Hardboiled and Hard Luck [Hardcover]

Banana Yoshimoto (Author), Michael Emmerich (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 10, 2005

Banana Yoshimoto's depiction of the lives of Japanese youth has changed her country's literature and earned international acclaim. In Hardboiled & Hard Luck, this internationally best-selling author delivers two tales of resonant grace, of young women coming to terms with change and heartbreak. In "Hardboiled," the narrator is hiking in the mountains on an anniversary she has forgotten about, the anniversary of her ex-lover's death. As she nears her hotel, a sense of haunting falls over her. That night she dreams of her ex-lover, and is visited by a woman who may not exist-perhaps these eerie events will help her make peace with her loss. "Hard Luck" features a young woman whose sister is dying and lies in a coma. Her fiancé left her after the accident, but his brother continues to visit, and as the two of them make peace with the impending loss of their loved one, they seem to find new hope for the future in their own new bond. Hardboiled & Hard Luck is a small jewel of a book, a work of resilient sweetness that will move readers deeply.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Like twins whose paths diverge dramatically, these two gentle stories share little beyond the mesmerizing voice of their creator. The surreal subject matter and dreamy narration of "Hardboiled" make it read rather like a bedtime story gone awry. When the young female narrator realizes that it's the anniversary of her lover's death, several curious events suddenly make sense: a stone from a creepy shrine that finds its way into her pocket; a fire at an udon shop where she'd just been eating; and a nighttime visitation by the ghost of a woman who committed suicide. "Harboiled" drags a bit, but "Hard Luck" is a pleasure, even if it's almost as downbeat as its predecessor. This time, a young female narrator is standing watch over her older sister, Kuni, whose brain is slowly dying after a cerebral hemorrhage. As their parents gradually lose hope for Kuni's recovery, the narrator makes her own peace by forging a bond with her sister's fiancé's brother. In this gemlike story, Yoshimoto (Goodbye Tsugumi) takes a subtle, graceful look at the relationship between the sisters and the fault lines in this grieving family, elevating her little book from fine to downright moving.
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From Booklist

In her seventh book of spare, piercing fiction, Japanese writer Yoshimoto once again portrays strong-minded young women coping with heartbreak, traumatic family fissures, drastic illness, and fatalities. This sounds grim, but Yoshimoto is tenderly ironic and keenly attuned to nature's beauty and the mystic dimension of life, and her characters' ability to tough their way through painful predicaments infuses her elegantly insightful stories with hope. Here two novellas portray two self-possessed yet besieged young women. In "Hardboiled," the narrator is on a solo journey that begins as a simple mountain trek and turns into an intense confrontation with otherworldly forces, including a ghost in a hotel and overwhelming memories of a lost lover and her terrible demise. In "Hard Luck," a tale all the more poignant in the wake of Terry Shiavo, the narrator's sister lies in a coma as her family struggles to find a way to say good-bye. Yoshimoto writes of profoundly complex matters of love, life, decorum, guilt, and death with the precision and grace of a traditional calligrapher. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; Tra edition (June 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802117996
• ISBN-13: 978-0802117991
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,352,368 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Of Stone and Fruit, August 28, 2005

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Daitokuji31 (Black Glass) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hardboiled and Hard Luck (Hardcover)

I have been a fan of Yoshimoto's body of work since 2001. After reading her debut novella Kitchen, I read her other translated works: N.P., Lizard, Amrita, Asleep, and Goodbye Tsugumi. While by far not my favorite Yoshimoto work, Hardboiled and Hard Luck is a decent work that includes a number of themes that are present in almost every Yoshimoto novel: memory, death, and the precious moments of life which deeply root themselves into our hearts.

The narrator of Hardboiled is a young woman traveling on her own through Japan's countryside. One day while walking upon a little used road the young woman comes across an old, dilapidated shrine where ten black stones are placed in a circle. Feeling an ominous air emanating from the stones, the young woman hurries back to town. However, inside an Udon noodle shop the woman finds one of the stones in one of her pockets. Later, she discovers that another one of the stones was used to build the bath within the inn in which she is staying for the night. At first she is unsure of why such odd things are happening to her, but soon it dawns on her that on the same date a year ago her friend and ex-lover Chizuru had died. Similar to the works of Murakami Haruki, it is not impossible to make amends with the dead in Yoshimoto's literary world.

Hard Luck details the final days that the nameless narrator spends with both her brain dead sister and her fiancé's older brother. In my opinion the more powerful of the two short novellas, Yoshimoto creates a gentle, delicate work that details not only the emotions of losing someone close, but the healing process one goes through when a family member who has suffered long is about to die.

Yoshimoto has often been criticized as a writer of fluff fiction, however, while she may not be in the same realm as Oe Kenzaburo or Takahashi Takako it does not mean that she does not bring something important to the world of Japanese Literature. Through her simple words, Yoshimoto can touch the hearts of readers. Something that a number of more literary writers are unable to do.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Yoshimito, Again, November 8, 2009

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N. M - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hardboiled and Hard Luck (Paperback)

My first book by this author was 'Goodbye Tsugumi' and since then, I have always been on the look out for books by yoshomoto.

Both Hardboiled and Hard Luck explore themes that have been prevalent in yoshomoto's previous works. Themes like friendship, death, grief, memories and love wove their way through these two short stories.

Hardboiled, the first of the stories, is about a young woman visiting a town on her lover's anniversary. A series of strange things happen to her on the way, and she flits into dreamworld and memories. The story takes us along as she comes to terms with her friend's death.

The second part of the book, hard luck, is the story of a young woman dealing with her brain damaged sister. As a result of an ebolism in the sister's brain, she goes into a coma, and then begins the progress of her death infront of her loved ones. The narrator, the younger sister, visits her sister in the beginning of the novel and reflects on her state and is plagued with memories of the past. There she also meets her sister's fiance's brother for the first time and her reaction towards him makes her realize that altho grieving, she is also getting back to her normal life.

Both stories, although written simply as the norm with yoshomoto's novels, are filled with a myriad of strong emotions. Goodbye Tsugumi still remains my personal favorite of her novels.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I Was Hoping For More, July 18, 2005

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Timothy Haugh (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hardboiled and Hard Luck (Hardcover)

I am a big fan of Ms. Yoshimoto's work. Her ability to evoke a spiritualism in a modern Asian context is fascinating to me. And her prose has a gentleness even in the face of stories of tragedy that I find soothing.

So it is with the two stories in this volume. In "Hardboiled" we have a young woman hiking and spending the night in a hotel on the anniversary of a friend/former lover's death. In the hotel she dreams of her friend and encounters the ghost of another woman who has committed suicide in the hotel. In "Hard Luck" we have a young woman whose sister is dying in a hospital because of an embolism and she is about to be taken off life support. In the course of the vigil and through the funeral she encounters the brother of her dead sister's fiancé and feels the first stirrings of love--the realization that life must go on.

Of course, my summaries do not do these stories justice. As always, Ms. Yoshimoto has produced simple, yet beautiful and truthful stories. My complaint is the dearth of text here. Almost all of Ms. Yoshimoto's books are brief but it amazes me the publishers had the nerve to put these two stories between hardcovers and price them what they did. Another couple stories of this caliber would have made it much more worthwhile. It's difficult not to feel you're getting a bit cheated.