Kenzaburō Ōe, today Japan’s only living Nobel laureate for literature, continued that, “Murakami and Yoshimoto convey the experience of a youth politically uninvolved or disaffected, content to exist within a late adolescent or post adolescent subculture.” She is married with a daughter.In a famous 1990 essay, one of the most respected living writers in Japan lamented that, “Serious literature and a literary readership have gone into a chronic decline, while a new tendency has emerged over the last several years … a largely economic one … reflected in the fact that the novels of certain young writers like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto each sells several hundred thousand copies.” She has said that her favorite writers are Truman Capote, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and William Burroughs. She told an interviewer that this fame can be somewhat problematic: “Everybody seems to be interested in the number of books I sold and how much money I earned, rather than the content of my work.

She is so popular in Japan that there have been shrines dedicated to her. Yoshimoto has won the Scanno Prize, the Fendissime Prize, the Maschera d’argento Prize, and the Capri Award. Besides later novels like Amrita (1994) and Hardboiled & Hard Luck (1999), Yoshimoto has also published collections of short stories and essays. The following year, while she was working as a waitress, she published what is perhaps her best-known work and the one that catapulted her to fame: Kitchen. Her first work, the novella Moonlight Shadow, was published in 1986 and won a prestigious literary prize from the university.

Still I have no regrets about those days.though I wish I had studied a bit harder then.” It's almost like I went to university to learn how to drink. In addition to that, booze came into my life at university. As a result I was dozing in class every day. She said of her time in school, “I didn't do much sports, just stayed up until late, writing novels. Yoshimoto also liked drawing but knew her sister was better, so she turned to writing and decided to become a novelist. Her father Takaaki Yoshimoto was a critic and poet, her mother Kazuko was a haiku poet, and her sister Yoiko Haruno is a manga artist. Yoshimoto was born in Tokyo on July 24, 1964, to a family well-versed in the arts. She changed her name to “Banana” because she loved banana flowers and thought the name was “cute” and “purposefully androgynous.” Banana Yoshimoto, née Yoshimoto Mahoko, is one of Japan’s most famous contemporary novelists, second only to Haruki Murakami.

Author banana yoshimoto