Apparently Haruki Murakami is a fan of Banana Yoshimoto and after reading "The Lake" I can understand why. She writes just like him. At least, she does in this novel.
Her narrator, Chihiro, could be a female version of just about any of Murakami's first-person male narrators. She's a level-headed, earnest, goodnatured sort, not without her troubles and foibles, but they don't get in the way of her being a basically decent and understanding person. Chihiro is an artist of self-described modest talent, an everyday average sort of person, again, sharing this self-proclaimed "everyman" identification with many of Murakami's "I" narrators. She's mainly employed painting murals of innocuously pleasant subjects for clients who just want to pretty-up the odd drab, nondescript wall. As Chihiro sees it, she's not creating great Art, that's beyond her skill; instead, she's content to make the world a brighter, more cheerful place in her own small way, even if only temporarily.
Nakajima, the man to whom she finds herself inexplicably drawn, is a mystery—as are, conversely, most of the major female characters in a Murakami novel. Nakajima is a brilliant, but boyishly naive student of genetic science. Severely introverted, physically frail, and sex-phobic to boot, he's something of a lost soul, floating detached and seemingly disembodied through a world he seems willingly capable of leaving at any moment. Something terrible happened to him in the past that has ripped him from the rootedness that hold most ordinary people to life.
But what happened to Nakajima as a child he won't or can't talk about—and Chihiro won't push him. Her delicacy of feeling in this regard is very much like that displayed by any number of Murakami's "heroic" male characters. They, too, never force a confidence or an issue, but remain the paragons of patience and benevolent passivity, content to let events and people unfold naturally, in their own time. Maybe, Chihiro considers, she doesn't even want to know what happened to Nakajima. If she knew, it might change everything. And, for the time being, at least, things are good. She thinks she may be falling in love with him. Why force him to dredge up the ugliness of his former life and ruin what sweetness they have?
Of course, the past must be dealt with sooner or later. And that supplies the suspense that drives the reader through this short, lightly written, but deceptively complex and challenging novel.
The fact is that Chihiro is damaged goods, too. She is still mourning the recent death of her mother, who was the hostess/owner of a bar, an occupation of dubious morality, to say the least, as seen by polite Japanese society. As such, Chihiro had a difficult, unconventional childhood of her own. The question that Yoshimoto poses—and resolves—is whether these two misfits can possibly make a life together. And if so, how.
Chihiro tries to define for herself, and the reader, what it is that so captivates her about Nakajima, a man who, by any other measure, is everything the opposite of what she seeks in a partner. This is what she comes up with:
We keep our gazes fixed, day after day, on the things we want to see. But sometimes we encounter people like Nakajima who compel us to remember it all. He doesn't have to say or do anything in particular; just looking at him, you find yourself face-to-face with the enormousness of the world as a whole. Because he doesn't try to live in just a part of it. Because he doesn't avert his gaze. He makes me feel like I've suddenly awakened, and I want to go on watching him forever. That, I think, is what it is. I'm awed by his terrible depths.
It's hard to believe that Yoshimoto hasn't been influenced by Murakami nor is it an insult to say her work is strongly reminiscent of his, especially when it's executed so well. Ultimately the same persuasive atmosphere of magic and danger imbues Yoshimoto's fictional world.When we finally learn what happened to Nakajima the horror is a lot more ambiguous and nuanced than what we might have feared. And for that reason, it comes as a complete, if somewhat anti-climactic surprise. But, in some ways, what happened to Nakajima is even more horrifying for being so perfectly human.
In Yoshimoto's world, as in Murakami's, the mystery, the magic, and especially the horrors, are those of everyday life. Both authors are showing us that the closer we look at the actual real world around us the more fantastical and irrational it reveals itself to be. There is a hidden-in-plain-sight pataphysical element about the world and human life that Yoshimoto and Murakami take pains to reveal in their fiction, which is to say, that theirs is a world of exceptions. Exceptions that don't merely prove the rule, but prove to be the rule itself. Everything—and everyone—is an exception.
A friend and fellow survivor of Nakajima's tells Chihiro:
Thanks for painting us. Thanks so much for seeing, the first time you met us, that even though we're like ghosts, even though we're not supposed to exist, we are alive.
The reader, too, might use these very words to thank Banana Yoshimoto for seeing with such clarity and charity the ghostly, orphaned, homeless parts within each of us and treating them with so much love and sympathy, but most of all, material reality.
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