Kitchen

Product Information

Banana Yoshimoto ( よしもと ばなな or 吉本 ばなな) is the pen name of Mahoko Yoshimoto (吉本 真秀子), a Japanese contemporary writer. She writes her name in hiragana. (See also 吉本芭娜娜 (Chinese).) Kitchen shines brightest as an elucidation of the awful transience of life in its every facet. So much of what we do slips through our fingers without us ever being aware of it. We’ve all had that ‘what if?’ thought. Perhaps it’s about a missed job opportunity or a potential partner we never had the courage to ask out. These are big things that slip through our fingers. We sometimes wish away a bad day at work, only to then be faced with the realisation that this day is one of a finite number we have. There's something about Japanese writers. They have the unparalleled ability of transforming an extremely ordinary scene from our everyday mundane lives into something magical and other-worldly.

In Kitchen, a young Japanese woman named Mikage Sakurai struggles to overcome the death of her grandmother. She gradually grows close to one of her grandmother's friends, Yuichi, from a flower shop and ends up staying with him and his transgender mother, Eriko. During her stay, she develops affection for Yuichi and Eriko, almost becoming part of their family. However, she moves out after six months as she finds a new job as a culinary teacher's assistant. When she finds that Eriko was murdered, she tries to support Yuichi through the difficult time, and realises that Yuichi is probably in love with her. Reluctant to face her own feelings for him, she goes away to Izu for a work assignment, while Yuichi stays in a guest-house. However, after going to a restaurant to eat katsudon, she realises she wants to bring it to Yuichi. She goes to Yuichi’s guest-house and sneaks inside his room in the middle of the night to bring him katsudon. There Mikage tells him she doesn’t want to lose him and proposes to build a new life together. I truly empathized with Mikage from the beginning of this story to the end. A tale that on the surface appeared to be simple and even trite at times, but which soon uncovered a multi-faceted kaleidoscope of human emotions which I had never seen expressed in this way before.

Need Help?

Sometimes, no matter how intensely I would be staring at him, I would have the feeling that Hitoshi wasn’t there” (p. 111). How does Yoshimoto craft this elegant, eerie tale? What early hints does she drop that we are on the edge of a paranormal experience? The hybrid narrative expresses the hesitation in artistic thinking between tradition and postmodernism. In Kitchen, the female writer interweaves traditional elements in postmodernity and vice versa. She points out that loneliness, disaster, the multiplicity of life, and the desire to escape, which existed long before, are now exploding in the postmodern era. People need to seriously consider their behavior so that life is not destroyed by human greed and carelessness. Those women lived their lives happily. They had been taught, probably by caring parents, not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness regardless of what they were doing. But therefore they could never know real joy. Which is better? Who can say? Such interesting characters are to be found in this rather philosophical work, individuals in fact who I continued to think about after I finished the book. The happy lives of the four are short. The car accident takes Hiiragi and Satsuki’s lovers away suddenly. Therefore, they seem to yearn for an opportunity for the last good-bye, somehow, between the living and the dead realms. Belief in the grace of life/nature has kept them hopeful. The encounter with Urara on the bridge is similar to fate. Urara plays the role of a mysterious prophet. She can understand Satsuki’s deepest thoughts, know Satsuki’s phone number based on her intuition, figure out there will be a once-in-a-blue-moon event on this bridge, and so on. Their first conversation is such a surprise for Satsuki because it is as if Urara knows everything about her already. Satsuki is so overcome that she cannot react to the requests and conclusions about a miraculous meeting with someone that can only happen once in a hundred years.

Satsuki often goes to the bridge where she used to meet Hitoshi and one day she meets a young woman called Urara. And due to this meeting, Satsuki and even Hiiragi have these metaphysical experiences. This story is all rather dream-like and so dif Why not-so-much ordinary? Why not strange? A kitchen-loving girl who was accidentally invited to stay at a grandmother's friend's house, a reserved boy who did not talk much but who was kind-hearted, and a man with the appearance of a woman, or should I say, a female father, who loved his family so much that he voluntarily became a woman to work, to take care of his son when his wife passed away but still had to leave the living world in a painful way . They seemed to be different, but they were just the same melodies in the song of a hectic society. They were lonely people digging a hole full of sadness, loneliness, and fear in their hearts. Above all, they still tried to live, to be happy to overcome everything. That was the most precious thing in the story. Both stories have a dash of this. In the first, it's a dream that might be a premonition; in the second, there's an ethereal character who (maybe) shows another character a little gap in time. Ze volgt altijd haar intuïtie, ik vind het fantastisch dat ze ook de kracht heeft dat te realiseren The hybrid narrative is multimeaningful. The story about a tiny kitchen depicts a clear way in which the Japanese people overcome hardship together. In the adorable plots of Mikage and Yuichi, it seems that they are in love; in fact, the relationship between them is just human care, which is greater than any form of romantic love. The fact that Yuichi invites Mikage to stay at his house comes from a genuinely humane gesture during her hard time. Therefore, when Yuichi’s mother dies, Mikage switches her position with Yuichi to help him with the same suffering. From Kitchen, the readers can realize that humans usually have to overcome challenges that are out of their control. During this lonely time, one always needs some form of caring from other people to light up the dark paths. This perspective influences the whole story. Both Yuichi’s lover and Mikage’s boyfriend cannot determine what kind of relationship exists between the two protagonists. These two supporting characters are simply selfish: they are not capable of comprehending the protagonists’ hardships. People also need to respect the pricelessness of humane care more than the daily love stories of immature young people.Banana also seems to fight against postmodernism. Somehow, she tries to preserve historical memory. Her hybrid narrative reaches beyond postmodernism. Butler wrote, “Frederic Jameson points to a defining sense of the postmodern as ‘the disappearance of a sense of history’ in the culture, a pervasive depthlessness, a ‘perpetual present’ in which the memory of tradition is gone” (Butler, 2002, p. 110). In Kitchen, Japanese tradition is still alive. Disasters: past and present The second story of Kitchen is Full Moon, which also centers around Yuichi and Mikage. The opening informs the readers of another disaster, the death of mother Eriko. Mikage at this time has overcome her loss, left Yuichi’s house, and lived on her own; Yuichi takes a turn at coping with loss. The father–mother died. The two parts of the book start off with death. Banana seems to demonstrate vulnerable cases that are very Japanese. From the traditional period to the present day, sudden deaths are mainly caused by detrimental earthquakes and tsunamis; if not for these two reasons, it is the two atomic bombs that destroyed two cities in Japan.