Goodbye, Hessle Road Book

The present encapsulates a series of moments which rarely coalesce to form a coherent motif or a recognizable image we can easily identify with only grief or euphoria or even dejection. Melancholia and felicity, hope and disappointment are often indissolubly mixed in this concoction. One cannot have one without the other. But on rare occasions clarity dawns on a fortunate few or those who are sentimental enough to look back at a time which has already merged with the void leaving only a pale shadow of its existence hovering uncertainly in its place. And one can, perhaps to one's utter astonishment, make out the remnants of a past in which one was really, truly content even though the edges of this transitory happiness were rimmed by an aching awareness of its imperfections.
The sense that the three of us were becoming friends seemed to saturate the air between us like a kind of instinct, a pleasurable premonition.
Even though I find myself grappling with a deep reluctance to disassemble Banana Yoshimoto's works to the sum of their parts knowing all too well that even the effort seems like an insult to her talent, I gain a kind of quiet confidence from the understated brilliance of her words to string together words of my own and attempt to trace the contours of that elusive, ephemeral happiness that she limns with consummate artistry. The small, tender moments that can presumptuously be considered inconsequential when a life is subjected to a careful scrutiny at its inevitable end but aren't. Moments which blend resentment and gratitude, restlessness and satisfaction, love and anger in equal measure. Moments which are akin to the blurred landscape on the other side of the frosted glass window on a misty, rain-drenched morning. One can only be dazzled by their burnish once the obfuscating, gauzy veil of time has been lifted.

For the sake of token criticism, one can call Tsugumi, the perennially ailing, delicate waif of a girl with the vicious spirit of a demon, a meaner version of the manic pixie dream girl prototype. But it's not Tsugumi - indisputably the emotional center of this narrative - who stands out in my eyes. It is rather the memory of a listless summer spent in a seaside town of one's childhood in which Tsugumi's casual cruelty, her laughter, her tears and fury burn in the palette of the narrator's consciousness with the inexorable intensity of the sun, eclipsing all the memories of other sharper happinesses. It is the bittersweet longing for a lost home that engulfs Maria (the narrator) every time she steps off a bus amidst the hustle and bustle of upscale Tokyo, an ache which only the gentle sound of Tsugumi sliding the paper door open to her room in Yamamoto Inn can ameliorate. And it is rather the story of the girl on the cusp of graduating to a newer phase of life, falteringly embracing the idea of a new home, and confronting the growing dread of losing something she had not even recognized she held dear to herself that I wish to cherish for a long time.
Because the ocean had always been there, in the good times as well as the bad times of my life, when it was sweltering out and the beach was filled with people, and in the dead of winter when the sky was heavy with stars, and when we were heading to the local shrine on New Year's Day...all I had to do was turn my head and it would be there, the same as always.
Fragile bonds which only accumulate substance and strength to grow into pulsating hearts that throb to the uneven rhythms of existence. Vague silhouettes flickering somewhere in the horizon coming into sharper focus with the shifting of light and the shortening of distance, and metamorphosing into the very people we are accustomed to admire and despise by turns. Yoshimoto is capable of disinterring profound meaning lodged in the depths of the most mundane of occurrences and shucking off the hard shell of superficial reality to reveal its soft, pliant core.
A surge of emotion cuts into my chest, overwhelmingly fierce. As if these people I love and this town are going to vanish from the very face of the earth, a feeling so overwhelmingly bright I can't stand to look at it straight.
Her craft lies in exalting the ordinary and the everyday truths of life's many baffling dichotomies to transcendental wisdom and in converting ambiguous characters to people of flesh and blood who cannot help surrendering before the promise of love which accosts them in their most vulnerable moments. In the end, she knows it is not about bidding farewell to a time in memory or a place or a way of life but having the courage to accept the truth of its centrality in one's life, knowing full well that forever is a beautiful lie and goodbye waits just around the corner.