“I've heard that there's a kind of bird without legs that can only fly and fly, and sleep in the wind when it is tired. The bird only lands once in its life... that's when it dies.” [Days of Being Wild (1990) dir. Wong Kar Wai]
Akimi Yoshida's manga, Banana Fish, is an action-packed, violent and bloody series from its first to its last chapter. It’s exciting, the highs are high and the lows are low. And the plot of a war between a teenage boy and his entourage against the Corsican mafia is one that never lets you stop to breathe. But it's also incredibly heartbreaking and cruel to its characters (as well as the readers watching it unfold.) Ash Lynx, a seventeen-year-old gang leader is the perfect example of the harsh realities that take place in the world of Banana Fish. Someone’s gotta pull the short straw, and Ash seems to get it every time. Being exposed to sexual violence, murder and apathy at such a young and influential age, the manga delivers a very harsh message of how one cannot escape from the fate they’ve been woven into, voluntarily or not. In the world of Banana Fish people like Ash Lynx live on borrowed time.
Born in the town of Cape Cod, Ash was shown the horrors of the world at the age of 7. Had been sexually assaulted by his Little League coach, who was a highly respected and admired veteran in his small town, Ash was exposed to violence young. His father had been aware of what was going on and told him that if anyone were to do something like it again, he was to shut up and let them as long as they paid up afterwards. After some time, Ash came back home beaten with his clothes torn, and his father knew things had gotten worse. He went to the police, but because of the veteran’s good reputation, the town believed he was not guilty, and even accused Ash of seducing him. Ash was 8 years old when he was assaulted by his coach for the last time, shooting him with his father’s handgun afterwards. When the police searched the crime scene, the coach's house, they found the bones of children in the basement and decided to drop all charges against Ash. But it wasn’t over for him, rumours spread fast and all were horrible things about the 8-year-old. His father moved him to his sister’s house but Ash ran away to the streets of New York. Where Ash’s life had already been bad, after leaving home it turned to a different hell entirely.
New York is not warm and welcoming, it's dirty and dangerous even on the nicest streets, hidden under suits and ties and the name Dino Golzine, who would later become Ash’s worst nightmare. Called “Papa Dino” by his minions, Golzine is a child molester, murderer and the boss of the Corsican mafia. The list of his criminal titles can go on for days, though. His two most malicious crimes have to be his sexual abuse towards children, and the facilitation of banana fish, a drug capable of putting the user under hypnosis and mind-control. He raises Ash with the most extravagant riches, best scholars for tutors and top military agents to training him in combat so that someday he might inherit Golzine’s title and lead the mafia. However, Ash constantly rejects Golzine and joins a different gang as an attempt to both defy and escape Golzine’s abuse, even if it is temporary before he has to go back. However, even this gang is essentially under Golzine’s rule, as he begins to give the members hit orders without Ash knowing. This leads to Ash finding a dying man in an alleyway holding a capsule with some sort of substance in it, which would later be revealed as banana fish. For the first time, Ash has leverage against Golzine, and he uses his possession of the drug to his advantage, beginning a series-long war between Ash and his friends, and Golzine's mafia.
In the final volume of the manga, Ash dies as he’s suddenly stabbed by a gang member over a simple misunderstanding they never got around to clearing up. On the first read, it's very sudden, but after looking back on the series, hints and foreshadowing can be shown throughout the entire story of Ash’s death. Ash was destined to die after the climax and after everyone’s happy endings (as happy as they can get in a story like this) were wrapped up. The set up for Ash’s death isn’t logical or realistic, it could have been avoided in several different ways: 1. The reason Lao (another gang member) stabs Ash is that he believes that Ash voluntarily murdered his leader, Shorter and that he was going to kill his little brother, the new leader, Sing. Neither of these things are true, and one conversation with the testimony of multiple eyewitness main characters could have cleared the air and resolved the conflict long before the moment of Ash’s death. 2. In the epilogue, Garden of Light, Sing clues us in on what happened after Ash was stabbed, going into the public library and waiting for death, “I keep wondering... what were you thinking about that day. While the blood slowly drained out of your body and your blood pressure and body temperature dropped, during those long, long hours until death finally came. You must have suffered a lot. Because the knife missed all your vital organs. And yet--you were smiling. As if you were having a really good dream” (155-156 Yoshida). With this, we can extrapolate that Ash had every opportunity to live after the climax in volume 18 when the war was over, but decided not to take them. So why did Ash die than? Well, to put it simply, it was a metaphorical death rather than a literal one. One that highlights one of the most painful themes present in the series. No matter how hard he tries, Ash can never escape the things he’s done and the things that have been done to him.
This is a very upsetting theme, and understandably so considering everyone rooting for Ash’s triumph after watching him suffer so much. It’s a theme that has been shown with allusions and easter eggs to the works of J.D. Salinger and Ernst Hemingway both in the chapters and anime episode titles. And has been confirmed by Yoshida herself.
In volume 8, as well as episode 13, titled, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” there is a direct allusion to the opening monologue of Hemingway’s short story of the same title, “Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai ‘Ngaje Ngai,’ the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude” (1 Hemingway). Standing on the deck over the bank off of New York City, anticipating a major upcoming fight with his rival, Arthur, Ash recites the monologue to Eiji, his closest friend and found family, and responds to Hemingway’s sentiment with his own pain from identifying and relating to the leopard, “When I think of my own death, I try to picture that leopard’s carcass. Why did he come to those heights--for what? Did he lose his way chasing some prey, and wander into some spot he couldn’t escape from? Or was he looking for something else, climbing higher and higher until he used up all his strength and collapsed?” (47-48 Yoshida). In his book, Hemingway uses the leopard as a metaphor for losing one’s self and sense of direction in life, dying on the mountain unable to get to its peak. This is extremely similar to Ash, who doesn’t know what to make of himself or his life other than aimless and never-ending violence and chaos.
The top of the mountain, where the leopard would find what it was dangerously, desperately searching for, may be happiness or clarity. In Ash’s case, the top would be Eiji’s presence or his freedom from his lifestyle of shame and killing. But just like the leopard, Ash dies before he can get there. And he’s aware of this future that awaits him, “I think about which way the carcass was facing... Was he trying to get back down, or was he trying to climb higher? Either way, that leopard knew that he would never be going back” (48). It’s a heartbreaking piece of foreshadowing that we make light of as Eiji reassures Ash in a monologue directly after that he is a human and not a leopard, and that he can choose his own fate. But as the story concludes, Eiji repeats those same words while Ash is stabbed and bleeding out, magnifying the irony and weak power in those actual words, since they end up being untrue as Ash dies by violence anyways, although, by his own choice.
Another comparison can be drawn from J. D. Salinger’s short story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish. Yoshida obviously drew a lot of inspiration from Salinger’s ideas, since her story is very similar in the official name as well as the title of the anime’s first episode, which is word-for-word-identical. In his short story, Salinger writes about a soldier named Seymour Glass who has come back from war and is on vacation with his wife when he meets a little girl named Sybil on the beach. He tells her about a type of sea creature called bananafish, that swim into holes in the ocean, gorge themselves on bananas to the point that they’re so big that they can’t swim back out of the hole, “‘What happens to them?’ ‘What happens to who?’ ‘The bananafish.' [...] ‘Well, I hate to tell you, Sybil. They die’” (6-7 Salinger). After this encounter, Seymour goes back to his hotel room and shoots himself in the head. With this allusion, Ash is parallel to Seymour, both have undergone severe trauma surrounding violence. The bananafish is a metaphor for people who are exposed to a multitude of traumas to the point where they can’t escape the negative feelings they produce, such as shame, fear, guilt, misery etc. Seymour experienced them during the war and is unable to adapt back to life as a regular civilian. The same can be said for Ash, who can’t live life as a regular kid after all the fighting is resolved.
In contrast, Sybil and Eiji symbolize the innocence Seymour and Ash lost and envy, which look beautiful in comparison to their sins. Ash talks to Eiji about his guilt and pain over all the people he’s killed since he was a child, “When I came back one day and shot him with the gun I found, I cried. Y-y’know why? Because I killed him and I felt nothing. I killed people and I don’t know their names. I killed people who were friends of mine. And I keep killing. And I feel nothing” (52-53 Yoshida). Although there is a large difference between dangerous people who kill and Ash, Ash being dangerous because he has to be if he wants to survive New York gang affiliation and his abusers, Ash is still constantly reminded of the things he’s done and is consumed by the guilt and empathy he feels for those he’s hurt. He only rarely forgets about his past traumas and actions in good moments with Eiji, but they’re always temporary before he is reminded when he kills someone else or watches his friends get hurt.
Yoshida addresses this in an interview about her series. Plenty of fans (myself included, at first) assume that Ash’s death was a literal and objective obstacle in the way of his pursuit of happiness and that if he had lived, he would take the plane ticket Eiji gave him and went with him to Japan where they would live normal lives and be happy till the end of their days, finally having escaped the monsters of New York. Yoshida denies and debunks this, “I wonder why some girls think of happiness in that sort of context. They kept saying, ‘He’ll come to Japan and the two of them will be happy, right?’ and I always wondered, why would you insist that coming to Japan will make him happy? What is happiness?” (qtd. in Angofwords). And with this it is implied that Ash’s happiness can’t be obtained by a change of location, or simply by being with Eiji, it takes a lot more than that. He can leave New York, he can leave his gang, he can leave Golzine, but he will still be stuck in the bananafish hole. To assume that a change of scenery and new lifestyle can unilaterally cure Ash of his trauma would be naive, as we’ve seen from volume to volume, Ash commonly has flashbacks and dreams about his worst memories and thinks extremely badly of himself. What he would need is professional psychological help, he’s been through an unfathomable amount of horrors, and moving to Japan wouldn’t make everything go away.
Finally, Yoshida relates Ash’s death to retribution and karma. Although we know Ash as a kind, compassionate and merciful character, for the most part, there are undeniable fractions of the story where he is genuinely unnerving and cold. In Angel Eyes, it's noted that Ash actively seeks out people to manipulate and will kill them without a second thought, but is usually kept out of jail by Golzine’s influence (although they’re usually pedophiles who provoke him into this). In his war against Arthur, when he hunts down dozens upon dozens of people just for associating with his rival, killing them even as they beg for their lives, something he would never do during the first few volumes, “My name has become the signal for a massacre. What on earth have I become?” (23 Yoshida). Although many of Ash’s killings have been justifiable given his circumstances, either being in self-defence, the killing of serial rapists and murderers or an extremist case of consensual euthanasia (Shorter's death), these had no such defence. Yoshida gives her stance on his crimes and the reasoning for his death, “[W]hen it comes down to it, Ash is a killer. I feel that regardless of what might have been behind the killings, people who take another person’s life need to make up for it with their own life. So that’s why I wrote that ending” (qtd. in Angofwords). This isn’t a favourable end for Ash, as practically all fans were devastated by his death, but it serves to let us understand why Yoshida decided to kill him off. However, the ethical debate over what Ash did and didn’t deserve is up to the readers to decide for themselves at the end of the day.
It should also be noted that Yoshida wrote the ending of Banana Fish when she was in a very dark place, and also stated that she was influenced by the allure and fascination people have of real and fictional people who die young.
Banana Fish is one of the most heartbreaking manga’s out there, it packs an incredible story with painful yet realistic hardships for a manga/anime, which we don’t see as often in shonen nowadays (the discussion of whether BF is shonen or shojo is another topic entirely, so let’s wrap this up). Despite the desperate longing for Ash to live and be happy, Akimi Yoshida presents us with a crushing tragedy that depicts the weight of living, and how some people are not able to find any lasting solace by the end of their journey. When I saw the final panel of Ash's face in the library, I imagined his thoughts after reading Eiji's letter as this is enough. But that's just my personal interpretation. Overall, Banana Fish remains a tragic and cathartic story with a philosophical question about its protagonist's losing fight to escape his own turmoil and fate.
Work Cited
“55 Short Stories from the New Yorker.” 55 Short Stories from the New Yorker, by J. D. Salinger, Simon and Schuster, 1949.
Angofwords. “Major Misconceptions about Banana Fish Debunked by Yoshida Akimi, the Writer.” Fan of Fiction, 8 Aug. 2018, angofwords.tumblr.com/post/1767702
97708/major-misconceptions-about-banana-fish-debunked-by.
Hemingway, Ernest. The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Publisher Not Identified, 1952.
Yoshida, Akimi. Banana Fish. Vol. 7, Viz Media, 2007.
Yoshida, Akimi. Banana Fish. Vol. 8, Viz Media, 2007.
Yoshida, Akimi. Banana Fish. Vol. 19, Viz Media, 2007.