Asleep

Banana Yoshimoto's novels have established her as one of Japan's finest & most popular writers, & an acclaimed & best-selling literary star all over the world. Now she delivers three novellas that develop her sophisticated, resonant, & artfully simple vision, in Asleep, a book that is already an international best-seller & may be her most charming since Kitchen.

Banana Yoshimoto has a nuanced & magical ability to animate the lives of her young characters, & here she spins the stories of three women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning for a lost lover, finds herself sleepwalking at night. Another, who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. A third finds her sleep haunted by another woman whom she was once pitted against in a love triangle. Sly & mystical as a ghost story, with a touch of Kafkaesque surrealism, Asleep is an enchanting new book from one of the best writers of contemporary international fiction.

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Banana Yoshimoto has won numerous prizes in her native Japan, & her first book, Kitchen, has sold millions of copies worldwide. Her books have been translated & published in more than twenty countries. She lives in Tokyo.

Michael Emmerich’s scholarly interests in Japanese literature range from the classical, court-centered prose & poetry of the Heian period to the popular printed fiction of the early modern age, & on from there to the prose fiction of modern & contemporary times. His engagement with the literary products of these diverse periods is informed by a sensitivity to the material & visual forms that writing takes, & by an academic commitment to translation studies with its potential for approaching literature in a manner relatively unconstrained by linguistic & temporal boundaries, both among & within nations.