Everything Is Only As It Is.

Look, I understand the controversy and upset surrounding the ending of Banana Fish.  My last post on this topic seems to have pissed some people off, which was never my intention.  But I think maybe I could have worded things a bit better, so I’m going to try again to explain why I feel like the ending of Banana Fish was so perfect.

It’s not a happy ending, and I don’t think anyone, anywhere, will try to tell you that the ending was meant to make anyone happy, or satisfied.  That’s the point.  It’s not MEANT to please the reader.  It’s meant to remain true to its narrative realism.  And in that realism, it’s meant to break the readers heart.  And boy does it do both.

I don’t think anyone would tell you, anyone with any ounce of feeling in their heart, anyway, that Ash didn’t deserve a happy ending, or that he deserved to die after all the awful shit he went through.  I think we can all agree that we would have wanted, if we had a choice, to see Ash have a happy, hopeful ending with Eiji in Japan.  We all agree that Ash DESERVED a happy ending, because he was a good person who was dealt about the shittiest hand in life a person can have.  And despite all that shit, he retained that innate goodness of heart that made him who he was.  He never became a monster, like the people who used him up and abused him over and over again.  That’s what makes him such an extraordinary character that’s deeply loved by so many people. He absolutely deserved to be happy.

But that’s the thing. Banana Fish is a story that deals in reality.  Everything that happens in the story, despite the often extraordinary, larger than life circumstances, is dealt with in a way that is, very often, brutally, painfully honest and realistic.  It doesn’t give us what should be, it gives us what IS.  And that makes perfect sense in accordance with its relation to writers like Hemingway and Salinger.  They wrote stories that dealt in brutal honesty and reality too, and both writers are referenced throughout Banana Fish.  And it’s Banana Fish’s commitment to that brutal honesty and reality that makes it an authentic piece of art.  People want a fairy tale ending, where Ash gets to ride off into the sunset with Eiji and live happily ever after, but at no point in Banana Fish are we given any indication that the story is, at any point, going to delve into the realm of unreality and fantasy, and give us such an ending.  To do so would have been a betrayal of the genuine nature of the narrative. It would have ultimately robbed it of its authenticity as a piece of art, and the story, as a result, would have been left hollow and lacking.  

Banana Fish, throughout its narrative, shows us that terrible things happen to good people, and that good people are often forced into doing terrible things.  It never shy’s away from that cruel, heartbreaking reality, and the ending is no exception.  

It affects us so deeply, and leaves us so upset, because it’s so REAL.  It feels genuine to us, it feels real, because it refuses to betray its honesty for the sake of a happy fantasy.  It remains loyal to the harsh truth of reality, and the harsh truth of Ash’s reality in particular.  Ash is a deeply damaged, broken person, who’s experiences in life are the very definition of cruelty.  Here is a boy who, since the age of seven, has experienced sexual, mental, emotional and physical abuse repeatedly and on a scale truly unfathomable to almost all of us. A boy who was forced into a life of prostitution in order to simply survive on the harsh streets of an unforgiving city.  A boy who, again out of a necessity for survival, has had to kill other human beings. A boy who, out of a desperate situation in which he was forced to choose either to save his soulmate or watch him be murdered by his best friend gone berserk in a mad, drug induced insanity, had to kill his best friend by shooting him straight through the heart.  A boy who, each time in his life that he’s tried to build real and meaningful relationships with other people, Griffin, the girl he liked when he was 14, Skip, Shorter, Eiji, he’s had to watch those people he allowed himself to grow close to either die or almost die, over and over again.  All of that combined creates a level of trauma that’s so far beyond the normal scope or understanding of a regular human being, so far beyond any discernable mechanism for coping with trauma, that to expect Ash to just get over it, for it all to magically be okay just because he moves to Japan with Eiji, is the height of unrealistic, and, again, would be a betrayal of the authenticity the story marries itself to from start to finish.  

Ash’s death is a tragedy, as his life was a tragedy, and the story is a reflection of that.  It stays true to that narrative, and never compromises on it.  That’s the point.  Life doesn’t always have a happy ending.  People that have suffered severe, irreversible trauma don’t always recover, and can’t always heal from it.  People who have suffered in the obscene and brutal ways that Ash has aren’t always going to be alright.  Sometimes it’s just too much.  For Ash, it was just too much.  Too much damage.  Too much heartache.  Too much pain.  Too much loss.  Sometimes we can’t overcome our damage, and that reality presented in this story scares people, I think, because it’s so nakedly honest and unapologetically expressed.

The ending is so god awful painful too because we see, in that moment after Ash reads Eiji’s letter, hope bloom inside him.  For an instant, this belief that maybe he can have a happy ending, when he thinks he’ll catch Eiji at the airport, and maybe go with him.  And in the next instant, he’s mercilessly reminded of that hope’s falsity. Hope springs eternal, but not always true.  Hope and happiness were never meant for Ash.  The chance for that was taken from him before he could even understand what those concepts were.  The thematic arc of the story was telling us from the start that it was going to end in tragedy.

People weren’t meant to LIKE this ending.  It wasn’t meant to make them feel good, or okay with what happened, or fulfilled.  In fact, I’d say, it’s meant to make you feel completely devastated.  As the story reflects reality, so often too does real life end in a way that leaves us feeling lost and confused and heartbroken.  Banana Fish is so good because it stays true to that sense of reality, right until the very end.

The ending doesn’t leave us feeling happy, but it sure does leave us FEELING.  Like any real piece of art would.  The emotions it conjures are immense and, for some I guess, too real. That sense of loss and hopelessness and pain it leaves us with is so effective because, again, it’s so honest. And I guess that because those emotions are so real, and felt so deeply, and with such intensity, it leaves some readers and viewers feeling angry.  Lashing out at a reality which they don’t want to accept.  The irony, of course, is that their hatred and rejection of the ending is testament to just how deeply the ending touched them.  It didn’t leave them feeling nothing, it left them feeling too much, and they then go into a state of denial, which is really just a stage of grief.  A refusal to accept.  You know Banana Fish is a true piece of art for that, in how it conjures sincere feelings of grief and mourning in us for its lead character in Ash.  We CARE about him, deeply.  We want him to be alright, because we love him.

But real art isn’t concerned with placation.  It’s concerned with truth.  So many great pieces of literature have unhappy endings, because that’s the truth of the human condition, and the condition of life in general.  Real art won’t shy away from those painful, awful truths, nor is it afraid to conjure the feelings which go hand in hand with those truths in its audience.  

With all that said, the tragedy of the ending doesn’t demand a feeling of meaninglessness or desolation at all.

Eiji’s love for Ash and Ash’s love for Eiji is still so pivotal and, ultimately, essential in how the story ends.  It’s what allows, maybe not a feeling of hope, but a feeling of peace.

You sense throughout the story that Ash knows he’s going to die.  Like he senses that his life is too fucked up, that he’s been through and had to do too many horrible things for it to last very long.  It’s like the saying of he who burns brightest burns twice as fast.  Ash is burning, and he knows it.  He’s already accepted it as an inevitable conclusion.  He doesn’t actively seek death, but he doesn’t fear, nor fight against it.  At points throughout the story, even, he asks for it, when the horror of what’s happening to him becomes too much.  He knows death is coming for him.  The only thing keeping him from giving in so easily I think is his lack of agency in how he will.  Everything has been taken from Ash, and he doesn’t want to give this last thing away. This choice in how he dies.

Eiji’s love is what finally gives him agency in that decision.

Ash died knowing Eiji loved him, and that knowledge, that certainty that he was loved, genuinely loved by another human being, without any strings or conditions attached, simply loved for himself alone, is what allowed Ash to finally find the peace in death which alluded him in life.  He no longer feels like he has to keep fighting, or struggling on through an endless malaise of misery and pain, because he’s finally found the calm and acceptance which comes with knowing he has this one, pure thing for himself, which nobody, none of his abusers, can ever touch or take away.  With everything else that’s been stolen from Ash, his innocence, his sense of agency, his own body, his own mind, Eiji’s love for him is the one thing nobody could ever steal away.  And that’s, I think, why Ash dies smiling, because it’s that knowledge, that he was worthy of another human being’s true love, that at last shows him that he was a human being himself.  Not an animal.  Not a monster.  He was a human being worthy of love.

Ash’s death is heartbreaking, and brutal, but there’s deep consolation to be had in knowing he spent his final moments with the feeling of Eiji’s love for him alive inside his heart, allowing him at last to feel like a person deserving, worthy of love.

It’s that which allows Ash to finally let go of his struggle, and let’s death’s embrace take hold of him.  It’s his own. Eiji’s love, and his choice to let go of life.

But yeah, as heartbreaking, sad and utterly devastating it is, it just fits. Banana Fish was never a happy story to begin with. We would have never gotten that overly happy ending with Ash and Eiji going together to Japan.

If anything, they had said godbye to each other with the hope of Eiji coming back to New York one day. That’s the only alternative ending I can imagine for this series. Ash would have been too scared to go with him to Japan right away. Too scared of both, himself and the possibility of putting Eiji in danger again. And I think people often tend to ignore this simply because they want an ending where they ride off into the sunset and where everything is fine.

Yes, it’s an ending none of us wanted, but as you said, it fits the realism of the overall story.

However, I personally think that there would have been a way for Ash to overcome his trauma, that death wasn’t the only solution for him. He just would have needed enough time and space and eventually, things would have gotten better. Slowly, but it would have been possible.

I think the realism about his death wasn’t “Ash could have never healed” but rather “It takes one single occurence to completely let your mentality spiral downwards and let you lose all kind of hope you had left”.

Like you said also, Ash’s fear would have been too great to simply go with Eiji.  Another thing people assume is that Ash was running to catch up with Eiji at the airport and go with him.  But it’s just as likely that he simply was going to say goodbye one final time.  Not necessarily go with him.  More than likely not, in fact, given Ash’s feelings about being around Eiji and how that put him in harms way.  Ironically, too, I think people tend to ignore Ash’s actual feelings in order to satisfy their own desires for Ash and Eiji.  Ash is extremely damaged, because his life has been so filled with absolutely devastating, horrible circumstances and experiences, and people want to believe Ash could have gotten over his trauma’s, that he could have overcome his trauma’s if he just tried hard enough.  Maybe.  But maybe not.  It’s hard to fathom what Ash was going through mentally and emotionally with regards to everything he’s been through.  Something, I think, would be impossible for any person to understand who hadn’t themselves gone through similar ordeals.  I say it’s ironic, because people who wanted the ending to be happy want that because, obviously, they care deeply about Ash, but people who are angry about the ending and say it was “bad”, and trash Akimi Yoshida for it are failing to consider Ash’s own feelings about everything he’s been through.  They say they care about Ash and that he deserved to be happy, without stopping to think about how Ash must have felt. 

And during his conversation with Sing: 

We all know how much it pained Ash to make that decision, but that was the only possibility he saw in order to keep Eiji safe and he was keen on going through with it.

There’s no way Ash completely changed his mind after having read the letter. Yes, he wanted to run to the airport, to Eiji. But I always had the feeling he just wanted to at least tell him goodbye, that reading his letter made him think: “I don’t want things to end between us like that.” He still would have stayed in America, thinking that this is the life he’s supposed to live, that he’s not deserving of a second chance and a new beginning. It’s a mindset that wouldn’t have changed that quickly within only a few seconds.

So he never was “on the road towards happiness” like people like to call it. He simply would have told him goodbye and that would have been it. It’s even comfirmed by Yoshida-sensei herself that this is approximately how the alternative ending she had in mind would have looked like.

People tend to say the ending is “bad” or “bad/lazy writing” because they see Ash’s death as the message: “All people who have gone through such trauma deserve to die/can only find peace in death.” To be honest, I’ve never got the impression that this is what it wants to tell us.

Yes, Ash smiled in the end, but not because he thought: “Yay! I can finally die!” but because of Eiji’s words that had touched him so deeply. Because he felt loved. Another thing he didn’t think he deserved to ever experience. And sadly, Ash also thought that this is all he could ask for, that asking for more would only put Eiji in danger again and maybe really get him killed.

That’s also why he rather went back to the library instead of seeking medical help after having been atacked by Lao. Because he saw this as a sign that dangers would always follow him, that he’ll always have enemies somewhere. He knew that they’ll target Eiji again when he comes back (and you can be certain he would have come back. He even said so in his letter that they’ll see each other again someday). We don’t know if that’s really how it would have turned out, but that’s what Ash thought is bound to happen. Just as he said, he always imagined the worst-case scenarios and the worst-case scenario he could imagine in that moment was Eiji coming back one day and dying due to him still having enemies. And in order to prevent that from happening, he let his life slip away like that, thinking that the unconditional love he had experienced is already more than he has been deserving of.

Ash always thought of himself as an unredeemable murderer, that he’d always be the cause of other’s misery and problems, that he can’t escape this life he was leading, that death may be the only way to pay for all he’s done in his life (he mostly killed out of self-defense, but for him, this wasn’t an excuse in any kind of way). What’s important to note about all of this is the fact that this is Ash’s point of view. This was how Ash thinks about himself and his life. This was how his mind worked. This doesn’t have to be the actual reality of it.

So does this tell us that every person having experienced such trauma deserves to die? I don’t think so.

At no point in the story, I had the feling as if the narrative was telling me that Ash deserves to die. On the contrary, we have Eiji and other characters who often express how much they want to protect Ash and how much they want him to live. And also the overall depiction and characterization of Ash makes us readers feel for him, sympathize with him and root for him. None of us wanted him to die nor thought: “Yeah, he deserved death”.

If it really was trying to send the message that Ash deserved to die, then we wouldn’t feel so devastated by his death. We would honestly think that this was the only and correct way for Ash’s story to end, but we don’t. We rather think of it as unfair, sad and heartbreaking.

Ash may have been happy in the moment of his death (again, not because he was dying but because of Eiji’s words) and thought that this was the right thing to do, but that doesn’t mean that we’re supposed to think of it as the right choice as well and I don’t think it’s even framed as such.

That’s why GoL is so important. Because it shows us what Ash’s death has done to other characters. We see their grief and them mourning Ash even years after he had died. We see how much pain it had caused and that it actually solved nothing. We see how much they miss him and how much they wish he was still there with them even though it’s never really said out loud. With that, the whole epilogue basically tells us that Ash shouldn’t have died, that he didn’t deserve to die, that it was unfair.

If the message really is “all trauma survivors deserve to die”, then we wouldn’t have GoL in the first place or it would have been framed differently with   everything being fine. But it’s not and that makes all the difference.

Again, I strongly believe that Ash would have been able to overcome his traumas with enough time and space. However, as I already mentioned, he didn’t thought so himself.

Throughout his life, he always had been treated like a monster, like a toy, like a “thing” rather than a human and this deeply scarred his soul. It’s understandable that he didn’t think highly of himself, that he always saw himself as “evil” without seeing any kind of goodness in himself.

Eiji was some sort of light at the end of the tunnel for him. He could sense his pain, comforted him, reminded him of his humanity and let him experience unconditional love. And this love was very important for Ash at this crucial point of his life.

However, that doesn’t mean that Eiji’s love was the ultimate salvation or solution for every problem. It would have been a highly romanticized view of love and we all know such stories:

A person who is deeply hurt meets someone they fall in love with eventually and suddenly everything is alright and nothing hurts anymore.

That’s pretty unrealistic. You can love someone as much as you want, but that won’t prevent someone’s inner demons to catch up with them at some point - the same that happened to Ash in the end.

That doesn’t mean that Eiji’s love was meaningless, though. Without it, Ash may wouldn’t have died, but he most probably would have turned into the monster Dino and Yut Lung wanted him to become - a fate he feared.

That’s exactly what I was trying to get at as well, when I said that it’s ironic that the people who hate the ending so much, because they didn’t get what they wanted to see, what Ash even deserved in a second chance and a happy ending, aren’t taking into account or considering Ash’s own feelings and view point.  They’re angry on Ash’s behalf, without realizing they’re dismissing Ash’s own thoughts and feelings.  You’re totally right when you say Ash’s view of himself is very skewed and warped.  He sees himself in this ugly light, sees himself as this horrible person who brings only misery and pain.  But like you also said, we know he’s not, both through our own observations of his actions as readers/viewers, and through the observations and reactions to him of the other character around him.  Ash is actually an incredibly good person.  Someone with deep feeling and love in his heart.  But see, that’s where the difficulty for him comes in.

He can’t justify his own actions to himself.  Every life he’s taken has taken a massive toll on him.  To take another life isn’t some frivolous, easily excusable thing for him.  It’s a serious, deeply consequential action, which Ash, no matter how justified he was in taking that life, can never square with himself.  Can never be okay with himself for.  It’s because Ash has such a good heart that the crimes he’s committed weigh so heavily on him, I think.  Why he can’t let it go, or forgive himself for it.  He cares too much, feels too much.  In the end, it’s what makes him unable to forgive himself, or accept himself.  It’s what makes him unable to believe he deserves anything good.  It’s tragic, and again, it makes sense with the narrative of the story, and with Ash as a character.  He’s a tragic character that ends tragically. 

There’s definitely every possibility that Ash could have recovered, for sure, given enough time and help.  Like you said, I don’t believe the narrative is telling us at all that people with severe trauma like Ash “deserve” to die.  I’m not even sure how anyone could take that message away from the story.  I think what the story is telling us is that, in reality, people that have suffered severe trauma often come to a bad end, because of that trauma, because it throws their life and the choices they make in that life so completely off track, and that it’s horrible and unfair and cruel, but it’s reality.  Ash himself was subjected to so much cruelty and abuse by so many people around him, that he often literally had no choice but to do the things he did in order to survive, and nobody with any heart or compassion blames him for that.  But Ash blames himself.  And that’s the inherent tragedy in his character.  Like you said, he never felt he deserved a second chance.  And he never felt that he deserved another person’s love, and never believed he would receive it.

I agree completely that the reason Ash is smiling when he dies is because he knows he’s loved by Eiji.  That knowledge, that feeling of love that he has, is far more than he thought he would ever receive, and because of that, because it’s more than he thought he would ever have, he receives it with gratitude and satisfaction.  For him, that was enough to die in peace.  

But you make an excellent point about the grief we see left over from Ash’s death in those who cared about and loved him.  Ash’s death in the end caused immense pain in those he left behind, and that too is testament to his value and goodness as a person, and to the fact that the story was never sending the message that he “deserved” to die.  He was someone who made the lives of people around him better, and more fulfilled, even if he could never see that about himself.  And with him gone, it leaves a huge empty space behind in those people.  

It’s maybe the most heartbreaking aspect of Ash’s death, that, like you said, he thought of allowing himself to die as the right thing to do, when in reality it wasn’t.  The world wasn’t better off without him in it.  The people he loved and who loved him weren’t better off without him in their lives.  But Ash, in his misguided view of himself, believes that he’s doing the selfless and correct thing, that he’s ensuring the safety and happiness of Eiji’s life, and everyone else he cared for, by letting himself die.  Ultimately, it shows the true consequences and devastation of all the trauma and cruelty that Ash has suffered in his life, the devastation of all the abuse he’s suffered at the hands of others who had power over him, that his view of himself could be so wrong and warped, as to believe the world and the people he loved were better off without him.

And I think that’s in keeping with the realism of the story.  The story wants to show us the damage done to those who have suffered and experienced things like child sexual abuse and people who have been forced into a life of violence and crime.  It wants to show us realistically the fallout of that kind of abuse and cruelty, of what happens to a person who’s been subjected to those kinds of cruelties from other human beings.  It never shy’s away from that, and that’s why the ending is so perfect, in my opinion.  It doesn’t undermine or trivialize what Ash has gone through.  I think if the ending had been what people wanted, where Ash went to Japan with Eiji and everything was all better, it would have done just that, trivialized Ash’s trauma, and subsequently, trivialized the trauma of sexual abuse and mental, emotional and physical abuse just in general.  It would have been sending the message that those things aren’t all that bad, and you really shouldn’t let them effect you so deeply, which is absurd beyond words.  By giving us the ending that it did, Banana Fish acknowledged the seriousness of those abuses, and realistically depicted what those abuses can do to a person, emotionally and mentally.  Ash hated himself because of everything that was done to him and because of the things he was forced into doing just to survive, and even Eiji’s love in the end wasn’t enough to fix that.  I think it’s a brutal but honest and realistic depiction of the consequences of abuse on a person, especially a young person like Ash.  

And the ultimate fallout from it in Banana Fish is that Ash views himself as a monster, and as someone not deserving of love, and who considered himself beyond lucky, to have been the recipient of love anyway.  

I think that’s incredibly courageous, to depict that in a story the way Banana Fish did.  To show the true damage caused when a person is treated like disposable trash.  

I’ve never been angry at the ending or felt “betrayed” like others did (seriously, the author didn’t promise anyone anything, how can people feel betrayed? 😂). I rather felt sad because it really didn’t have to end that way if certain things had been different. And things like sexual abuse, child abuse, the consequences victims of these things have to suffer from and have to endure are very much still an issue nowadays in the real world. So if anything, Ash’s death also teaches us that such things finally have to disappear if we don’t want people to have to go through the same like Ash did. Maybe we need to see him die in such a tragic and unfair way in order to let that fully sink in.

But sadly, as soon as some people know the ending, they immediately judge it, hate on it, bash the author and sometimes even those who like the ending. Like, don’t do that. Let people have their own opinions on it, it doesn’t make them a bad person. And it also doesn’t mean that they think “every person who has experienced abuse deserves to die” (yes, I saw this accusation on twitter once). You can still be fine with the ending and like it and still think that Ash actually deserved to live.

And hating on the author so much is just a no-go. It’s okay to criticize things about a story, but people calling Yoshida-sensei names, like “bad/lazy writer” or saying she doesen’t deserve rights/her characters is beyond simple “critique”. It’s her story and she ended it the way she wanted it to end. There was no ill intention behind it. And the accusation of her “clearly hating Ash” is still beyond my reason. Like, she modelled him after her favourite actor. He was such a deep and complex character. How could she hate him? People really need to learn that “killing a character ≠ hating them”.

Things like that are the reason why I rather talk to people about the ending who either like it or at least accept it even though they don’t like it. I find it more difficult to talk to people about it who just outright hate it and call it “trash” and “bad writing” because I have the feeling that most of them aren’t interested in different interpretations or opinions of others. “Ash dies and this is bad and insulting” and that’s all there is to it which is sad because the most interesting aspect of literature is how people’s views on it differ.

And like you said, because of the circumstances of the story, of Ash’s story, the things he goes through, the trauma’s he suffers, and how those trauma’s lead to this situation in the end where he gets killed, it’s really a warning against allowing kid’s like Ash to fall under the radar.  To allow the sorts of things that happened to Ash to happen to any child.  One of the most damaging things to happen to Ash, of all of the damaging experiences he went through, I think, was his father allowing him to fall into the hands of the first person to sexually abuse him, even after knowing it was happening.  It set Ash on a path of destruction towards himself, because it had such a severe impact on how he viewed himself, had such negative consequences for how he ended up seeing himself as this terrible person who didn’t deserve love, or happiness, or a second chance.  It set him on this path of self-loathing, despite his actions always being driven by a sound moral center.