Banana Yoshimoto’s ‘Dead-End Memories’ is the literary equivalent of a lo-fi playlist

If you’ve spent any time at all on YouTube during the past few years, you might have noticed the proliferation of lo-fi music playlists across the platform. Beloved by millions worldwide for helping them focus on work or create a soothing, “late-night” ambience — this review was written to a three-hour lo-fi playlist — lo-fi (low-fidelity) music is a subgenre of electronic music that mixes elements of hip-hop beats, downtempo rhythms, jazz, chillwave and house, with an emphasis on the imperfect, analog quality of the audio.

Award-winning author Banana Yoshimoto’s writing is the literary equivalent of lo-fi music, and her latest English language release, “Dead-End Memories,” illustrates this perfectly.