The three exquisitely crafted novellas in Banana Yoshimoto's Asleep reside in a delicate state of blurred-out consciousness, those uncertain moments in which reality creeps slowly into a waking dream, making the distinction between the two unclear. The protagonists in each are women in mourning, and when they reach this state while drinking heavily or gazing at hypnotic sheets of snowfall, memories come flooding back to them, their loss turning oddly sensual. Translated from the original Japanese by Michael Emmerich, the stories skip through time with a bare minimum of florid language, achieving their effects without falling into preciousness or stylistic trickery. The first and most accomplished of the three, "Night And Night's Travelers," concerns the death of a young man, but Yoshimoto is more interested in the tender bonds connecting the women who loved him, a point of view that remains constant throughout the book. Triggered by a letter never sent to her late brother's American ex-girlfriend, Shibami sorts through her emotions while his last lover, shattered by the tragedy, wanders through her life like "a resident ghost." Shibami's compassion for both women transcends their past rivalry, a theme that bleeds gracefully into the second novella, "Love Songs," in which the narrator is haunted by her once-bitter rival in a romantic triangle. Both in love with "a man whom women love fleetingly but with explosive force," their mutual devotion led to numerous fights, but upon hearing the now-deceased woman's voice just before she sleeps, she's forced to reconsider her feelings. They come to terms with each other through a séance, realizing with the distance of time and mortality that they had more in common than they'd ever figured—and, ultimately, that their relationship was more special than the thug over whom they'd argued so intensely. The concluding title story finds a young woman coping with her best friend's suicide by sleeping half the day, then spending her nights pursuing an affair with a man whose wife lingers in a coma. Much as she tries to divide her life into separate halves, she can't help but feel that her habits are somehow related to her lover's languishing spouse. Though all the stories wrestle with loneliness and death, Asleep is never morose or unremittingly bleak, because Yoshimoto shows how mourning can lead to knowledge and rebirth. Eloquent, concise, and saturated with emotion, the novellas begin in a dream-like trance and wake into a clearer understanding of the world.