned by a shape-shifting homeless man about the trials
of his marriage. In "Blood and Water," a woman recalls how she left the
village she grew up in--which was run by a New Age cult--in order to
lead a fulfilling life, even against her parents' wishes. And in the
title story, "Lizard," a woman who has never before felt truly secure in
her life admits a deep secret to her lover--that she has the ability to
heal others with her mind. In different ways, these six stories explore
what it takes to navigate the perils of the modern world as well as what
it takes to reinvent one's self. Permeated by the author's own
effervescent spin on magic realism, Lizard cements a special place for
Yoshimoto in twentieth-century Japanese fiction.
"Earnest, deep, and unaffected. . . . These stories . . . [are]
quick and delicate, building, one after another, in a gentle crescendo
of understanding and intensity." --The New Yorker
