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Concept
Banana Yoshimoto
Summary
is the pen name of Japanese writer Mahoko Yoshimoto. From 2002 to 2015, she wrote her name in hiragana (よしもと ばなな).
Yoshimoto was born in Tokyo on July 24, 1964, and grew up in a liberal family. Her father was the poet and critic Takaaki Yoshimoto, and her sister, Haruno Yoiko, is a well-known cartoonist in Japan.
Yoshimoto graduated from Nihon University's College of Art with a major in literature. While there, she adopted the pseudonym "Banana", after her love of banana flowers, a name she recognizes as both "cute" and "purposefully androgynous."
Yoshimoto keeps her personal life guarded and reveals little about her certified rolfing practitioner husband, Hiroyoshi Tahata, or son (born in 2003). Each day she takes half an hour to write at her computer, and she says, "I tend to feel guilty because I write these stories almost for fun." Between 2008 and 2010, she maintained an online journal for English-speaking fans.
Yoshimoto began her writing career while working as a waitress at a golf club restaurant, in 1987.
Her debut work, Kitchen (1988), had over 60 printings in Japan alone. There have been two film adaptations: a Japanese TV movie and a more widely released version titled Wo ai chu fang, produced in Hong Kong by Ho Yim in 1997.
In November 1987, Yoshimoto won the 6th Kaien Newcomer Writers Prize for Kitchen; in 1988, the novel was nominated for the Mishima Yukio Prize, and in 1989, it received the 39th Minister of Education's Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists. In 1988 (January), she also won the 16th Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, for the novella Moonlight Shadow, which is included in most editions of Kitchen.
Another one of her novels, Goodbye Tsugumi (1989), received mixed reviews but was made into a 1990 movie directed by Jun Ichikawa.
Her works include twelve novels and seven collections of essays (including Pineapple Pudding and Song From Banana) which have together sold over six million copies worldwide. Her themes include love and friendship, the power of home and family, and the effect of loss on the human spirit.
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