You can eat the bananas but they won't taste like a regular banana, they'll be stringy and waxy with a bunch of seeds.

Musa basjoo is a type of banana cultivated for fiber, not for fruit.

I believe they pound the fibers out of the leaves and the stalks. A lot of plants have long fibers, but only a few are strong enough or easy enough to process to be of any use for humans. In the tropics people use just about every part of banana plants - they eat the flowers and the fruit; they process the fibers from the stems and leaves and weave cloth and they use the leaves as everything from clothing to wrappers for food.

I've never cut my Musa Basjoo back every fall, like I probably should, and so instead of having the same stalk grow back every year (some of them do, sometimes), I generally have pups grow, in sort of a straight line in one direction from the original -- so my banana is creating a sort of horizontal row, because most of the old stalks come back.

This year, with all the rain (and the increasing cost of water), I didn't even do any watering, and they still did OK -- not as well as past years, but not bad. I agree, pretty amazing, considering my back yard is nothing like a "tropical rain forest."
Jeff