There was no past, no future, no words, nothing - just the light and the yellow and the scent of dry leaves in the sun.

Japan's internationally celebrated storyteller returns with five stories of healing and hope. Effortlessly beautiful, nostalgic and melancholy, the stories in Dead-End Memories explore the stories of five women who, following sudden and painful events, find solace in the blissful moments in everyday life.

The daughter of a restaurant owner experiences a budding romance, accompanied by the ghosts of an elderly couple. After a scandalous near-death experience, an editor gains a new lease of life. A woman seeks refuge in the apartment above her uncle's bar after being betrayed by her fiancé. As Yoshimoto's gentle, effortless prose reminds us, one true miracle can be as simple as having someone to share a meal with, and happiness is always within us if only we take a moment to see it.

"I had a premonition of setting out on a journey and getting lost inside a distant tide ... It was the beginning of summer, and I was nineteen years old."

Yayoi lives with her perfect, loving family - something 'like you'd see in a Spielberg movie'. But while her parents tell happy stories of her childhood, she is increasingly haunted by the sense that she's forgotten something important about her past.

Deciding to take a break, she goes to stay with her mysterious but beloved aunt Yukino, whose strange behaviour includes waking Yayoi at two in the morning to be her drinking companion, watching Friday the 13th repeatedly and throwing away all the things she wants to forget.

Living a life without order, Yukino seems to be protecting herself, but beneath this facade Yayoi starts to recover lost memories, and everything she knows about her past threatens to change forever.

Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about mothers, transsexuality, bereavement, kitchens, love and tragedy in contemporary Japan. It is a startlingly original first work by Japan's brightest young literary star and is now a cult film.

When Kitchen was first published in Japan in 1987 it won two of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, climbed its way to the top of the bestseller lists, then remained there for over a year and sold millions of copies. Banana Yoshimoto was hailed as a young writer of great talent and great passion whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of modern literature, and has been described as 'the voice of young Japan' by the Independent on Sunday.

An elegiac story of two young cousins coming of age at the Japanese seaside, Goodbye Tsugumi is an enchanting novel from one of Japan's finest writers. Banana Yoshimoto's novels have made her an international sensation. Now she returns with a magical, offbeat story of a deep and complicated friendship between two female cousins that ranks among her best work. Maria is the only daughter of an unmarried woman. She has grown up at the seaside alongside her cousin Tsugumi, a lifelong invalid, charismatic, spoiled and occasionally cruel. Now Maria's father is finally able to bring Maria and her mother to Tokyo, ushering Maria into a world of university, impending adulthood, and a 'normal' family. When Tsugumi invites Maria to spend a last summer by the sea, a restful idyll becomes a time of dramatic growth as Tsugumi finds love, and Maria learns the true meaning of home and family. She also has to confront both Tsugumi's inner strength and the real possibility of losing her.

At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place - a naive book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time... The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people's company. As one character puts it, 'The world is full of delicious things, you know.'

"Yoshimoto hits some of the same notes that a previous generation's literary masters (say, Kawabata or Tanizaki) might sound, and yet the effect seems artless, spontaneous and wonderfully fresh." --Los Angeles Times Book Review Banana Yoshimoto's warm, witty, and heartfelt depictions of the lives of young Japanese have earned her international acclaim and best-seller status, as well as a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. In N.P., a celebrated Japanese writer has committed suicide, leaving behind a collection of stories written in English, entitled N.P. But the book may never be published in his native Japan: each translator who takes up the ninety-eighth story chooses death too--including Kazami's boyfriend, Shoji. Haunted by Shoji's death, Kazami discovers the truth behind the ninety-eighth story--and comes to believe that "everything that had happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy." Banana Yoshimoto's language sweeps the reader immediately into the streets of Tokyo, with her uncanny ability to merge the echoes of Japanese traditional literature with a contemporary plot. N.P. is essential reading, a stunningly simple tale of youthful desires and obsessions.

A celebrated actress who has died in mysterious and shocking circumstances leaves behind an unconventional extended family that includes an older sister, a woman in her twenties through whose eyes the story unfolds; a young brother who possesses mystical powers; and a fiancé who is writing a novel with uncanny parallels to his own story. 'Her novels can have the effect of addictive drugs . . . Pathos, nostalgia, the sense of exquisite sadness at the fleetingness of life are key elements of beauty in Japanese aesthetics, and all are themes central to Yoshimoto's books.' The Times

A powerful story of passion and friendship, the nature of love and the taboos surrounding it. N.P. is the last collection of stories by a celebrated Japanese writer, written in English while she was living in Boston.

Banana Yoshimoto has a magical ability to animate the lives of her young characters, and here she spins the stories of three women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning a lost lover, finds herself sleepwalking at night. Another, who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. A third finds her sleep haunted by another woman whom she was once pitted against in a love triangle. Sly and mystical as a ghost story, with a touch of Kafkaesque surrealism, Asleep is an enchanting book from one of the best writers in contemporary international fiction.

Banana Youshimoto's depiction of the lives of Japanese youth has changed her country's literature and earned international acclaim. In "Hardboiled & Hard Luck, she 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 the 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" is about a young woman whose sister is dying and lies in a coma. Her fiance 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 small jewel of a book, a work of resilient sweetness that will move readers deeply. "Book Page has compared Yoshimoto to "Haruki Murakami and]. . . Anne Tyler for her] spare and ethereal manner of wiriting and eye for the way to which terrible experiences shape one's life, "but Yoshimoto's voice, and deserved international stature, are most certainly her own.

Ms. Yoshimoto's writing is lucid, earnest and disarming. ... [It] seizes hold of the reader's sympathy and refuses to let go. -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times With the publication of Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, the literary world realized that Yoshimoto was a young writer of enduring talent whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. Kitchen is an enchantingly original book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father) Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart. In a whimsical style that recalls the early Marguerite Duras, Kitchen and its companion story, Moonlight Shadow, are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a very special writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul.

"Entering Banana Yoshimoto's fictional world is a little like living as an expatriate in Tokyo--everyday things are disconcertingly different. The exotic lurks around every corner. . . . Amrita is difficult to forget." --San Francisco Chronicle Banana Yoshimoto's warm, witty, and heartfelt depictions of the lives of young Japanese have earned her international acclaim and best-seller status, as well as a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. In Amrita, now in Grove Press paperback, when a celebrated actress dies under shocking circumstances, she leaves behind an older sister, Sakumi, who suffers from memory loss in the wake of an accident. Struggling to remember whom she loves and what she lost, Sakumi embarks on a unique emotional journey, accompanied by her dead sister's lover and her clairvoyant kid brother. In Amrita, Yoshimoto proves, once again, her prowess as an imaginative yet grounded storyteller as she takes Sakumi--and readers--on a compelling expedition through grief, dreams, and shadows, to a place of transformation and discovery. "Yoshimoto's most fully realized work to date. . . . Her firm grasp of her characters, her surefooted prose and her wide-eyed exploration of everything from American pop culture to the Japanese language make this one of the most satisfying books of the summer." --Time Out New York

Demonstrating again the artful simplicity and depth of her vision, Banana Yoshimoto reestablishes her place as a writer of international stature in a book that may be her most delightful since Kitchen. In Asleep, Yoshimoto spins the stories of three young women bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning for a lost lover, finds herself sleepwalking at night. Another, who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, finds herself suddenly unable to stay awake. A third finds her sleep haunted by a woman against whom she was once pitted in a love triangle. Sly and mystical as a ghost story, with a touch of Kafkaesque surrealism, Asleep is an enchanting new book from one of the best writers in contemporary international fiction.

"It's as if magic coats the pages."
Novelist Banana Yoshimoto
It all begins with a feat of imagination in the ocean. Guided by a high-tech scuba helmet, a young woman comes across a machine that allows her to review love affairs from past lives. Welcome to the mind-bending world of Wisut Ponnimit, whose manga are revered in Tokyo for their artistic charm, intellectual depth, and literary humor. This is the first of Ponnimit's works to be published in English, though he has released over ten books in Japanese and Thai. Based in both Bangkok and Tokyo, Ponnimit holds a coveted Japanese Media Arts Award for outstanding manga by the Japanese Government's Agency for Cultural Affairs. This brilliant comic fantasy includes essays about Ponnimit's art by novelist Banana Yoshimoto as well as by the book's translator Matthew Chozick.

Five characters who, after living painful moments, wonder about the meaning of life, and the possibility of being happy. Mimi is crumbling when she discovers her boyfriend has left her, and only her relationship with Nishiyama, a young man working in a bar in a dead end, will help her overcome her sadness.

Yoshimoto favors short novels that gradually reveal thin, almost translucent layers of her characters' personalities. Her latest, following in the style of earlier books such as Kitchen and Asleep, is a careful examination of the relationship between two teenage cousins in a seaside Japanese town. Maria Shirakawa is a thoughtful young woman thrown by family circumstance (her parents never married; with her mother, she is waiting for her father's divorce from his current wife) into growing up with her cousin, Tsugumi Yamamoto, in her aunt and uncle's small inn.