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Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto: a book review
After reading Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen, I had the strange feeling that I had travelled somewhere for a very long, long time and yet I had not gone very far at all.Kitchen is a morose but revealing journey towards love, loss, death, and the in evitable state of isolation that we all must experience. However bleak this reality may be though, there is always the warm comfort of kitchens and food and cooking. The novella's musings on the kitchen provide instances of warmth, life, satisfaction and familiarity in an otherwise cold and solitary world.
Kitchen follows the story of a young Japanese woman named Mikage Sakurai. Mikage's grandmother--the one blood relative that she had and the one person who comforted her and took care of her--has just died. Touched by her loss and subsequent loneliness, Yuichi Tanabe, a young man who worked part-time at the flower shop that Mikage's grandmother visited so often, offers his apartment for Mikage to stay in while she recovers from her grandmother's death. What ensues are several negotiations between Mikage and Yuichi of love, friendship, death and honest y with one's self. Yuichi's transsexual mother Eriko is perhaps one of the most self-aware characters in the story, and Mikage and Yuichi's development are shaped by the strength of such characters in the novella.
Yoshimoto's writing style is fluid, simple and mesmerizing. Her descriptions of urban Tokyo are vivid and yet set in a deep melancholy, "I watched the rows of windows in the tall building across the street from the bus stop, suspended, emitting a pretty blue light. The people were moving behind those windows, the elevators going up and down, all of it, sparkling silently, seemed to melt in the half darkness." (p.33) This dream-like state throughout the novella is almost imaginary and unreal, creating voyeuristic scenes that mimic images in a film or a photograph.
Kitchen, while at times long and awkward in the translation, provided for me a poignant look at one woman's struggle with death, loneliness, friendship and love. It re-examines some of those basic needs that we tend to take for granted -- shelter, a sense of community/family, self-reliance, and of course, food!
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