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“Weetzie Bat” & Banana Yoshimoto
Love in the 90’s in Pop Y.A. novels
Around the start of the 1990s, two remarkable books ushered in the pop young-adult or y.a. novel. When teens sported spiked and colored hair, when pixie princesses dressed in 1950s prom dresses and cowboy boots, when Madonna’s songs were in the air and Cyndi Lauper was singing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Francesca Lia Block introduced her punk heroine Weetzie Bat in the novel by that name. Weetzie was the immensely popular new kid on the block, and Block would eventually publish more Weetzie stories, then bring them all together in her collection Dangerous Angels.
Meanwhile, across the Pacific, in Japan, the hot adolescent book was Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen. With its references to Colonel Sanders’ Chicken, Charles Schultz’s “Peanuts,” and other trendy kitsch, Kitchen was very “kokusai” (international) and a sensation. By the time it reached American shores (in a translation by Megan Backus), the book had already gone through 60 printings.
Block’s Weetzie Bat has been described as a “punk fairy tale” and an example of “pop magical realism.” The story of Weetzie and her boyfriend (a.k.a. My Secret Agent Lover Man) and of their pals (including the gay couple, Dirk and Duck) is largely realistic except that the story is shot through with fairy-tale events (like the appearance of…
