Lizard, by Banana Yoshimoto

A monstrous city like Tokyo can host soul mates. A sunset between the first lights of the big city can be the excuse to intertwine existence with the thread of the peremptory nature of life, of longing and of the final hope between a common sunset of melancholy.

Banana Yosimoto opens the doors to the Japanese spirituality of the everyday. It presents us with a set of stories with which to soak up the Japanese idiosyncrasy in its most intimate part.

And yet the feeling of life ends up being very similar here or there, despite the fact that the world built around it may be very different. The six protagonists who pass through their corresponding six stories, set out with a supposed intention of dissecting Japanese social groups into a kind of typical characters by different stripes.

But the final portrait of men and women, young and old, serves to erase all previous labeling. There is no ideological or moral intentionality, it is about discovering how equal we are when we explore our surrounding world, from within.

The only difference is the experiences that have guided us towards one or another way of acting. But the human being stripped of everything, is composed identically both of a large part of water, and of similar emotions.

We stop loving in the same way at twenty as at seventy, we suffer losses with the same unease, we wake up with the same cellular need to survive, we get lost along the way with the same closure.

And everything, absolutely everything ends up aimed at finding happiness on some occasion, however ephemeral it may be.

Yosimoto draws each character from this current Japan in their own particular setting. We decipher the ancestral tradition in some of them and discover the same globalization process in others. And we are still fascinated by the differences.

But what is really fascinating is realizing that common feeling that governs us all, from the land of the rising sun to the other side of the world.

You can buy the book Lizard, Banana Yosimoto's short story volume, here: