Goodbye Tsugumi - Softcover

Banana Yoshimoto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571212840 ISBN 13: 9780571212842

Publisher: Faber, 2003

Synopsis

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About this title

About the Author:

Banana Yoshimoto was born in 1964. She is the author of Kitchen, Lizard, N.P., Amrita and Asleep. Her stories, novels and essays have won numerous prizes both in Japan and abroad. She lives in Tokyo.

From Publishers Weekly:

Yoshimoto favors short novels that gradually reveal thin, almost translucent layers of her characters' personalities. Her latest, following in the style of earlier books such as Kitchen and Asleep, is a careful examination of the relationship between two teenage cousins in a seaside Japanese town. Maria Shirakawa is a thoughtful young woman thrown by family circumstance (her parents never married; with her mother, she is waiting for her father's divorce from his current wife) into growing up with her cousin, Tsugumi Yamamoto, in her aunt and uncle's small inn. Tsugumi, who is chronically ill, possesses a mischievous charm that both maddens and amuses her family. As Maria describes Tsugumi: "She was malicious, she was rude, she had a foul mouth, she was selfish, she was horribly spoiled, and to top it all off she was brilliantly sneaky." Tsugumi's tenuous health seems to free her from the behavioral norms that govern Maria and Tsugumi's long-suffering older sister, Yoko, allowing her to curse, flirt with boys, concoct elaborate pranks and shock adults in a way Maria resents, envies and admires. Eventually, Maria's parents are united and she leaves to attend university in Tokyo, returning for a final summer during which the inn is being demolished, and this provides Yoshimoto with all the plot she needs to explore the difficult but affectionate bond between the cousins. Emmerich's translation overcomes the occasional awkward moment to render the frank yet understated language that animates this modest story.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0571212840
• ISBN 13: 9780571212842
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192