This film wishes to be a poetic peak into the film director’s “personal but fictionalised” life and Ms. Yoshimoto’s “public but real” surroundings in Tokyo, fusing together fiction with un-scripted documentary.

It is meant to look simple yet pugnant, sensual images juxtaposing private spaces of a fictionalized life and the real spaces of a public life. 

Nature, city streets, objects, animals, plants and people’s bodies should overwhelm the viewer with beauty, simplicity, a melancholic trip to finding Banana Yoshimoto and myself “inside” her books.

These two universes meet in Shimokitazawa, the neighborhood where Ms. Yoshimoto lives and works but also where her ficiton book Moshi Moshi is based on.

At times documentary like, at others ethereal and dreamlike, this portrait seeks to create a slow-paced atmosphere closer to a dream than to reality.

Banana Yoshimoto’s name is inspired by the flower of the Banana tree. Her real name is Mahoko. She wrote her first published novel Kitchen at 26 years old, while working as a bar tender in Tokyo. The theme of flowers and in general of plants and nature is recurrent in her books, specifically her life chronicle Un Viaggio Chiamato Vita.