Kitchen

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During the time that Mikage spends with Eriko and her son, Yuichi, the latter who appeared to be a quiet unassuming person, was slowly transformed into a soul-mate of Mikage which rather stunned her. She felt he knew her very soul. She graduated from Nihon University's Art College, majoring in Literature. During that time, she took the pseudonym "Banana" after her love of banana flowers, a name she recognizes as both "cute" and "purposefully androgynous."

Silent as they might be, they understood their partner's feelings as if they were communicating with one another through an invisible telephone.

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Two broken people together don’t make a whole necessarily and sometimes the narrative steers into overly sweet territory. Still the katsu don scene is *chefs kiss*, and would work perfectly in an anime. Wherever he went, Hitoshi always had a little bell with him, attached to the case he kept his bus pass in. Even though it was just a trinket, something I gave him before we were in love, it was destined to remain at his side until the last. La elegancia y sensibilidad niponas que admiro (Soseki, Yanizaki…) también las encuentro en Yosimoto. Su lenguaje es más actual, más directo y dialogado, pero mantiene cierta calidez, cadencia, dulzura y melancolía que me agradan. Un lenguaje sencillo, repleto de detalles de la vida cotidiana de la gente corriente, que creo aporta modernidad y frescura de autora joven al tono más tradicional de muchos de los autores japoneses. If you know you have six months to live, you’d be mad to wish away an hour. So why do we find ourselves wishing away days, even the bad ones? Because we so often refuse to believe that life ends. That we don’t just go on living. And this unavoidable truth is at the heart of Kitchen.

Kitchen and its accompanying story Moonlight Shadow comprise the first novella by award winning Japanese novelist Banana Yoshimoto. Both stories are told through the eyes of young women grieving following the death of a loved one, and deal with how that death plays a profound role in relationships going forward. Told in straight forward prose leaving nothing to chance, Yoshimoto tells two elegant stories. Japanese writers have a tradition of using dreams in narratives. Kawabata is an excellent master in this field. In The Sound of The Mountain, Kawabata lets Shingo, the old man, drowned in dreams. Every dream reminds him of a painful and regretful memory. In the newer generation of writers, both Murakami and Banana applied this method to reinforce the sense of mystery and vagueness in their stories. According to Freud, dreams are a gateway to our unconsciousness (Freud, 1913), where it is full of confusion, and people can only feel and intuit meaning rather than directly understand it. Dreams are a form of inclusiveness. Writers use dreams as though creating an underground scene lying below the main scene, a path that exists within other roads; no matter how professional the readers are, they can only guess a partial meaning. This vague narrative seems to be useful in creating more layers of meaning for the text. Because human dreams are always unpredictable, they have their roots somewhere deep in the dark realms of the soul.

That night, Yuichi drunkenly asks Mikage to stay for a while, and she asks him to explain if he needs her as a friend or a lover. Yuichi becomes despondent, saying he can’t think straight. Mikage discovers that Yuichi has been drinking himself to sleep every night and is in a dark place. Mikage imagines her and Yuichi climbing down a ladder to hell and realizes they can’t create a life together in this place of pain. Mikage becomes rooted in the kitchen. It becomes her compass by which she compares all homes that she has ever entered. Upon arriving, she takes over cooking for Yuichi and his mother Eriko, a transvestite who runs an all night club. Both lead busy lives and emit positive energy, encouraging Mikage to engage in her newfound passion of cooking. The three make up a new family unit until Mikage can recover from all the death around her. Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends. Perhaps Eriko's was only a minor kind of greatness, but her light was sorely missed. The sudden death of loved ones is a unifying aspect of both stories. They all find awkward support from each other, and one finds solace in kitchens and food, another in jogging (and the river that had divided them, been their meeting place, and was ultimately where they were separated for ever). Mikage Sakurai — Young Japanese woman. Main character. Struggling with the loss of her grandmother, who was her last surviving relative. She moves in with Yuichi Tanabe and Eriko Tanabe after her grandmother's death.