Lizard

“Yoshimoto’s elegant, fey touch with such weighty themes as despair and fate, [and] her urban images distilled and shimmering as haiku . . . continue to make her a welcome and uniquely assured voice.” —Paper magazine

Banana Yoshimoto’s warm, witty, and heartfelt depictions of the lives of young Japanese have earned her international acclaim and best-seller status, as well as a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. In Lizard, now available in Grove Press paperback, Yoshimoto deftly fuses traditional and pop culture to create contemporary portraits of love and life. These six tales explore themes of time, healing, and fate—and the journeys of self-discovery through which young urbanites come to terms with them. In “Newlywed,” an unhappily married young man deliberately misses his stop on the train, only to be questioned by a shape-shifting homeless man about the trials of his marriage. In “Blood and Water,” a woman recalls how she left the village she grew up in—which was run by a New Age cult—in order to lead a fulfilling life, even against her parents’ wishes. And in the title story, “Lizard,” a woman who has never before felt truly secure in her life admits a deep secret to her lover—that she has the ability to heal others with her mind. In different ways, these six stories explore what it takes to navigate the perils of the modern world as well as what it takes to reinvent one’s self. Permeated by the author’s own effervescent spin on magic realism, Lizard cements a special place for Yoshimoto in twentieth-century Japanese fiction.

“Earnest, deep, and unaffected. . . . These stories . . . [are] quick and delicate, building, one after another, in a gentle crescendo of understanding and intensity.” —The New Yorker

“Earnest, deep, and unaffected. . . . These stories . . . [are] quick and delicate, building, one after another, in a gentle crescendo of understanding and intensity.”—The New Yorker

“Banana Yoshimoto’s elegant, fey touch with such weighty themes as despair and fate, [and] her urban images distilled and shimmering as haiku . . . continue to make her a welcome and uniquely assured voice on the global Gen-X scene.”—Paper

“Yoshimoto writes spare but precise narratives . . . Included is a strain of magic that at times is overt, and at times delicately traced along the margins of the tales.” —South Bend Tribune

“The substance of the stories in Lizard . . . could be from any time concerned with the ambivalence of life and with the longing for humans for a spiritual connection.”—Edge

“Yoshimoto revels in the transformative . . . Her delight in the everyday and things beyond translates easily and ultimately merges the two in a beautiful whole.”—Virginian Pilot & Ledger-Star

“Articulate and young but already jaded and wistful urbanites populate these reflective tales of relationships and discovery.”—Library Journal

“Yoshimoto’s frequently surreal, elegantly geometric yet richly hued, and gently spiritual stories celebrate the wonder of love at first sight, the rightness of certain relationships, and the gift of hope.”—Booklist