Jess Gulbranson's Reviews > N.P

Japanese girls, love quadrangles, incest, spirit mediums, and a book that makes people kill themselves... sounds like the next Takashi Miike movie.

However, it's actually the critically aclaimed book "NP" by Banana Yoshimoto. I won't go into detail about the slight but convoluted plot, but it follows the family and friends of the author of the eponymous book, a great example of the motif of harmful sensation. Translating it fully into the author's native language results in the translator's suicide, and even translating part of it or interacting with the manuscript(which the main characters have all done) leads to some degree of mental instability.

Aside from being an exploration of love and grieving and youth, as expounded by Ms. Yoshimoto, it is this thread of instability and subtle madness that makes the book so interesting. As a study of anomie and modern malaise, this blows shite like "Fast Sofa" or "Prozac Nation" out of the water. I read this book in high school but it is only with the passage of many years and many hardships along the way that I was able to reread it with some appreciate for the darkness underneath the light, beautiful prose.