Kitchen

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One day, Eriko is gracefully watering the plants and telling Mikage about the time when Yuichi’s biological mother died. Eriko tells Mikage that life can be very hard, but those who never suffer can never understand joy. Mikage is comforted by Eriko’s words and thinks to herself that she’ll experience many moments of pain in her life but knows that she’ll keep going and won’t let her spirit be broken. I thoroughly agree with her and that magical quality transforms what could have been a rather banal book into a great one. 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. Such interesting characters are to be found in this rather philosophical work, individuals in fact who I continued to think about after I finished the book.

The hybrid narrative cares about ephemeral beauty in nature and humans, including sudden disasters. In Kitchen, the first story, Kitchen, has three characters, who are actually four if we count the deceased grandmother who still lives on in the admiration and love in the narration by the other characters. From this introduction, Mikage, the first-person narrator immediately shows signs of her incoming disastrous events. Placing these events at the beginning of the story leads the reader to a sad and miserable atmosphere. All the following events, which are mostly successive disasters, force Mikage to cope with them and become more mature. In addition, there are innumerable turns of phrase that are unforgettable but I particularly liked:Although Kitchen superficially tells the story of a father, or mother, who loves their child, it actually aims to warn that an overwhelming culture built around labor and consumerism that blindly goes after material needs will produce a generation of deformed people with no humanity. Having a passion for work is always a valuable quality, but working overtime to just make ends meet is abnormal. Banana is probably among the first novelists to determine this absurdity in the work mindset. It is such a hurtful warning when Eriko—the mother—is suddenly murdered by “a crazy man who was obsessed with her and killed her” (Banana, 1993, p. 44). It turns out that even when a person decides to change his gender to obtain love and live a peaceful life, there will be someone who disturbs this tranquility. This world is truly not peaceful, full of darkness and disasters. In Kitchen, a young Japanese woman named Mikage Sakurai struggles to overcome the death of her grandmother. She gradually grows close to one of her grandmother's friends, Yuichi, from a flower shop and ends up staying with him and his transgender mother, Eriko. During her stay, she develops affection for Yuichi and Eriko, almost becoming part of their family. However, she moves out after six months as she finds a new job as a culinary teacher's assistant. When she finds that Eriko was murdered, she tries to support Yuichi through the difficult time, and realises that Yuichi is probably in love with her. Reluctant to face her own feelings for him, she goes away to Izu for a work assignment, while Yuichi stays in a guest-house. However, after going to a restaurant to eat katsudon, she realises she wants to bring it to Yuichi. She goes to Yuichi’s guest-house and sneaks inside his room in the middle of the night to bring him katsudon. There Mikage tells him she doesn’t want to lose him and proposes to build a new life together. 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.

if a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I'm grateful for it. Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated - defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable. One of the many things I love about goodreads is that a person is able to see what other “friends” think about a novel before committing oneself to reading it. I would have never read KITCHEN had I not seen that Mariel, Oriana, and Jason Pettus, three of my friends, all thought highly of this slim book.

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With the postmodernist inclusive approach, Banana uses traditional perspectives to deal with the issue of human loneliness and emptiness in life. Two aspects of traditionalism can be divided separately for the sake of showing a clearer picture of her interpretation: life’s impermanence and life/nature’s blessing. “Impermanence” (mujō 無常) of life: loneliness and sudden death The hybrid narrative proved to be very attractive to readers. The signs in Kitchen, although used in a hesitant fashion according to postmodernism, are always multimeaningful. The readers can read on the surface of the text that there is a young couple who are finding out about each other to prepare for their possible marriage. However, at a deeper layer of meaning, one can find that the author uses love as a healing process for the painful and scary trauma in the subconsciousness of the Japanese. In a deeper sense, we can realize that it is an effort to escape the loss and loneliness of humanity. Due to the complexity of the layers of metaphor, Banana’s stories seem to barely have any connection, which, in fact, is untrue. Its complexity reaches an advanced level at which the characters themselves can produce different meanings as readers reinterpret and try to relate them to their personal lives. The storyline is written in a postmodernist style, and there are few details to create dramatic conflicts such as in older forms of narrative found in Akutagawa or Mishima’s fiction. However, this does not mean that this story has no conflict. This narrative still maintains conflicts; they appear in the depth of cultural meaning instead of being expressed explicitly, creating forever internal conversations and making the “meanings” of the story change according to how the readers interpret it at different times. Mensen bezwijken niet onder omstandigheden en krachten van buitenaf, ze worden van binnenuit verslagen, dacht ik uit de grond van mijn hart

The hybrid narrative expresses the hesitation in artistic thinking between tradition and postmodernism. In Kitchen, the female writer interweaves traditional elements in postmodernity and vice versa. She points out that loneliness, disaster, the multiplicity of life, and the desire to escape, which existed long before, are now exploding in the postmodern era. People need to seriously consider their behavior so that life is not destroyed by human greed and carelessness. There's something about Japanese writers. They have the unparalleled ability of transforming an extremely ordinary scene from our everyday mundane lives into something magical and other-worldly.I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit,’ Eriko tells Mikage, ‘ It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me.’ Life will always be hard, but finding love and happiness must still go on and we must always get up and keep going. ‘ Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated - defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable.’