Asleep
Lately I’ve been reading.
I walk through the streets aimlessly. I engage in conversations with people I know nothing about. At the end of the night, I like to close my eyes and listen to Chopin’s whispers. I slowly turn the pages of a book and tear up at words that tug at my heartstrings.
Asleep (白河夜船)
Title: Asleep (Japanese Title: Shirakawa Yofune 白河夜船)
Author: Yoshimoto Banana 吉本ばなな
Genre: Novel
Written: 1989
Translated: 2001
It was my second time reading Asleep (白河夜船) by Yoshimoto Banana (吉本ばなな). It was the summer after my first year of university when I first came across this book. The strange summer in which I was involved with someone I could not be involved with.
I can still see it. The motorcycle ride through the morning markets and old CD shops. The old brownish cylindrical narrow staircase I took to go up into the local library. The aisles of bookshelves that I walked down. The moment I picked up the book.
I remember reading it in one sitting, at a small but busy cafe downtown. It was early summer and in the middle of the boisterous city, but as my eyes drifted across the pages I was in a deep ocean of silence. No light, no wind, no sound. It was like a spell.
The book consists of three short novellas, each of them irrelevant to the other and largely different, but all of them center around sleep, dreams, death, and love. We meet three women all amid some kind of hiatus in their lives. They are “asleep”, or rather, stuck in time in one way or another.
The stories are neither tragic nor climatic, but the extraordinary details of ordinary things in life that Yoshimoto has depicted on these pages were able to touch the deepest, softest, dustiest part of me. Her words are open, full of sensations and enchantingly, almost hauntingly beautiful.
Night & Night’s Travelers (夜と夜の旅人)
あの時、夜はうんと光っていた。永遠のように長く思えた。いつもいたずらな感じに目を光らせていた兄の向こうには、何か、はるかな景色が見えた。
In the first story, Night & Night’s Travelers, Shibami tells the story of her sleepwalking cousin, Mari, who is mourning the death of Yoshihiro, Mari’s lover and Shibami’s brother. This short story discusses subjects of unconventional love, death, and letting go.
I think “death” refers not only to Yoshihiro’s death, but also to his relationships with those he has left behind — his family, his sister Shibami, his past lover Sarah, and Mari.
When a loved one leaves the world, they don’t just leave. The secrets that they held and the relationships they formed will never be truly gone. Death is not separate from life. Memories of loved ones may fade and may be almost forgotten, but will forever remain. Though letting go is important for the living, we all have to learn to carry death with us.
Love Songs (ある体験)
また朝になってゼロになるまで、無限に映るこの夜景のにじむ感じがこんなにも美しいのを楽しんでいることができるなら、人の胸に必ずあるどうしようもない心のこりはその色どりにすぎなくても、全然構わない気がした。
The second story is titled ある体験. It pretty much means “a kind of experience”… I don’t know why they translated it to Love Songs.
A young alcoholic woman Fumi kept on hearing strange music before falling asleep and remembered the face of Haru, a woman who was involved in a triangle relationship she was in. She then realized that she loved Haru. When she learned that Haru had died, she sought to reach her from beyond the grave…
Themes of death vs. life, triangular love, relationships and letting go are ever-present throughout the story. I can’t say that this story struck me particularly, but I loved Haru as a character, even though she was already dead before the story began. Although she is a supporting character, in my opinion, Haru is the central embodiment of every theme in the story — loneliness, love, death, the past.
Asleep (白河夜船)
ただひとつ、ずっとわかっていることは、この恋が淋しさに支えられているということだけだ。この光るように孤独な闇の中に2人でひっそりいることの、じんとしびれるような心地から立ち上がれずにいるのだ。
(The only thing I’d understood right from the beginning was that our love was supported by loneliness. That neither one of us could haul ourselves up out of the deadly numbness we felt when we lay together, so silent, in darkness so isolating it seemed to shine.)
白河夜船 is an expression used to say sleeping deeply. It means “the ship in the evening of Shirakawa” (Shirakawa is a village in Japan).
In Asleep, Terako is a young woman involved in a love affair with a man whose wife is in a coma. After her best friend Shiori’s suicide, she was left battling sleep until she forced herself to confront her issues.
For some reason, the narrative in Asleep resonated with me a lot. So much it hurts. I didn’t like the fact that it moved me in such a profound way. It made me feel weak when I first read it. And I was weak. I was 18. I had nothing. I knew nothing. I belonged everywhere and nowhere.
When I began to read it the second time around, it was difficult. I had to take little breaks between my reading of this particular story because images of that summer kept creeping back to me.
Asleep also deals with the themes of death, love and affairs. When I read it last month I was able to see it from a different perspective.
生きるのはすごく素晴らしいことだなぁ…と思って…わざわざ幸せを探さないでいいんです。幸せであるかどうかは自分で決めることだと思います。(I think to live is a wonderful thing. We don’t have to look everywhere for happiness. I think the ability to achieve happiness is something we must first decide on.) This was my immediate response the moment I took in the last word, last period, last breath of the book. I think willpower is the strongest quality that we as humans possess. I truly believe that when we have enough will and desire for something, we can get it no matter what. If we want to be strong, we can. If we want to create an empire, we can. If we want to be happy, we just need to decide to be.
Not just death, but also time… We learn to let go and move on, and we carry the past with us and learn to become stronger, carrying the weight of its eternal secrets, memories and feelings.