Kitchen

by Banana Yoshimoto

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TW: Death, transphobia, murder, hate crime, illness

At 152 pages, Kitchen is a compact book split into two stories: ‘Kitchen’ and ‘Moonlight Shadow'. 

Kitchen, the first story of the book, lingers between the lines of grief and finding new footing without our loved ones. It’s relatively straightforward storywise. Mikage is taken in by a friend and his mother, Yoichi and Eriko, when the last of her family dies. They all lead busy lives but find the time to meet in their kitchen and form a family as Mikage wades through her grief.

In the book, there are several outdated gendered terms and instances used. There is violence against a trans person, please check the trigger warnings. Although Eriko is treated with affection by the characters, she is misgendered and talked about in offensive language. All this is not a one-off incident and shadows the whole story. She is such a wonderful character and, without going into details, used as a catalyst between Yoichi and Mikage.

Moonlight Shadow, the second and shorter story follows similar themes. Satsuki’s boyfriend has died in a car accident. Her boyfriend’s brother, Hiiragi’s girlfriend also died in the same accident. The two left come together to work through their grief, shared and seperate.

This felt more nuanced and earnest in its approach. I connected more to the characters and, even though it was shorter, felt that it examined the interconnections between characters more fully.

This review by the Boston Herald excited me to read in the first place: “Kitchen is cool, gentle, and neat, even within the most chaotic of life crises… This is a modern-day fable… [that] leaves a lingering taste for more.” But in the end I feel that this quote doesn’t quite encapsulate the read. As my first Yoshimoto book, after seeing and hearing about her everything, I’m sad to say I’m disappointed.

Further reading:

Another book by a Japanese author I think takes an interesting look at grief would be If Cats Disappeared From the World by Genki Kawamura.

Quotes:

“You might come to fear the next time you get a cold; it will be as bad as this, but if you just hold steady, it won’t be. For the rest of your life. That’s how it works. You could take the negative view and live in fear: Will it happen again? But it won’t hurt so much if you just accept it as a part of life.”

“In retrospect I realise that fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung.”