5 Quotes from "N.P." by Banana Yoshimoto

 

These are the 5 quotes I choose from Banana Yoshimoto's "N.P.":

• " [...] The absent party takes on this enormous presence. My father wasn't there, but life revolved around him, anyway."
• I wrote the note in defiance of the hidden darkness that was my enemy.
• For the most part, I live my life as if time didn't matter, but when I see Mother, I feel as if a time machine has suddenly transported me into a well-defined future. The changes in my mother made me keenly aware of the passage of time.
• "Once you get involved with a text, it's difficult to let go of it or create it in another language. That's what I think. Of course, if you don't like the book to begin with, then you have to suffer through it," she said with a smile. " [...] I've been translating  for more than ten years, and sometimes I get weary. Translations exhausts you in a special way. [...] You become so involved with the writer's style that it starts to feel like your own. You spend hours every day with it, and then you end up feeling that you alone had created it in the first place, and then your thoughts fall into sync with the author's, and that's very peculiar. Why, sometimes I get so far into the author's thought processes that I feel no resistance at all. I become unable to distinguish my thoughts from hers, and sometimes I find myself thinking the way she would, not just about the book, but about my own life, even when I'm not translating. Particularly if the author has a very strong personality, a translator gets drawn in so tightly, much more so than an ordinary reader would."
• I wasn't a child anymore, and that made me feel awfully lonesome, and utterly alone.