Hardboiled: & Hard Luck

Banana Yoshimoto

Grove Press, 2005 - Fiction - 149 pages

Banana Youshimoto's depiction of the lives of Japanese youth has changed her country's literature and earned international acclaim. In "Hardboiled & Hard Luck, she delivers two tales of resonant grace, of young women coming to terms with change and heartbreak. In "Hardboiled." the narrator is hiking in the mountains on an anniversary she has forgotten about, the anniversary of the ex-lover's death. As she nears her hotel, a sense of haunting falls over her. That night she dreams of her ex-lover, and is visited by a woman who may not exist--perhaps these eerie events will help her make peace with her loss. "Hard Luck" is about a young woman whose sister is dying and lies in a coma. Her fiance left her after the accident, but his brother continues to visit, and as the two of them make peace with the impending loss of their loved one, they seem to find new hope for the future in their own new bond. "Hardboiled & Hard Luck is small jewel of a book, a work of resilient sweetness that will move readers deeply. "Book Page has compared Yoshimoto to "Haruki Murakami [and]. . . Anne Tyler [for her] spare and ethereal manner of wiriting and eye for the way to which terrible experiences shape one's life, "but Yoshimoto's voice, and deserved international stature, are most certainly her own.

About the author

Banana Yoshimoto, 1964 - Novelist Banana Yoshimoto was born Mahoko Yoshimoto on July 24, 1964 in Tokyo, Japan. She is the daughter of poet and commentator Yoshimoto Ryumei, who had an impact on the radical student movement of the late 1960's. She attended Tokyo's Nihon University, where she studied creative writing and won a faculty award for her 1987 graduation novel "Moonlight Shadow." While working as a waitress, she took moments out of her day to write a novel and, at the age of 24, the result was "Kitchen" (1988), which is the story of a lonely woman who moves her bed into the kitchen, finding comfort in the humming of the refrigerator. She also wrote "Pineapple Pudding" and "Fruit Basket," which were both bestsellers. Her novel "Lizard" was dedicated to the memory of the late rocker Kurt Cobain and the novel "Long Night of Marika/Bali Dream Diary" (1996) was considered a flop.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Hardboiled: & Hard Luck
• Author: Banana Yoshimoto
• Translated by: Michael Emmerich
• Publisher: Grove Press, 2005
• ISBN: 0802117996, 9780802117991
• Length: 149 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Literary; Fiction / Short Stories (single author)