A review by sarahmatthews
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

emotional reflective sad medium-paced
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

Read in Braille

Pub. 1988, 160pp
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This book contains a novella, Kitchen, and a short story, Moonlight Shadow, a fact I hadn’t realised before starting due to my aversion to spoilers on blurbs so when the character names changed I was a little taken aback and had to do some rereading to get back on track! Both stories were beautifully written but the voices were not particularly different and Kitchen ends rather abruptly so it’s easy enough to be a bit derailed.

Both stories are about loss, loneliness and adapting to change and I found them very relatable though of course with very different personal circumstances. In Kitchen, 20 something Mikage narrates the story. She’s alone in the world now that her beloved grandmother, who raised her, has died and is taken in by Yuishi and his mother Eriko who run the local coffee shop her grandmother frequented. The relationship between the 3 of them is very touching. Mikage starts cooking to help out in the house and becomes obsessed with it as a way to distract herself:

“I washed and bleached dish towels, and while watching them go round and round in the dryer I realised that I had become calmer. Why do I love everything that has to do with kitchens so much? It’s strange. Perhaps because to me a kitchen represents some distant longing engraved on my soul. As I stood there, I seemed to be making a new start; something was coming back.”

In the second story Satsuki is grieving for her boyfriend who we learn very early on was killed in a car accident. There are elements of magical realism in this one which I really enjoyed and the writing is gorgeous:

“It was a noon enveloped in warm sunlight—it made you think that spring would truly come.A light wind was blowing soft and gentle on the face. The trees on the street were beginning to sprout their tiny infant leaves. A thin veil of mist hung distantly in the pale blue sky far beyond the city. 

Such blossoming delectability did not make my own insides flutter; it left me unmoved. The spring scenery could not enter my heart for love or money. It was merely reflected on the surface, like on a soap bubble. Everyone out on the streets” coming and going, looking happy, the light shining through their hair. Everything was breathing, increasingly sparkling, swathed in the gentle sunlight.The pretty scene was brimming with life, but my soul was pining for the desolate streets of winter and for that river at dawn.”
Kitchen is melancholy, soothing, sad and uplifting all at the same time, a brilliant read! Written in the 1980s it’s very progressive for it’s time though some of the terms seemed a little confused at times and not how we’d write about these issues now. 
Spoiler Alert: Eriko is a transsexual character which is written about sensitively in general for a book from the 1980s. I did notice a couple of points where transsexual and transvestite seemed to be confused and a line that appeared to insinuate that she decided to transition because her wife had died and she didn’t want to be a man any more. Obviously not what we’d want to read from a 2024 perspective. Overall though Eriko’s character is written very sympathetically.