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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Twin Souls, November 28, 2006
This review is from: Kitchen (A Black cat book) (Paperback)
When my friend Mini sent me this gift, I wanted to immediately loose myself in the pages. I kept thinking it was truly a book I would want to read all in one sitting. I wanted to curl up on a couch and have my two cats sleeping at my feet and how right I was!
Once I started reading, (my husband sound asleep, cats sleeping at my feet, and the house deathly quiet except for the quiet humming of the refrigerator), I was immediately drawn into Mikage Sakurai's world.
Banana Yoshimoto uses luscious descriptions of food and kitchens. She describes people and places with such poignancy, you truly feel connected to them. Her thoughts burst onto each page with such honesty, you cannot help but fall in love with her innocent, charming writing style.
There are life and death issues in "Kitchen," we can all relate to. Her evocative writing will fill you with nostalgia for some of the cooking spaces you have perhaps left behind. Mostly I love my grandmother's kitchen best. The familiar creak of the oven door, the scooting sound of the chairs as we sit for a cup of tea, and the racks of cookbooks patiently waiting on the shelves. To imagine this kitchen without my grandmother was to imagine the entire house without a soul, without love, and without peace.
This is the emotion Mikage feels as she sleeps on the floor in her grandmother's kitchen. After loosing her grandmother, Mikage is lost, lonely and depressed. Her soul longs for the comfort of another soul who can understand her torment. She feels as though death surrounds her and she cannot escape.
For a time she finds happiness with Yuichi, who knew her grandmother well. He is living with his mother Eriko. Mikage goes to live with them until she can learn to handle her emotions.
Yuichi's girlfriend is not impressed, even though the relationship is purely platonic on the surface. Deep within their souls they are soon to become twins, bearing the scars of a common life experience.
Banana Yoshimoto's writing is fresh, real and casts a spell on the reader. I would have preferred the book to end on page 105. She does truly seize hold of your heart and I wanted the book to either end or I wanted one more chapter in place of Moonlight Shadow.
I found the second book did not belong with the beautiful yet somewhat unfinished story of Yuichi and Mikage. I think you will agree. In fact, I suggest that when you get to page 105, you close the book and come back later to read the second story.
I find her writing to be most inspirational when she has fully developed her characters. To truly appreciate this book, you must love food and kitchens, that is the magic.
~The Rebecca Review
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The First Banana, October 19, 2008
This review is from: Kitchen (A Black cat book) (Paperback)
A couple of years ago, while waiting outside my Japanese teacher's office, I was flipping through a book of Yoshimoto Banana's essays paying particular interest to one titled Oyogu hitobito or "People Swimming." It was a simple essay concerning a drunken Yoshimoto and an outing that she had with her drunken friends. Anyway, while I was reading the book, a visiting professor from the Kyoto University bent down, I was sitting on the floor at the time, and he asked me what I was reading. I showed him the book, he laughed, and said that Yoshimoto was only for young women.
Oh well.
I read my first Yoshimoto novella during the summer of 2001 between readings of a couple of Murakami Ryu's novels and, of course, that novel was Yoshimoto's debut novella Kitchen. Judging the book by its cover, I can definitely agree that it looks like it belongs in the "chick-lit" section, as do the rest of her novels, but I believe that Kitchen carries a bit more weight than say the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
Yoshimoto is often lumped with her fellow contemporary writer Murakami Haruki because their writings are quite well-received in the West and that they both weave fictional worlds threaded with magical realism. Another similarity is that the theme of death looms over the majority of their fictional landscapes. However, unlike the gloomy, Lacanian worlds of desire that Murakami weaves, one can never acquire again the object of one's desire because only substitutes for said desire exists, Yoshimoto's characters, although still in a melancholy state, are able to heal the emptiness left by the loss of a loved one.
Kitchen centers on Sakurai Mikage, a young woman whose grandmother has just passed away. In a state of shock, Mikage spends her nights sleeping in the kitchen next to the constantly humming fridge. However, the apartment is too big and too expensive for her to live in alone, so she must move out. Yet, because of her current situation she is unable to gain the motivation to do so. At that moment fate enters the story. One day while tidying up some magazines for recycling, Tanabe Yuichi rings her doorbell. A fellow student, Mikage knows little about Yuichi besides the fact that he works at a flower shop and that her grandmother favored him highly. Therefore, she is quite surprised when he asks her to move in with him and his mother... While quite shocked at first, Mikage soon falls in love with the Tanabes' couch and kitchen and slowly with Yuichi himself because she can see a lot of herself within him.
Yoshimoto's book is quite simple, but it does work its way into one's heart especially if one has recently gone through a loss similar to the one Mikage has suffered from. While she has written many more novels, novellas, short story collections, and essay collections, Kitchen, which she wrote at twenty-four, is still quite a slice of nostalgic sweetness enwrapped in almost dreamlike language. Easy to read in one sitting, and if liked or not, I believe that Kitchen should be read by most individuals interested in contemporary Japanese literature.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heartbreaking and beautiful, November 21, 2007
This review is from: Kitchen (A Black cat book) (Paperback)
From the first page you are effortlessly thrust into Yoshimoto's universe. Mikage, whose parents and grandfather passed on earlier in life, has been living with her grandmother. The start of the book is a bit after her grandmother has died,leaving her alone in her old house and in life. Yuichi, a friend of her grandmother's, appears to invite her to live with him and his mother. Mikage agrees and the three live together for a while in bliss. When tragedy hits this newly-formed 'family,' Mikage and Yuichi learn what it is to be absolutely alone.
Yoshimoto's characters are crisp and unique, each with their own good-humored twists. The situations these unfortunate characters are dragged into are unbelievabally tragic, yet their responses, both emotional and physical, remain believable and poignant. I started reading Kitchen around 1AM, wanting to read a few pages before sleeping. I didn't turn off the light until I'd read all of it, and my pillow was soaked with tears.
It is one of the best books I've ever read.
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