Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104575 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780802142627
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

From Publishers Weekly
Like twins whose paths diverge dramatically, these two gentle stories share little beyond the mesmerizing voice of their creator. The surreal subject matter and dreamy narration of "Hardboiled" make it read rather like a bedtime story gone awry. When the young female narrator realizes that it's the anniversary of her lover's death, several curious events suddenly make sense: a stone from a creepy shrine that finds its way into her pocket; a fire at an udon shop where she'd just been eating; and a nighttime visitation by the ghost of a woman who committed suicide. "Harboiled" drags a bit, but "Hard Luck" is a pleasure, even if it's almost as downbeat as its predecessor. This time, a young female narrator is standing watch over her older sister, Kuni, whose brain is slowly dying after a cerebral hemorrhage. As their parents gradually lose hope for Kuni's recovery, the narrator makes her own peace by forging a bond with her sister's fiancé's brother. In this gemlike story, Yoshimoto (Goodbye Tsugumi) takes a subtle, graceful look at the relationship between the sisters and the fault lines in this grieving family, elevating her little book from fine to downright moving.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In her seventh book of spare, piercing fiction, Japanese writer Yoshimoto once again portrays strong-minded young women coping with heartbreak, traumatic family fissures, drastic illness, and fatalities. This sounds grim, but Yoshimoto is tenderly ironic and keenly attuned to nature's beauty and the mystic dimension of life, and her characters' ability to tough their way through painful predicaments infuses her elegantly insightful stories with hope. Here two novellas portray two self-possessed yet besieged young women. In "Hardboiled," the narrator is on a solo journey that begins as a simple mountain trek and turns into an intense confrontation with otherworldly forces, including a ghost in a hotel and overwhelming memories of a lost lover and her terrible demise. In "Hard Luck," a tale all the more poignant in the wake of Terry Shiavo, the narrator's sister lies in a coma as her family struggles to find a way to say good-bye. Yoshimoto writes of profoundly complex matters of love, life, decorum, guilt, and death with the precision and grace of a traditional calligrapher. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Of Stone and Fruit

I have been a fan of Yoshimoto's body of work since 2001. After reading her debut novella Kitchen, I read her other translated works: N.P., Lizard, Amrita, Asleep, and Goodbye Tsugumi. While by far not my favorite Yoshimoto work, Hardboiled and Hard Luck is a decent work that includes a number of themes that are present in almost every Yoshimoto novel: memory, death, and the precious moments of life which deeply root themselves into our hearts.

The narrator of Hardboiled is a young woman traveling on her own through Japan's countryside. One day while walking upon a little used road the young woman comes across an old, dilapidated shrine where ten black stones are placed in a circle. Feeling an ominous air emanating from the stones, the young woman hurries back to town. However, inside an Udon noodle shop the woman finds one of the stones in one of her pockets. Later, she discovers that another one of the stones was used to build the bath within the inn in which she is staying for the night. At first she is unsure of why such odd things are happening to her, but soon it dawns on her that on the same date a year ago her friend and ex-lover Chizuru had died. Similar to the works of Murakami Haruki, it is not impossible to make amends with the dead in Yoshimoto's literary world.

Hard Luck details the final days that the nameless narrator spends with both her brain dead sister and her fiancé's older brother. In my opinion the more powerful of the two short novellas, Yoshimoto creates a gentle, delicate work that details not only the emotions of losing someone close, but the healing process one goes through when a family member who has suffered long is about to die.

Yoshimoto has often been criticized as a writer of fluff fiction, however, while she may not be in the same realm as Oe Kenzaburo or Takahashi Takako it does not mean that she does not bring something important to the world of Japanese Literature. Through her simple words, Yoshimoto can touch the hearts of readers. Something that a number of more literary writers are unable to do.

Bananamania continues
I can only say that these two stories are up to par with Banana's older books like Kitchen. Just read it.

When death comes along
Yoshitmoto's new book (actually composed of two short stories) is about the human reaction when death comes along. It reveals our weakness to reject it and the urge for bravery and perspective to deal with it, as a living human being.

In the first short story, 'Hardboiled', the narrator went to stay in a country hotel on the anniversary of her ex-girlfriend's death. The narrative is interesting as the living and the dead are all woven together in the plot. Perhaps, it is really hard to distinguish who is living, or non-living (dead and non-living are different, in a metaphorical sense). There's a particularly interesting, which is about that it is not the dead that we should be afraid of, but the living. The story talks about the pain of losing a partner and the nostalgia of their romance.

In the second story, 'Hard Luck', another narrator has a sister who is going to die of a brain damage. This story is not as gothic as the first one and the suspense created by the notion of death is absent. Instead, it gives you a sweet account of the sisterhood between the living and the dead-to-be. There is also a romantic subplot in the story, between the narrator and the brother of her sister's fiance. The last chapter on the relationship between musical enlightenment and death sounds familiar in Haruki Murakami's fiction, especially in Kafka on the Shore and Dance Dance Dance.

The stories are written in plain English. There's no fancy description on the setting and the psychology of the characters. But the plainness works effectively in order to bring out the theme, death. There are a few regrets upon reading the book. First, I was expecting Yoshimoto to explore the theme of lesbianism or sexuality a bit more in the first story, as she did in Kitchen. I was trying to compare it with Murakami's Spunik Sweetheart. Second, I was looking for a more substantial work since her last publication. The stories are just too short to satisfy her readers. Perhaps, she might have published more in Japanese. I always don't know why the English version needs to take so long. Or are they not translating all her works?