Asleep

Banana Yoshimoto’s novels have established her as one of Japan’s finest and most popular writers, and an acclaimed and best-selling literary star all over the world. Now she delivers three novellas that develop her sophisticated, resonant, and artfully simple vision, in Asleep, a book that is already an international best-seller and may be her most charming since Kitchen. Banana Yoshimoto has a nuanced and 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 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 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 new book from one of the best writers of contemporary international fiction.