Goodbye Tsugumi, by Yoshimoto Banana

Translated by Michael Emmerich

(1989, translated 2002)

Grove Press

(Novel)

Yoshimoto presents us with a seaside coming-of-age story involving three young girls. The narrator, Maria, is the daughter of an unmarried woman and a married salaryman. The father lives in Tokyo, where he works and struggles to get his wife to agree to a divorce. He visits Maria and her mother regularly through Maria’s late teens, when he is finally able to secure the divorce and bring his new wife and daughter to Tokyo. Maria’s aunt Masako takes mother and daughter in; her mother works at her brother-in-law’s hotel, and Maria Shirakawa grows up alongside her cousins Yoko and Tsugumi. The children lead an idyllic life in a gloriously beautiful environment and Maria is extraordinarily well-adjusted despite being uncertain of her father’s commitment to her and her mother, and her cousin is the very embodiment of grace and goodwill. The title character, Tsugumi, suffers from an illness that is never named but puts her fate in doubt from the moment of her birth. Everyone walks on eggshells around her. She often feels ill after eating and retires to her room, seems forever to be consumed by a fever or about to break out into a trembling sweat, and sleeps like a champion. Though the setting is contemporary Japan, Tsugumi seems like a character out of a Gothic novel. Her mood is alternately morbid and capricious, she is extraordinarily pale, has enormous eyes and unnaturally thin wrists, and is known as the beauty of the town. And even among her teen peers, she is both waif-like and wraith-like. She is also an absolutely cruel and vindictive person. She insults, demeans, and betrays both her sister and her cousin and she terrorizes her parents. Willful and spoiled, she is contrary to everyone. She even owns to a desire to murder the family dog. Yet Yoko and Maria always find ways to forgive Tsugumi’s selfish fits and cruel pranks. At times, the parents seem to suffer Stockholm syndrome as they gush over their daughter’s alarming behavior; after all she repeatedly announces that she is going to die and even comes close to death on several occasions. The story shifts somewhat with the arrival of Kyoichi, a handsome loner who takes an interest in Tsugumi yet seems to have the good sense to keep the relationship chaste and appropriately distanced. Yoshimoto published this after Kitchen; readers remark that the characters are unlikable or difficult to relate to in Goodbye Tsugumi.  As unnaturally strained as all the relationships are in the novel, and given the number of “pranks” Tsugumi concocts about the dead or her own ever-imminent death, the hotel guests that we never quite meet, and the hole that appears in the neighbor’s yard, it is possible that Goodbye Tsugumi, as well as being a coming-of-age novel, has more in common with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, in that it makes us wonder about the innate cruelty of children and the reliability of the narrator. A film version with the original Japanese title, Tsugumi, directed by Jun Ichikawa, premiered with great success in 1990.

“And yet I liked her even so, and Pooch liked her, and probably everyone else around her liked her too. We all continued to be enchanted by her. It didn’t matter what she put us through, or what awful things she said to us just because she happened to be in a crummy mood. In Pooch’s case it didn’t matter that he might end up being killed and eaten. Beyond her words and beyond her heart, much deeper than all that, supporting the snarl of who she was, was a light so strong it made you sad.” (61)