Dead End Memories is a group of short stories which on the surface appear to have no linking theme. But once you are engrossed in the world Yoshimoto conjures, there are clearly repeated tones of regret, lost love, betrayal and relationships that literally do come to a dead end.
There is the ongoing search for a compatible love. Unresolved or unfound love that can have no closure. Love of a person who once seemed ideal, who's now proved themselves clumsily, cruelly fallable. Some times love reaches a dead end, and yet though dead, the relationship lingers on in an emotionally tricky inability to disentangle the good from the bad memories.
The opening story has a man who lives in the house of his grandparents, though they continue to exist there as mute ghosts. The dead couple are the spectral embodiment of a Japanese romantic ideal. One the young lovers initially react against. Each feels the obligation to continue with the family business. Do they break away or go with the momentum of that legacy?
There is a simple beauty in all these stories. Sometimes wistful, sometimes more aggrieved. The titular story Dead End Memories finds a woman talking about her relationship with Takanashi. A relationship that slowly evaporates without her ever realising it was finished. There's a lot of unresolved business that she tries to process through her conversations with Nishiyama, who she works with. There is admiration between these two, and the hint of more should they both wish to persue it.
Yoshimoto's signature themes of the difficulty of finding and keeping love, of things left unsaid, all are here given poignant focus in her uniquely sparse yet touchingly effective writing style.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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