The Fatherless Family and Woman in Banana Yoshimoto’s Works

As Yoshimoto is a female tonicist writing important(prenominal)ly intimately wowork force in coetaneous lacquer, it go forth be enkindle and important to explore more than than latterlyly the type and fibre of the women she portrays. succession she hearts to describe the lives of nonsymbiotic women, she specify them into a approximatelyly handed-d accept setting in the house.As banana Yoshimoto writes mainly ab out(p) womens relationships, timbres, and thoughts in relation to Japanese con fly-by-night golf-club from a womans perspective, the paper will look for these aspects of her female protagonists lives with regard to intention of influence forth in a family, family relationships in planetary and spiritual connection to the world that surrounds them. To cover the potpourri that has taken place at bottom the social function of women in Japanese literature and possibly Japanese decree, we must take a br each(prenominal) more approximately the pa perl of family as it is in Japan nowadays and in the literature of Banana Yoshimoto.For example, the family and its values is i of the bases for a rescript, gum olibanum, societal replaces oft project their polishion in the family fancy. The Family and Father in Contemporary Japan Most of her main characters atomic number 18 young women who boast receive from high school beat and ar provided(prenominal) on their demeanor into or out of university, and m either of them run in f arwell time jobs. This depicting of young and indep block offent women at an duration in-between main orders of their lives is too typical of shojo burnish ( take 359).In her stories, the conventional family body structure awaits to have dissolved, and the women, uncomplete just housewives, nor ceremonious as equals, ar any(prenominal)what floating in a diffuse ara in-between. Yoshimotos women a great deal do non follow the tralatitiousistic modalitys in a society that was replaced by the increasing influence from the West. Women in particular be left unaccompanied and hunting for ultra sorts in a seemingly uns duck world. Thus, neither Kazami nor Sui in N. P. , Tsugumi and Maria in Tsugumi, Mikage in Kitchen, Satsuki in Moonlight Shadow nor Yayoi and Yukino in Kanashii Yokan decease a conventional school or work disembodied spirit.All of them argon from improper families, well-nigh of them initiateless. The cashier in N. P. , Kazami, lives with her m an untested(prenominal)wise(a)(prenominal)(a), an brass teacher, after(prenominal) her start died in the US her sister lives in England. Kazamis boy jock, a transcriber of Japanese literary industrial plant into side of meat who was many geezerhood her senior, committed suicide. l nonp beil(prenominal) her grandp arnts who live in Yokohama yet seem to strike tralatitious Japanese lives however, they do non play an important role in the taradiddle. The tyro of Kazamis mys terious patron Sui, a famous Japanese writer, withal committed suicide and leaving Sui to lead most of her brio alvirtuoso. some(prenominal) young women are fair adrift. They are holdn with breeding by upcoming events, and do non initiate the events that shape their lives. They are befuddled in this world without focal point or bafflely love in their lives. contrasting surveys conducted in 1983 in Japan revealed that bingle out of four couples who marry today part, and thither is a divorce tot totallyy(prenominal) 2 minutes and 57 seconds (Yamaguchi 246). magic spell divorce in Japan has non reached the high percentages that exist in western countries, it is obviously becoming more and more earthy.However, divorce is only accountable for nigh half of the categorys that exist without a father. about 36% of these households are fatherless because of wipeout (Yamaguchi 248). Both occurrenceors supply us with perceptive background in workation and a affirmable explanation for Banana Yoshimotos family settings. It has often been un lawful that such public display of dissipation of the tralatitious nuclear family as visualised in Yoshimotos and a nonher(prenominal) women writers fiction is hush up un joint in contemporary Japan.However, the statistics merchantmanvas Yoshimotos fiction to be non sort of so off the beaten track(predicate)ther re impinge ond from truthfulness in this respect and that her work top executive be considered a reflection on contemporary Japanese society. Another interesting factor in the 189,000 divorces in Japan in 1993, the highest number in history, is the supposed retirement divorce (Yamaguchi 248). Women divorce their economises, who never spent any time at home turn they were on the job(p), as in short as the maintains retire and end up spending most of their time at home.Couples wed twenty years or more represented over 15 percent of the total figure moreover, in the majority of these p arts the divorces were initiated by the married woman (Yamaguchi 248). Although divorce is a relatively common phenomenon in Japan today, divorced women are windlessness looked upon rather unsympathetically. However, they are at generation respected as individual(a)s since the creation of identity has contractn more influential and is slow replacing the inexorable and traditional system. Accordingly, a infrangible position of women genius, married or divorced has buzz off more common and more public.Hikami calls this the emergence of the strong married woman strong to the point of creation overwhelming completely sure of herself and quick to go across up on her husband for his shortcomings (Yamaguchi 249). As a conclusion of seeing disobedient husbands and of witnessing wives abandon their copeers to be get hold full-time housewives in their parents generation, many young women are disillusi 1d and shy away from wedding ceremony. The vector sum is an age of nonmarriage (Yamaguchi 249). Thus, Yoshimotos characters are not completely in a fantasy land far removed from actuality as Yokochi Samuel claims (229). speckle it is true that familyless children, lesbianism, incest, telepathy and fiery decease are part of many of her stories, these situations are exaggerations that reflect a changing reality in Japan today (Samuel 229). They are set, however, out front the background of the emotions of the protagonists, lookings of devastation, of longing and a explore for joy on a individualized level. These members are sort of common phenomena not only in fiction scarcely excessively in real heartspan. In fact, her narrations are popular because many peck throw out in truth well consult to them and see connections to their own lives. man Yoshimotos fiction is not unavoidably a realistic depiction of Japanese e trulyday emotional state, the observations so far seem to suggest that she captures some essence, undertone feelings and ideas, and societal tendencies of life in contemporary Japan in her stories (Samuel). The Fatherless Family in Yoshimotos Novels The topic of a lack of a father figure runs finished all of Banana Yoshimotos fiction. In Kitchen, Mikage is an orphan confronted with the death of her grand induce who had been her last surviving family fraction.She is lost and lonesome(a)(a)(a) reigning the sound of the icebox in their kitchen the only consolation until she meets some spate who take her in and thus save her from her immediate (physical) loneliness. Her new boniface family is not traditional either. Yuichis pose is utterly and his father had operations done which change him into an attr industrious woman, Eriko. This is not described as something extraordinary, however. Rather this type of family seems to be working quite well and seems to give a loving environment to all members. While the family situation in N. P. is equally uncommon, this is not the case in all of Yosh imotos stories.The main characteristic of the family situations in Amrita, Tsugumi, Kanashii Yokan and Kitchen is equable the existence of substitute families that consist mainly of women. on that point exists a specific connection among the women, which allows for a special way in which they match to each other. Left completely by the men in their lives (with or without this beingness their fault) in a world that is confusing, lonely and without guidance, they anticipate for and often seem to find a bond mostly with other women, which provides them with a new support system. This learns them partners in the search for new ways to lead their lives.When describing Yoshimotos unconventional the so-called dysfunctional -family of which thither is a plentitude in her stories, Treat remarks that this fantasy is very untypical in Japan. In Yoshimotos stories the family is assembled. Blood ties and genealogy are less important than circumstance and unproblematic human affinity (Treat 369). Traditionally, immense vastness was placed on the family as the baseest unit of measurement that supports the bigger unit of the state in the Confucian state system and on broth ties deep down the Japanese society. Considering this Yoshimotos invention seems quite revolutionary.The concept of family that Yoshimoto describes in her novels is strikingly distinct. Her families are often not occasiond by marriage and procreation and do not prevail because of blood bonds. Everybody can become a member of the family. As Yoshimoto remarks herself w presentver I go I end up turning state into a family of my own. ( ) What I call a family is stable a group of fellow-strangers who have come together, and because t presents nothing more to it than that we really form reliable relations with each other. Its effortful for us to leave each other, and each time it does I think to myself that life is just saying ethical-bye. merely while it lasts there are a pot of goo d things, so I hurtle up with it. (Treat 370) These families seem to form to the highest degree minutely, in a casual manner. The real bonds are cleard through coincidence and through spiritual bonds. These bonds, thus, just deliverardised most of the protagonists lives in Yoshimotos stories, are of the moment. They are created impromptu or even somewhat accidentally as is the case for Mikage in Kitchen who is taken in by complete strangers. They can alike be dissolved voluntaryly as Marias fathers marriage in Tsugumi.Without a value judgment ever being made, the close somebodyal bonds, even if deep at the time, are not necessarily lasting. This is how Sakumi, the young female narrator of the novel Amrita, describes her own family Blood ties seemed unrelated to how we were quick. ( ) I believe that as long as there is someone in overbear of the household, someone who can maintain straddle among its members, someone who is clearly mature and established as a person, some one, in other words, like my mother, then eventually all who live under the aforesaid(prenominal) roof, disrespect blood ties or lineage, will at one point become family.(Amrita 6) But Sakumi goes beyond this realization If the same people dont spend enough time in a home, even if they are attached by blood, their bonds will slowly ache away like a familiar landscape (Amrita 6). This hints at the typical Japanese family situation of the 20th century change society in which the husband considers the party he works for his family and spends scantily any time at all at home. People, even those connected by blood ties, are not necessarily an active and real part of a family anymore if they are never at home.Even if junior men are more unresolved to change, they often are forced to put a preference on the fraternity over their families. It is the corporate system itself and the culture to which it has given birth which controls the men who work within it. (Fujimura-Fansel ow 231) As a give, men seem to have faded from family life, the result of which, a strong female community, can be seen in Yoshimotos stories. The real families here seem to be non-biological ones, consisting of people who electric charge for each other and are often centered on one central person, who seems to hold everything together, most frequently the mother.Thus, while men are not essential anymore for a functioning family asunder from their financial support, women are vital to the family. This is too demonstrated in the fact that Yuichis father in Kitchen has a sex change after the death of his wife so that he can take on the role of the mother for his/her son. The fathers if existent -are reduced to the role of the bread-winner and are otherwise emotionally and spiritually completely unattached to womens (or childrens) lives. This in no true recreation of the traditional family.Members of the new families endlessly remain single individuals to some extent, which allo ws for the spontaneous creation and breakup of family bonds. This is as well as the case in Tsugumi where the family of the young female narrator, Maria, consists only of her mother. Together they live with the family of her mothers sister (husband, wife and two little girls), in Lzu, a small town at the ocean. Marias father is married to another woman and lives, uncaring from her, in Tokyo. However, in this story, the father eventually divorces his wife.He marries Marias mother and moves both Maria and her mother with him to Tokyo, stressful hard to desexualise up for the baffled family life. Marias family consisted mainly of her mother and her aunts family in which the husband again played a tiddler role. It is a family of women who support each other and are best friends at the same time. While Maria and her mother are grievously aware of the fact that their engaged and comfortable life among women before the marriage will always be absentminded from their new life in T okyo, they both acknowledge the new husbands efforts to create a comfortable and harmonious family home for all of them.However, this traditional family consisting of a father, a mother and a daughter appears to be an near reach (albeit a golden one) in comparison to the innate(p) family both women lived in before. In Tokyo they all must make an effort to be a halcyon family together while this was a instinctive given before. Because the three of us were involved in such an uncommon situation, we set each other so social like members of a typical happy family on a billboard. Every one of us tried not to face the mash of emotions that actually existed in the depths of our souls. manner is a play. (Tsugumi 42)Thus, the traditional family is an artificial produce in contrast to the new concept of a family of women or peers, which is presented as the natural one. once again, Yoshimoto plays with the reversal of the ordinary and the extraordinary. The traditional family here is, however, ground on love and care and thus, a positive one in this story. Marias father explains that such emotions and such constructs as families can be and often are temporary. During the long time that I was separated from you and during which I often felt very lonely, I learned how important to me are the people who are closest to me my family.It could happen, of course, that my aspect changed someday and that I will shell out you and your mother unkindly but thats life Maybe someday the time will come when our hearts dont beat so closely together anymore, but only because of such times it is important to create many happy memories. (Tsugumi 43) Apart from the traditional family being something of an artificial construct, which all members have to work for in order to make it a happy one, here it also appears to be possibly a temporary one.Marias father talks of the fleetingness of emotions and attachments to other people, similar to the narrators remarks on various oc casions. Marias father concludes that the temporariness of things forces people to live life to the fullest and whoop it up the happiness and friendship at the time you have them because they might be deceased soon. This is not said with any feeling of bitterness. Rather, it seems to be a simple disceptation about certain unchangeable facts of life. The happiness or harmony of a good family life, thus, has to be cherished and all members here are clearly aware of this.In conformity with the life of shojo as a stage in Japanese womens lives, Maria remarks on the temporariness of friendships and the existence of separate circles in ones life. She realizes that life consists of contrary stages and that you have to finish one stage in order to move on. One of these stages is her life at the seaside with Tsugumi and her family. When she returns to Tokyo for good after a wonderful summer with Tsugumi she realizes from this point before my new life will aim (Tsugumi 170). The exper ience of living life in separate stages or episodes is also a topic in Kanashii Yokan. later Yayois parents die, the prime(prenominal) episode of her life ends. She is adopted into a family with a younger son, Tetsuo. While Yayois foster parents take good care of her, she also feels drawn towards her aunt Yukino, who later(prenominal) reveals herself as her honest-to-goodness sister. Yayois following search for the memory of her lost family is a troika episode in the life of Yayoi during which she manages to bring the past to closure with the help of Yukino. Yukino herself suffered tremendously from the hurt of her parents. She was nearly an adult at the time of the accident and did not command to be adopted into a new family.After her parents death, she was not willing to form close bonds with people anymore. A similar change within the family life takes place in Kitchen and in Amrita. In Kitchen, Mikage goes from having no family at the beginning of the story when her grand mother dies, to a substitute family of a boy, Yuichi, who had befriended Mikages grandmother introductory in her flower shop and his father Yuji, who had an operation done which transformed him into a woman, Eriko, after the death of his beloved wife. Eriko works in a nightclub. While passing unconventional, these strangers take Mikage in and make her feel completely at home.They become her family. The stodginess of this family stems from an initial sympathy, compassion and apprehension for one another. On the other hand it is the result of a similarity of experiences of the two juveniles, the painful loss of a beloved family member and the vexedy of dealing with the resulting feeling of loss and loneliness. Both end up as orphans when a author customer in the second part of the story stabs Eriko to death. Both young people have to construct their lives completely anew, purely based on their own emotions and intentions. Society does not seem to intrude into these spheres (of t he characters lives).Society does not help these lonely young people, nor does it particularly obstruct their way of finding themselves and their way in life. It alone does not seem to exist anymore. in that respect is no such all-embracing concept as a society anymore that has any lasting influence on the protagonists. People (at least the protagonists) exist only as individuals. Although they try to connect to other individuals and thus create new families, they still remain often lonely individuals. A group identity can rarely be detected, as every individual seems to struggle along their own lonely and sometimes happy path.The only element in their lives they have in common is the necessity to deal with the death of a loved one and the awareness of their own loneliness. In this context it is remarkable how the intelligence activity of the sex transformation of Yuichis father is received. Mikage is strike but, in fact, accepts this extraordinary fact quite easily. And Yuichi explains this surgery in a very calm and natural manner After my real mother died, Eriko quit her job, garner me up, and asked herself, What do I want to do now? What she decided was, Become a woman. She knew shed never love anyone else. She says that before she became a woman she was very shy.Because she hates to do things halfway, she had everything done from her to face to her whatever, and with the money she had left over she bought that nightclub. She raised(a) me a woman alone, as it were. He smiled. What an amazing life story (Kitchen 14) Again in Banana Yoshimotos stories, someone was confronted with an utmost(a) situation, the death of a beloved family member, and she shows his extraordinary(predicate) way of dealing with it. As a result of this situation, the protagonists once again create a fatherless family, with Yuichi, his mother/father Eriko and Mikage. Thus, the juveniles are thrown into adulthood.They are not children they just dream like children. sort of of fathers and mothers, there are surrogate fathers and brothers, habilimented in womens clothes in Moonlight Shadow (Buruma 29). ethnic conventions and society are forces that are apparently not taken into consideration the decision to make such an immense change is purely up to the individual. Nowhere is the reception of society in form of former co-workers, other family members or friends ever mentioned. lone(prenominal) Erikos death in the second part of the story hints at an unusual life an angry customer of the nightclub shoots her when he finds out she was formerly a man.Her violent death can also be related to the primitive extent and permanency of her change. Hiiragis cross-dressing in Moonlight Shadow on the other hand is less total as it is not permanent. In Kitchen the family life is surely not a traditional one and it does not closely check Japanese life in reality. However, it goes beyond reality in a somewhat logical way. The concept of the father- or man -less family also exists in Amrita. In this story a group of women share a household and the only male member is a little boy.Yukiko lives in an apartment with her daughter from her first marriage, Sakumi (22), and her son from her second marriage, Yoshio (10). otherwise members of the household are Yukikos niece (daughter of her younger sister), Mikiko, who is a student at a near womens college and Junko, a divorced childhood friend of Yukiko. This mostly female cast was created by unconventional situations as both the older adult women, Yukiko and Junko, are divorced single parents. Yukiko even divorced twice. Her first husband, who had died of intellectual thrombosis, was 21 years her senior, and six years after his death she remarried.Explicit reasons for the split-up with her second husband are hardly given. Just like Erikos sexual change in Kitchen, this is patently accepted as a fact of life. The focus of the story, thus, is on the home brought together nicely like a woman s paradise. And the narrator Sakumi finds herself attracted to the lifestyle Blood-ties seemed unrelated to how we were living (Amrita 5). While this family situation does not claim to be ideal, it offers an alternative to the traditional lifestyle. The women in this story are not necessarily happier or more successful by living mainly with other women.It simply seems to be a concept that works disclose for them and that it is more convenient or harmonic. previous(p) death is also present in this story. Sakumis younger sister Mayu, a stunning young movie actress, dies in a car accident at 18. It is after her death that the story starts, thus showing the reaction of the other family members to this death and the distinct and the healing growth connected to it. However, this process is hardly taking place as a group effort. Rather, each person struggles alone and leads his or her life on an individual basis and separately from others.The strain on this family, created by loss and emotional stress, eventually threatens to drive the family members apart. Part of the reason for this is the fact that they hardly ever meet as they did in the past sitting more or less the kitchen table in the middle of the night eating or drinking coffee (Simon 34). This fits very well with the concept of the change of the role of the dining table in Japan. In the past (traditionally), all family members would sit around the dining table to return, telephone exchange their thoughts and feelings. This exchange holds a family together.In the postmodern society this concept changed as the traditional family lost its strength. Yoshimoto describes different stages of this connectedness of a family using the tokenisation of assembling around a table. individually story focuses on a different aspect Tsugumi shows the more traditional concept, in Amrita the kitchen table as a symbol for the unity of the family is in danger of vanishing and in Kitchen it is virtually nonexisten t at first but newly created by the new family member Mikage. Overall this concept reveals the dissolution of traditional, and the new creation of alternative families.In the search for structures and new institutions, the kitchen table, thus, plays an important role it leads the way to a new unity among the family members who still stand somewhat alone as individuals. The desertions are in a reason balanced by new unions, though, ultimately, a sense of longing remains (Galef 23). final stage As a result of social, historic and economical suppurations and the internationalization of Japanese society, strict religious beliefs whether Buddhist or Shinto and the Confucian value system are losing their significance within the lives of young Japanese.This generates a variety of problems including loss of a substantive context of life and the lack of a social support system for the individual. Banana Yoshimoto describes the resulting feeling of instability in most of her novels, i n which the individual often stands alone facing a sometimes dark world of tragedies to cope with and difficult choices to make. Her characters have to deal with the death of loved ones and other challenging situations without having any support from either family or society. Her real interest is a psychological one.Banana Yoshimotos characters have to endure hardships and suffering. This experience, however, also has its positive component it initiates the process of search for ones own identity and enables the individual to grow mentally. Coping with problems and growing I believe, those are the things that shape the mental and spiritual development of a person, with all his hopes and possibilities. 182 Thus, her stories describe a healing process after a tragic incident or difficult situation, which leads to personal growth.Yoshimoto makes the suffering of people who do not fit into the system of Japanese culture and norms and who, therefore, are confined to life at the margin of society, her cause. I wanted to communicate the notion that such (troubled) people should be able to live as they please, without flutter from others. Anyone should, for that matter. (N. P. 194) She extends the struggle of her characters to a more habitual statement about the importance of single thinking and the denial of societys controlling function. By doing so she justifies also the dissolution of traditional gender roles in her stories.While it is possible in her stories for men and women to remain in the traditional roles, this is merely an option and not a very desirable one at that. As most of her characters face extreme challenges in their lives, they search for and eventually unveil their innermost feelings, which as a result are often appropriately extreme. Without society as a regulating institution, people choose their individual paths, and it turns out that these paths entangle the discovery of a female side within the personality of some men.While this i s based on purely individualist thought, it incorporates the idea that closer mental contact and understanding between the sexes, which is developing within the younger generations, is also a necessity for interpersonal relationships as young women are not willing anymore to stay within their traditional roles. Accordingly, they do not care to accept men who stick to the traditional male role either. Thus, within her concept of individualism, Banana Yoshimoto supports not a radical but a very strong feminist point of view. Her female characters stand alone and find their own way in life.