Customer Reviews

Kitchen (A Black cat book)

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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

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.

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.

Kitchen is short. This isn't the kind of book you want to buy if you're looking for a long, long read in front of the fireplace. But it comes from someone's soul. It's gentle, kind, and pure.

I first read this book when I was in college. I picked it up on a lark at the college bookstore, knowing nothing about it, or Japan, or even that she won a lot of awards from this. I didn't know about all that. What I do know is that this book stayed with me, in my memory, for many years. Some of her writing reminds me of Hemmingway - short, but honest.

If you want to read a story that you'll always remember and be touched by, this is the book for you.

Kitchen has two stories within the cover. The first is the book's title, called Kitchen, and is a wonderful but sad story. Two people, the surviving members of two family, coming together to make a new family. It is a story of love, memories and, well, kitchens. The second, smaller story called Moonlight Shadow is a simple story about love lost, love remembered and, in the end, about moving on with one's life.

This is a really easy-to-read book that in very few pages let's you get to know the two main characters very well.
I found interesting how this two people who apparently had nothing to do with each other life puts them in a place where they become family .
I thought it was a lovely story.

The symbolism and emotion contained in the simple and unabashedly honest sentences of this novella--a translation, no less--impressed me deeply. For example, I can't think of a better way to describe the shock, emptiness, and psychological turmoil of a recently orphaned protagonist than the way Yoshimoto pens this passage:

"When my grandmother died the other day, I was taken by surprise. My family had steadily decreased one by one as the years went by, but when it suddenly dawned on me that I was all alone, everything before my eyes seemed false. The fact that time continued to pass in the usual way in this apartment where I grew up, even though now I was here all alone, amazed me. It was total science fiction. The blackness of the cosmos.

Three days after the funeral I was still in a daze. Steeped in a sadness so great I could barely cry, shuffling softly in gentle drowsiness, I pulled my futon into the deathly silent, gleaming kitchen. Wrapped in a blanket, like Linus, I slept. The hum of the refrigerator kept me from thinking of my loneliness. There, the long night came on in perfect peace, and morning came.

But . . . I just wanted to sleep under the stars.

I wanted to wake up in the morning light.

Aside from that, I just drifted, listless."

I love how Yoshimoto's prose never gets purple or heavy, but it lasts and lasts. The flavor of her words stay with me even now, a taste as sharp as the first day I encountered it, seven years ago...

"Kitchen" is not at all what I thought it was going to be. I was expecting a "magical kitchen" type story, similar to Like Water for Chocolate where the kitchen is a metaphor or someplace where things happen. I was expecting cooking and ingredients, detailed recipes, manic energy and that sort of thing.

Instead, I got three sweet novellas, only two of them directly connected, about unspoken emotions and complex relationships, with the kitchen playing little more role than the title. Much of my expectations came from Banana Yoshimoto's being hailed as a "young author" in Japan. A young author she may be, but she carries the legacy of Japanese literature and influence, and her subtle, underplayed emotions and simple/complex characters and plots are as alive and moving as Soseki.

There is magic here, of a quaint sort. And a ghost of two. A transvestite. But for the most part, this is the real world. The three novellas are connected in tone, if not in plot and characters. Each has its own charm, and each carries and ocean of depth beneath a seemingly shallow surface, which is the hallmark of Japanese literature. Love moves the world, but lovers must find and recognize each other.

Simply, a great book.

Kitchen took me by surprise. It is a thin book pairing two novellas, Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow, that both deal with loss and its aftermath. At first the author's light, easygoing style tricked me into underestimating my emotional involvement with the story. Kitchen begins when Mikage loses her beloved grandmother and is taken in by the Tanabe family she barely knows. From there, Mikage's relationship with the Tanabes--a transvestite nightclub owner and his son--deepens based on shared late-night meals and three lives brushing up against each other in a small Japanese apartment. I was unprepared for the turns this 100-page novella took and how anxiously I rushed to the end, hoping to see Mikage find respite from her overwhelming sense of being alone in the world.

The second novella, Moonlight Shadow, contrasted the reactions of Satsuki and Hiirage who both lost loved ones in a tragic accident. Satsuki deals with the loss of her beloved Hitoshi by eating less and less and jogging more and more. Hiirage copes with his double loss--his brother Hitoshi and his girlfriend Yumiko--by wearing Yumiko's old school uniform. Their attempts to console each other are awkward yet touching. As the novella built toward a promised surprise ending, I ached for them to find happiness as well.

"Kitchen" by Banana Yoshimoto is a fantastic read. I read it as part of an Introduction to Japanese Culture class at MIT, and I must say it was one of the most entertaining reads I've had to do for a class. The world created by Yoshimoto is mysterious and thrilling. An excellent work of fiction, "Kitchen" tells the a story that is easy to read, but at the same time very profound. "Kitchen" tells the sad story of two young people and how after losing their families they come together to support each other. The story is written in a way that allows you to submerge yourself into it as deep as you want, giving you the amount of details about each scene that allows you to fully understand the setting and what is happening.

Banana Yoshimoto's "Kitchen" is a book that must be read by anyone looking for an excellent fiction book, and is a must read for anyone interested in Japan and Japanese culture. Although it might not teach you directly about Japanese culture, the fact that this book has sold millions of copies in Japan is something that will make you wonder what it is about it that the Japanese found so appealing.