These essays, like the ones on Murakami and the Akutagawa Prize write-ups, were salvaged from my old culture blog, Sgt. Tanuki’s Lonely Hearts Club Blog.  I wrote most of them when I was preparing to teach a seminar on Yoshimoto Banana in 2012;  I reread everything that had been translated and these were my thoughts.

As with Murakami, I’ve been reading Banana since I first got interested in Japanese lit around the turn of the ’90s.  I’m not quite as much a fanboy of hers as I am of his, however (this probably comes out in the essays).