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Product Description
Review
Praise for The Lake
"[The Lake] attests to the power of emotional intimacy to help even the most 'ridiculously fragile people' overcome trauma and grief."
—Hirsh Sawhney, The New York Times Book Review
"The simplicity of this elliptical novel’s form and expression belies its emotional depth...There’s almost an artistic sleight of hand in the latest from Yoshimoto, a novel in which nothing much seems to happen yet everything changes."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"Yoshimoto's marvelously light touch is perfectly captured by Emmerich's pristine translation."
—Publishers Weekly
"Yoshimoto aficionados who have savored any of the dozen-plus novels she’s written over the last three decades since she became a near-instant pop literary phenomenon with Kitchen will recognize her signature crisp, clipped style (thanks to exacting translator Emmerich’s constancy) and revel in her latest cast of quirky characters. Newbies with a penchant for Haruki Murakami’s mind-bending protagonists or Yoko Tawada’s sparse precision will do well to begin their so-called Bananamania with this beguiling title."
—Library Journal
"Reading [The Lake], you realize just how conventional most love stories are."
—New York Times
"Touching."
—Miami Herald
"The Lake demonstrates Yoshimoto's deepening talent, and her craft for quietly revealing an enveloping and haunting world."
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Yoshimoto is in peak form in this mesmerizing and suspenseful drama of the perils of brainwashing, from class bias to intrusive advertising to an infamous cult. Social conventions, memories and dreams, and the creative process are all explored with exquisite insight in Yoshimoto’s beautifully mystical and hopeful novel."
—Booklist
"Yoshimoto’s simplicity — both in prose and narrative — speaks to a mastery of form....The Lake will haunt you."
—Thought Catalog
Praise for Banana Yoshimoto
“A sure and lyrical writer . . . Yoshimoto transforms the trite into the essential.”
—The New Yorker
“Ms. Yoshimoto has an effortless ability to penetrate her characters’ hearts.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Banana Yoshimoto is a master storyteller. . . . The sensuality is subtle, masked, and extraordinarily powerful. The language is deceptively simple.”
—Chicago Tribune
“There is no such thing as a stock character in Yoshimoto’s fiction. She writes utterly without pretense.”
—The Washington Post
“The disturbing, ironic, relentless clarity of her voice casts a spell. . . .”
—The Denver Post
“Her achievements are already legend.”
—The Boston Globe
"[The Lake] attests to the power of emotional intimacy to help even the most 'ridiculously fragile people' overcome trauma and grief."
—Hirsh Sawhney, The New York Times Book Review
"The simplicity of this elliptical novel’s form and expression belies its emotional depth...There’s almost an artistic sleight of hand in the latest from Yoshimoto, a novel in which nothing much seems to happen yet everything changes."
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"Yoshimoto's marvelously light touch is perfectly captured by Emmerich's pristine translation."
—Publishers Weekly
"Yoshimoto aficionados who have savored any of the dozen-plus novels she’s written over the last three decades since she became a near-instant pop literary phenomenon with Kitchen will recognize her signature crisp, clipped style (thanks to exacting translator Emmerich’s constancy) and revel in her latest cast of quirky characters. Newbies with a penchant for Haruki Murakami’s mind-bending protagonists or Yoko Tawada’s sparse precision will do well to begin their so-called Bananamania with this beguiling title."
—Library Journal
"Reading [The Lake], you realize just how conventional most love stories are."
—New York Times
"Touching."
—Miami Herald
"The Lake demonstrates Yoshimoto's deepening talent, and her craft for quietly revealing an enveloping and haunting world."
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Yoshimoto is in peak form in this mesmerizing and suspenseful drama of the perils of brainwashing, from class bias to intrusive advertising to an infamous cult. Social conventions, memories and dreams, and the creative process are all explored with exquisite insight in Yoshimoto’s beautifully mystical and hopeful novel."
—Booklist
"Yoshimoto’s simplicity — both in prose and narrative — speaks to a mastery of form....The Lake will haunt you."
—Thought Catalog
Praise for Banana Yoshimoto
“A sure and lyrical writer . . . Yoshimoto transforms the trite into the essential.”
—The New Yorker
“Ms. Yoshimoto has an effortless ability to penetrate her characters’ hearts.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Banana Yoshimoto is a master storyteller. . . . The sensuality is subtle, masked, and extraordinarily powerful. The language is deceptively simple.”
—Chicago Tribune
“There is no such thing as a stock character in Yoshimoto’s fiction. She writes utterly without pretense.”
—The Washington Post
“The disturbing, ironic, relentless clarity of her voice casts a spell. . . .”
—The Denver Post
“Her achievements are already legend.”
—The Boston Globe
Product Description
A major literary sensation is back with a quietly stunning tour de force about the redemptive power of love.
While The Lake shows off many of the features that have made Banana Yoshimoto famous—a cast of vivid and quirky characters, simple yet nuanced prose, a tight plot with an upbeat pace—it’s also one of the most darkly mysterious books she’s ever written.
It tells the tale of a young woman who moves to Tokyo after the death of her mother, hoping to get over her grief and start a career as a graphic artist. She finds herself spending too much time staring out her window, though ... until she realizes she’s gotten used to seeing a young man across the street staring out his window, too.
They eventually embark on a hesitant romance, until she learns that he has been the victim of some form of childhood trauma. Visiting two of his friends who live a monastic life beside a beautiful lake, she begins to piece together a series of clues that lead her to suspect his experience may have had something to do with a bizarre secret from his past. . . .
With echoes of real life events, such as the Aum Shinrikyo cult (the group that released poison gas in the Tokyo subway system) and the kidnapping of Japanese citizens by North Korea, The Lake unfolds as the most powerful novel Banana Yoshimoto has written. And as the two young lovers overcome their troubled past to discover hope in the beautiful solitude of the lake in the countryside, it’s also one of her most moving.
While The Lake shows off many of the features that have made Banana Yoshimoto famous—a cast of vivid and quirky characters, simple yet nuanced prose, a tight plot with an upbeat pace—it’s also one of the most darkly mysterious books she’s ever written.
It tells the tale of a young woman who moves to Tokyo after the death of her mother, hoping to get over her grief and start a career as a graphic artist. She finds herself spending too much time staring out her window, though ... until she realizes she’s gotten used to seeing a young man across the street staring out his window, too.
They eventually embark on a hesitant romance, until she learns that he has been the victim of some form of childhood trauma. Visiting two of his friends who live a monastic life beside a beautiful lake, she begins to piece together a series of clues that lead her to suspect his experience may have had something to do with a bizarre secret from his past. . . .
With echoes of real life events, such as the Aum Shinrikyo cult (the group that released poison gas in the Tokyo subway system) and the kidnapping of Japanese citizens by North Korea, The Lake unfolds as the most powerful novel Banana Yoshimoto has written. And as the two young lovers overcome their troubled past to discover hope in the beautiful solitude of the lake in the countryside, it’s also one of her most moving.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Novel on a Most Unique Love Affair,
By
This review is from: The Lake (Hardcover)
Banana Yoshimoto's "The Lake" is an engrossing, exhilarating, look at a love affair between two misfits, Chihiro and Nakajima, on the verge of adulthood. Elegantly translated by her long-time translator Michael Emmerich, Yoshimoto weaves a most beguiling tale via her descriptively sparse prose. Moving to Tokyo soon after her mother's death, Chihiro spots one day from her apartment window, an odd young man staring out of his apartment window, Yoshimoto, with whom she develops both an intellectual and physical attraction. She'll realize that he's the victim of some unusual psychological trauma sometime in the youth. When he invites her to visit two friends who live alone by themselves beside a lake shrouded by trees, she concludes eventually that Nakajima and his rural friends may have belong to some bizarre religious cult she's heard of. This terse jewel of a novel offers one of the most fascinating love affairs I have read in fiction; Yoshimoto is definitely one of Japan's greatest living writers, having created in this novel, two characters that are as memorable as any I have read in Haruki Murakami's novels.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.7 out of 5 stars (42 customer reviews) 40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So Glad She's Back,
By Timothy Hallinan - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Lake (Hardcover)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
Banana Yoshimoto is unique. I don't know of any other writer who explores the spaces in the human heart with such delicacy and accuracy. This book, which was published in Japan in 2005, follows the love affair of Chihiro, a young girl whose mother's death both freed her from the censorious small town in which she grew up and also cast her adrift, rootless, in Tokyo; and Nakajima, a very secretive and tightly wound young man who endured something terrible as a child. Both of them are damaged; both of them are needy but in many ways unwilling to risk opening up to anyone. Chihiro, an artist, is hired to paint a mural on the wall of an elementary school that is in danger of being torn down, and as Nakajima's story unfolds, Chihiro translates elements of it into art, in the lighthearted form of monkeys painted especially for children's eyes. I don't know of another writer in the world who would come up with such pitch-perfect alchemy, not only bringing fear out of the shadows but painting it in primary colors in bright daylight. From KITCHEN on, I've devoured every book Banana Yoshimoto has written, and this is no exception. My only complaint is that we had to wait six years to read THE LAKE in English.
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A quiet quirky love story,
By Patto - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Lake (Hardcover)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
The lovers in this story are walking on eggshells towards a fragile intimacy.
Chihiro is the illegitimate daughter of the flashy Mama-san of a club and a conventional businessman. Nearing thirty, she's become a fairly successful painter of murals. Nakajima is a brilliant graduate student doing genetic research at a prestigious university. He's definitely odd. Something terrible happened in his past. Their Tokyo apartments face each other diagonally across a street. They begin by nodding to each other and progress to reading greetings on each other's lips. Eventually they make contact, and this is the beginning of a cautious, complex coupling of psyches. Despite the gentle tenor of Yoshimoto's prose, there are some shocking revelations in store for the reader. Banana Yoshimoto has a nice unpretentious way of describing life's cruel twists and turns. She tosses off bits of wisdom that, if she were a mountain ascetic, would cause her to be revered. It's no wonder she's engendered Banana-mania among millions of fans around the world. The Lake has a small cast of characters, but among them is one of the oddest and most poignant psychics I've ever encountered in literature. It's easy to get so relaxed and pleasantly pensive reading Banana Yoshimoto that you miss her artistry. She manages to be utterly non-threatening, even comforting, while dealing with heavy subjects like alienation, loss and death. She offers a very contemporary take on the traditional Japanese theme of ephemeral existence. I loved everything about The Lake - the style, the story, the ambience and the offbeat characters. I devoured it in a day. 11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great Imaginations Review of The Lake,
By K_Malinczak - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Lake (Hardcover)
Alright..this is another review I have been dreading, truthfully because I don't have a lot to say. And it's hard, because I hate when that happens. I feel like I'm doing the author a disservice. But here's the thing. This was a fairly short novel and to me it read more like a short story. Which would have been fine if I had been prepared for that going in. But I wasn't. This also the first Yoshimoto I have ever read and I did like it, but not as much as I thought I would. I'm going to try and articulate why.
I like a certain amount of detail in my reading and I felt like that was lacking in The Lake. There were hardly any place descriptions and it was very hard to picture exactly what was going on. I know that doesn't matter to some people, but it matters to me. I also felt that there was an emotional disconnect. I didn't particularly care what happened to the characters, especially Nikajima, who I think the author intended me to have a lot of sympathy for. I just felt a complete lack of emotion for anything that was going on, and I found that to be a shame because the story had a great deal of potential. The idea of the plot and the summary of the story really drew me in and was what initially made me want to read the book. It sounded a bit scary and mysterious. Plus the cover is absolutely mesmerizing. I wish it had been as good as i thought it was going to be. The reason why I gave it three stars? I really enjoyed the writing style. I just wish it had been a little more detailed. She really does write beautifully. It's a very simple writing style, but manages to be quite poetic. And like I said, I really loved the plotline. I just feel the story would have been so much more if I felt emotionally invested in the characters, even if it was just a little bit. I am very interested in reading another Banana Yoshimoto though, and I have added a few of her books to my TBR list. Maybe I will have better luck with another book. I hope so, because I really appreciate what she was trying to do here. |
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