{"id":305996,"date":"2017-04-14T16:30:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-14T16:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2017\/04\/14\/moshi-moshi-by-banana-yoshimoto-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T14:23:46","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T14:23:46","slug":"moshi-moshi-by-banana-yoshimoto-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2017\/04\/14\/moshi-moshi-by-banana-yoshimoto-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Moshi Moshi” by Banana Yoshimoto [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists<\/a> and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win<\/a> series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and read!<\/em><\/p>\n

Steph Opitz is the books reviewer for<\/i> Marie Claire magazine. She also works with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP<\/span>),<\/i> Kirkus Reviews, the Brooklyn Book Festival, and the Twin Cities Book Festival.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Moshi Moshi<\/em><\/a> by Banana Yoshimoto, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda (Japan, Counterpoint Press)<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 37%<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA<\/span>: 3%<\/b><\/p>\n

Who doesn\u2019t love a good ghost story? Well, me. I get scared easily. But, in Banana Yoshimoto\u2019s Moshi Moshi<\/em> there\u2019s a palatable haunting for even the biggest scardy-cats.<\/p>\n

In her latest novel, Yoshimoto tells of a mother and daughter (Yoshie) coping with the sudden death of their patriarch. We learn in the beginning that, wildly out of character (isn\u2019t it always?!), the father was having an affair and that his death seems to have been a murder-suicide with the mistress. What follows is more unexpected. The novel isn\u2019t actually about all that. It\u2019s really about a starting over, or of finding oneself, or, maybe, both.<\/p>\n

Yoshie moves to a trendy neighborhood of Tokyo to get out of her family home, but she can\u2019t seem to shake the details of her father\u2019s death. Her mother soon follows and moves in, abandoning what she feels was a haunted house. Living together in this new arrangement allows the two to look at each other in a new light.<\/p>\n

Not a lot of action happens in this book, despite the premise, and that\u2019s it\u2019s magic. It doesn\u2019t rely on the gimmicks of the mysterious death like it could, but rather focuses on character development and the slow grace of someone coming out of grief and of age.<\/p>\n

This book came out in Japan in 2010 after being serialized in the Mainichi Shimbun<\/em>, Japan\u2019s oldest newspaper. Yoshimoto is a national treasure and now that Americans are able to enjoy this book it won\u2019t just be big in Japan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[66056,40856,35996,64586,48766,66046,1646,64996,37876],"class_list":["post-305996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-asa-yoneda","tag-banana-yoshimoto","tag-btba","tag-btba-2017","tag-btba-fiction","tag-moshi-moshi","tag-review","tag-steph-opitz","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305996"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":396622,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305996\/revisions\/396622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}