“Love Songs” by Banana Yoshimoto

Excerpts from the Paper

Literary Analysis
The short story “Love Songs” by Banana Yoshimoto was characterized by a lucid, reflective mood in which the narrator, Fumi, effused her deepest feelings and struggles to the audience. Additionally, there was a real sense of melancholy in this story.
This is one line which evidenced this mood:
“Each time I looked out on that scenery with drunken eyes I’d be overwhelmed by the unbelievable purity of those colors, and I’d start feeling as if nothing really mattered, like I wouldn’t really care at all even if I were to lose everything I had” (Yoshimoto 1205).
The depressed, detached emotion conveyed in this line is quite evident. Japan has consistently had one of the highest suicide rates in the world for many years. The...

..... some solace, yet she would never truly be able to reconcile the fact that she had loved and lost.
Thus, the story which was woven around the sadness of love lost was actually deftly developed to make the audience feel that it was a simple case of two women who wanted to be with the same man. In the end, it was actually the two women who were with each other but their love was still never truly developed and enjoyed. The sadness of the impossibility of consummation
of love was not focused on the man but on the relationship
between Fumi and Haru, which was realized too late by both women.
Works Cited
Yoshimoto, B. “Love Songs.” Short Fiction: Classic and
Contemporary. Ed. Charles H. Bohner. Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005. Print.