Kitchen

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When I finished this tale, I thought of love won and then lost, tragedy, pain, and suffering that I had just encountered but then beauty, hope and optimism are also there. What a marvellous mix. The reader is fully convinced by this hybrid narrative. The feminine “graceful mystery” seems to create an immeasurable appeal to the story. The narrator uses a romantic reference traditional to Eastern culture, the seventh day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar, which is called Tanabata (たなばた) in Japanese culture. On this date, the deities Orihime and Hikoboshi reunite on the Milky Way. Whoever lives in this cultural field realizes that any separations of love have their limits and any love, no matter how difficult and distant, can be reunited, even in a moment. It seems that this humanist philosophy inspired Banana to create her tragic love story. Each sentence in Moonlight Shadow is covered with sadness for this compassionate love story. There is a self-awareness about one’s own tragic fate. However, then, their fates change, and at the moment when the dimensions of their lives shift, as Urara says, the tinkling sound of the bell echoes, followed by the image of Hitoshi on the other side of the river. This sequence saddens both Satsuki and the readers. They meet at the time a natural love should come to an end, but they can promptly exchange gestures and images of love. In Urara’s words, they can say farewell to each other kindly to move on in isolated spaces of life and death. Using tradition to clarify the problems of reality, Banana’s hybrid narrative both reveals the fragility of human life and shows people’s approaches and attitudes toward disaster. I could continue passing on the knowledge this book so kindly imparted on me, but by then I’d have recited the whole thing. Perhaps it’s best for me to stop, and for you to discover it for yourself.

Most editions also include a novella entitled Moonlight Shadow, which is also a tragedy dealing with loss and love. Can cooking help you cope with the despondency you feel from loss? I’m not talking about wolfing down garlic mashed potatoes from a pan; I’m talking about a multi-course gourmet meal that you are willing to toss out if it’s not perfect and start all over again. That’s the theme of Kitchen. Our main character is a twentyish-woman who lost her father at an early age and then her mother. She went to live with grandparents but her grandfather died, and then her grandmother, and now she has no living relatives. I didn't like this book. It comprises a novella (Kitchen) and short story (Moonlight Shadow), but I'm not sure how much is the book's fault, and how much can be attributed to being set in an unfamiliar culture (Japanese teens/twenties), possibly bad translation, and that although the atmosphere is contemporary, it was actually written and set nearly 30 years ago.From this cultural archetype, the readers may understand Banana’s intentions when she placed two stories in her book (the stories of Mikage-Yuichi and Satsuki-Hitoshi), which is formally in three parts (Part I includes Kitchen and Full Moon, while part II is Moonlight Shadow). The three short stories are about a grandmother who dies because of her old age, a mother who dies due to a crazy man with an obsession, and a lover who dies due to a traffic accident. Instead of making the reader feel sympathetic to the survivors of these losses, these details lead to the impression that these people live on with their own situations. From a comparative perspective, we can view this as if it is an interior power of a hybrid narrative that is dominated by the impermanence of life. 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.

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 Lost in Translation – what planet was everyone else on? This was a snoozefest. If you haven’t seen it, count yourself fortunate Loneliness is the debt that Banana’s characters always carry. After her grandmother’s death, Mikage feels nothing. She does not know how to act and does not feel like she can determine what to do. Her thoughts are whirling in her head to such an extent that one day, after waking up, she observes that at some point a person will find no living relatives left, which is a bitter definition of happiness for her: “What I mean by ‘their happiness’ is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are truly, all of us, alone” (Banana, 1993, p. 59). The world surrounding Mikage seems to melt all away. Mensen bezwijken niet onder omstandigheden en krachten van buitenaf, ze worden van binnenuit verslagen, dacht ik uit de grond van mijn hart

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Wong C (2016) Banana Yoshimoto’s improbable literary journey from waitress to writer. https://theculturetrip.com. Accessed 15 Jan 2022 Kitchen is definitely not the most ingeniously narrated tale ever. Rather it suffers from the monotony of brief, simple sentences that may not sit well with some readers who love eloquence.