Unfortunately, the endearing characters and amusing scenes in Ms. "Moonlight Shadow," the less satisfying story that fills out this volume, tells of a mysterious stranger who leads the young woman narrator - her voice sounds exactly like that of Mikage Sakurai - to a reunion with her deceased boyfriend. She is befriended by a young man, Yuichi Tanabe, and his glamorous transsexual "mother," Eriko, and in this household finds some peace - at least for a time. "I love even incredibly dirty kitchens to distraction - vegetable droppings all over the floor, so dirty your slippers turn black on the bottom." Left alone in the world when her grandmother dies, Mikage finds that her saddest moods are dispelled by the chance to scrub a refrigerator or even glimpse a busy kitchen from the window of a bus. "The place I like best in this world is the kitchen," Mikage announces in the very first line. Yoshimoto was all of 24 years old when "Kitchen" was published in Japan in 1988 with its kooky young woman protagonist, Mikage Sakurai, the novel - a best seller that is now in its 57th printing - clearly has spoken to the author's contemporaries. Yet today, though still small by American standards and still largely the domain of women, kitchens are the showcases of Japanese consumer affluence.īanana Yoshimoto's first novel evokes this modern opulence even in its title, which uses the trendy English loan-word kitchin rather than the Japanese term, daidokoro. $14.95.Ī JAPANESE maxim warns that "A gentleman does not go near a kitchen." Traditionally a cramped, dingy place - even in an otherwise well-appointed home - the old-fashioned kitchen revealed the low status of the women who spent much of their time there. In a whimsical style that recalls the early Marguerite Duras, Kitchen and its companion story, Moonlight Shadow, are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a very special writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul.KITCHEN By Banana Yoshimoto. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart.
Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend, Yoichi, and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father), Eriko. Mikage, the heroine, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Kitchen is an enchantingly original book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan.
With the publication of Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, the literary world realized that Yoshimoto was a young writer of enduring talent whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature.
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