ABSTRACT
Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto is known for rejecting gender stereotypes in her fiction, though she refrains from aligning her writing with feminism, instead professing to explore human possibility more broadly through a particular focus on the self, self-understanding and self-actualisation. This chapter explores how the connection of female figures in five of Yoshimoto’s stories each closely connect with water as a transforming force. While not defining the outcome of their self-actualisation, the oceans, lakes, rivers around them and other forms/states of water (tea, steam, ice and snow) awaken them to change in themselves. Her work does not attempt to give a universal character to the element of water, however, and the texts discussed in this chapter explore its varied flow through everyday lives and growing self-understanding.
