Kitchen: Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen
Banana Yoshimoto
Megan Backus (Translator)
150pp


This week I return to Banana Yoshimoto, possibly a fitting way to begin the new year after a year in which I simply didn't read or write as much as I had hoped to do.

So, Kitchen, a story of people stuck, seems like a perfect place to attempt to get myself going.

I will likely attempt to do smaller reviews this year, but hopefully still try and examine what it is that makes J-lit so valuably different and a counterpart to other countries literature.

So, lets begin!

In Kitchen, Yoshimoto gives us the sad, but subtly and never overbearingly sad, story of Mikage. Mikage has just lost her grandmother, the only living relative she had, and is faced for the first time with decisions such as how to live her life.

Yoshimoto has a real talent for creating the melancholy of these situations. Her writing is never unpleasant and actually lovely to read, but the sadness permeates everything, and this sets up what could otherwise seem like an odd series of choices for Mikage.

However, it seems perfectly natural that when an acquaintance, Yuichi, offers Mikage a sofa to sleep on, she takes it. Most authors would likely create a financial excuse here, but Yoshimoto is too confident to need one. Instead, the loneliness of a new apartment is so unbearable, and not specifically for Mikage, but for the readers, that there's joy in Mikage's acceptance.

Yuichi lives with his mother, the transgendered woman who once acted as his father, a joyful character who doesn't get enough time in the pages of this work. She seemed to signify the beauty of accepting the changes that must come, as the younger characters are simply unable to move.

I'll spend no more time on the plot, as the set up is enough to detail the positives that sit throughout this work, but finish here with what is likely the most powerful and touching part of this work, so much so that it was given the place of title.

The kitchen of the title here is a place of warmth and creation. Yoshimoto never pushes these ideas too strongly, but the sofa where Mikage rests her head at night is never separated by any wall from the warmth of the cooking or the boiling of tea water. Instead of being annoying, the late night noises of post-work bites and nibbles are a comfort to the lonely girl. I don't think it would be too far to suggest that the kitchen is the grandmother we never really meet within the pages of the book. I don't know if it's completely universal, but the connection between the love for a grandmother and her cooking seems like something most of us can taste, smell, and feel years after the cooking stopped.

For myself, the only thing stronger is my memory of the sofa in my grandmother's living room. Old, slightly worn, not quite a perfect fit for it's place, but oh so comfy, and maybe not really for the feel of the darned old thing, but for the sleep it invited. As Mikage finds comfort in the heat of the teapot, I couldn't help but remember the safety of that sofa and the assurance that I could sleep there basked in the love of those protecting me.

While it might be argued that this, and much of Yoshimoto's writing is a bit simple, and that she can be even more frustrating that Haruki Murakami, who she shares some stylistic talent with, however, her books bring forth, from me, and I suspect many of her readers, that warmth that I left behind on my grandmother' sofa.

A sweet, simple, but memorable little story.