Anyhow, if true, that might go some way to explaining my somewhat conflicting (is 'conflictual' a word?) responses to these stories. In general, I like them - I like the airiness-coupled-with-weight, the whimsy, the sensitivity, the way its protagonists are moving towards coming to terms with themselves, their pasts, and the worlds around them...and there's a nice balance and progression within the six stories without anything so simple as a teleology; compare this:
Your love is different from mine. What I mean is, when you close your eyes, for that moment, the center of the universe comes to reside within you. And you become a small figure within that vastness, which spreads without limit behind you, and continues to expand at tremendous speed, to engulf all of my past, even before I was born, and every word I've ever written, and each view I've seen, and all the constellations, and the darkness of outer space that surrounds the small blue ball that is earth. Then, when you open your eyes, all that disappears.
to this, from later:
At that moment, I was truly without words. I realized that the world didn't exist by virtue of my mind. On the contrary, he and I and everyone else were swept up in a great whirlpool, swirling around constantly and not knowing where we're bound. Our sensations of pleasure and suffering, our thoughts, none of these things can stop the motion. For the first time, I was able to step away from my imagined position in the center of the universe and see myself as part of something larger. This was my revelation and I now felt--what? Not particularly happy or sad, but just a bit precarious, as if I'd relaxed some muscle that I hadn't needed to use all along.
But I don't like them wholeheartedly, and nor do they particularly speak to me, and passages like the above are in some measure responsible for that. I can't entirely figure out where this negative reaction comes from - but I think that a large part of it is that the stories often strike me as a little bit simplistic, almost to the point of being trite (they're told in the first person, which always makes things tricky, but the problem is exacerbated by the narrators' habit of addressing themselves/the reader directly and really spelling things out (although the things being spelt out tend to be 'new', rather than simply summations of what has gone before)). So while I reckon she's pretty good at what she does, and really quite like Lizard, I'm not yet convinced that Yoshimoto is anything special - or, at least, not for me...which brings us back, dear reader, to this idea of 'feminine' writing and sensibility (at risk of seeming to be conflating the 'simplistic' accusation with the 'feminine' thing, which isn't quite what I'm trying to get at).
