Dead-End Memories: Stories

"Banana Yoshimoto’s 11th book to be translated into English, Dead-End Memories (originally published in 2003) is a collection of stories, each of which, while specific and distinct, has at its center a woman both losing and finding something of herself. In Asa Yoneda’s elegant translation of this collection – whose title story Yoshimoto herself considers her best – the soothing rhythm of the everyday and the mundane is broken by equally quiet moments of profundity. “I know now,” the narrator of the title story tells us, “that just then, under the worst possible conditions, I was in the midst of my greatest happiness.”"