Banana Fish (manga)

In a 1998 vote by 5315 readers of the magazine "Comic Link", Banana Fish was chosen as the best manga ever.

It's ironic that the author would choose to use the name of a Salinger story as the basis for a military experiment, since the author actually served in an intelligence unit during WW2. In fact, some suggests Salinger's other book, "The Catcher in teh Rye" has subliminal messages, since the assassins for John Lennon and Ronald Reagan read the book before shooting their victims.

Banana Fish is the j-rock singer Gackt's favorite manga. In fact, Gackt even wrote a song dedicated to the character Ash called "Asrun Dream" (Ash's real name, Aslan, would be pronounced something like Asrun in Japanese). The song is apparently about Ash watching Eiji sleep.

J. D. Salinger's story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", centers on an unstable young man who kills himself at the end of the story. The bananafish, in the story, is a fish that looks like a perfectly normal fish until it swims into a hole where there are lots of bananas. However, once they find the bananas, they proceed to gorge on them until they reach a size where they cannot fit back through the hole and eventually die from "banana fever". For Salinger, the fish are essentially a metaphor for human greed.