Kitchen

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Another: "Why do I love everything that has to do with kitchens so much?... a kitchen represents some distant longing engraved on my soul." Does anyone think like that? (And it doesn't answer the question anyway.) And so here we have a love story. But one that reads like a puppet show, with Mikage tied to death’s right hand, and Yuichi to his left. For many reasons deeply rooted in social structure, politics and laws, Shinto and Buddhist traditions, and myriad other factors, Japan as a culture places deep and sacred value in death. Henshall KG (2012) A history of Japan: from stone age to superpower, 3rd edn. Palgrave Macmillan, New York Maybe this is the main idea that Japanese writers aim for. Getting accustomed to one’s own new situation is the foremost rule of survival. The Japanese people are born in a land filled with death, so they have developed their strangely brave and patient characteristics. The same applies to Banana. While writing about disasters and accidents, she is fully aware of the spirit of the Japanese—they are ready to face their challenges calmly. This is how Banana tells the rest of humanity that the Japanese can overcome any injury. However, how do they overcome them? And if so, are they the winner in all cases? One young man takes to wearing his dead girlfriend's sailor-suit school uniform. He finds that comforting (and no one would think it odd for a girl to wear a boyfriend's jumper); a female friend is "mortified" to be seen with him, but other girls find it attractive because they assume it means he understands women. Not exactly enlightened views, but plausible, perhaps. However, they're not challenged, which tacitly condones them.

Chika—A loyal employee who inherited the gay nightclub from Eriko and helps the relationship between Mikage and Yuichi. In Freud’s theory, deep in the unconsciousness, artists have been affected by this kind of living environment, especially in the form of mental trauma. Maybe when writing, Banana did not think of these disasters, but she unconsciously cannot escape from the enchanting thought of death while writing her fiction. “Loneliness” and “sudden death” are similar to Japanese archetypes in this mindset. This fact can be suggested by the works of many famous writers from this nation known for its cherry blossom, from Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Junichiro Tanizaki, Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, and Yasunari Kawabata to Haruki Murakami. They all write about disasters that are sudden and inevitable, that have barely understood causes or that are unpredictable. Loneliness is the debt that Banana’s characters always carry. After her grandmother’s death, Mikage feels nothing. She does not know how to act and does not feel like she can determine what to do. Her thoughts are whirling in her head to such an extent that one day, after waking up, she observes that at some point a person will find no living relatives left, which is a bitter definition of happiness for her: “What I mean by ‘their happiness’ is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are truly, all of us, alone” (Banana, 1993, p. 59). The world surrounding Mikage seems to melt all away. She graduated from Nihon University's Art College, majoring in Literature. During that time, she took the pseudonym "Banana" after her love of banana flowers, a name she recognizes as both "cute" and "purposefully androgynous."

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The person bearing a double life of the responsibilities of both father and mother receives a tragic and unfair death after dedicating their whole life to raising a child. Yuichi thus becomes a brave, cool, and sentimental man. He sympathizes with Mikage’s grandmother who loves flowers, an ephemeral beauty. Yuichi admires her. From their grandmother, Yuichi has a chance to meet Mikage, a daring and beautiful girl. Much like Yuichi, she is also an independent spirit and supports herself independently. While having a good and respectful relationship with the grandmother, Yuichi develops feelings for Mikage and wants to share some of his responsibilities with her. Traditional and postmodern elements are gradually being combined here. The Japanese tradition promotes compassion among people in the same situation (we can see that in Akutagawa’s Kappa). However, the relationship between Yuichi and Mikage also has an LGBT theme: both of them seem uninterested in sex. Banana focuses on the ability to endure and implicitly asserts that suffering knows no gender. Biological gender identities are the two sides of the same earthly pain, yin, and yang. With this thought, readers can imagine Banana’s “ontology of postmodernism” (McHale, 2004, p. 26).

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto is divided into two stories of love, loss, and hope. It’s one of the most breath-taking pieces of literature I’ve read. The stories’ elegant simplicity feels like a breeze of cold air that can hurt, numb, and refresh. There’s also an element in the writing that feels almost evanescent, a certain transparency that is pure honesty. I wasn’t instantly spell-binded as you might think. It took a while, but when it did, it felt right. Everything was perfectly clear, like looking into a small pond seeing your own reflection and washing your face with its cold clear water. When I finished this tale, I thought of love won and then lost, tragedy, pain, and suffering that I had just encountered but then beauty, hope and optimism are also there. What a marvellous mix.Researching early 20 th-century Japanese writers such as Hayashi Fumiko (1903–1951) and Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951), Donald Keene wrote, “The women writers of the 1930s and later, though strikingly different in their interests and modes of expression, shared many frustrations. Regardless of the nature of their books, these women were often known more for their love life than for their criticisms of society or the beauty of their prose styles” (Keene, 1987, p. 1114). To Banana, this statement is no longer true. While Banana still tells compelling love stories, social problems in her hybrid writing have brought a new face to Japanese women’s literature. Creating characters who share the same situation makes Banana’s work always in-depth and leads readers to suspect a persistent, obsessive, and unending event might happen next. We know about the younger brother, Hiiragi, from the earlier story. Now, we learn that Urara also bears the same loss. It is just that the narrator does not reveal what Urara suffers from. We can guess from the conversations between Satsuki and Urara that Urara comes to the river to try for a chance to bid farewell to her friend who suddenly died. Satsuki and Urara both suffer from this loss of a person close to them, so it is easy for them to empathize. From the reader’s perspective, these two characters have a supportive role for each other: Satsuki’s story is clearly in traditionalism while Urara’s is more postmodern, which is presented with only a few clues for the reader to draw inferences. This narrative creates more mysterious tension, evocative of a miraculous fairytale, cause in part by the vagueness of their current lives. The postmodernist society, which obtains its symbol from the car accident, can end everything to create a tragedy for couples such as those in this story. However, in the end, it can never end their relationship, their love, and their interaction, even in the form of a dream. It is the miracle of life. Sotaro — Mikage's Ex Boyfriend. Broke up with Mikage when her grandmother became ill and his reasoning was that she was hard to keep up with. Banana Y (2022) FAQ in the interviews. http://www.yoshimotobanana.com/question_e/ Accessed 3 Feb 2022

Both stories have a dash of this. In the first, it's a dream that might be a premonition; in the second, there's an ethereal character who (maybe) shows another character a little gap in time. Heaps of praise are to be showered on Yoshimoto for not only featuring a transgender character (especially in a novella written in 1988), but even more so for the way in which Eriko is not defined by being transgender, but rather celebrated for her femininity and the love she has for her son. Wherever he went, Hitoshi always had a little bell with him, attached to the case he kept his bus pass in. Even though it was just a trinket, something I gave him before we were in love, it was destined to remain at his side until the last. 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. A man walking along a river-bank on a misty April morning may appear to our senses as an ethereal being, barely human, on the path to deliverance and self-discovery. I didn't like this book. It comprises a novella (Kitchen) and short story (Moonlight Shadow), but I'm not sure how much is the book's fault, and how much can be attributed to being set in an unfamiliar culture (Japanese teens/twenties), possibly bad translation, and that although the atmosphere is contemporary, it was actually written and set nearly 30 years ago.Telkens als ik met hem had afgesproken gebeurde hetzelfde: dan werd ik verdrietig omdat ik was wie ik was Mensen bezwijken niet onder omstandigheden en krachten van buitenaf, ze worden van binnenuit verslagen, dacht ik uit de grond van mijn hart Modernists view the world in binary, divided opposition, whereas postmodernists view the world as a unity of oppositions. With modernism, men are men, and women are women; there is no such thing as a woman living with a male biological nature. Banana’s postmodern vision offers a unique “hybridity” to her character’s image. Eriko/Yuji is a genderfluid character. Banana uses them to defy traditional notions of masculinity, affirming the role of women. This character’s gender identity manifests just how people freely express their gender. However, the death of Eriko/Yuji, on the one hand, shows the traditional Japanese conception of ephemeral beauty, expressed by authors such as Kawabata or Mishima; on the other hand, the moment represents the fierceness of modernist views against the genderfluidity of postmodernism. Bondanella P (1997) Umberto eco and the open text: semiotics, fiction, popular culture. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge When Mikage enters Yuichi’s apartment, she is drawn to the kitchen full of plates, pots, and pans, and sinks into the massive, soft sofa. Mikage is dazzled by Eriko’s beauty and amazed when Yuichi explains that “[Eriko] is a man.” Eriko was actually Yuichi’s biological father, but after Yuichi’s biological mother died of cancer when Yuichi was a baby, Eriko decided to become a woman, open a nightclub, and raise Yuichi as his mother. It seems perfectly natural to Yuichi to see Eriko as his mother as she’s so feminine. Mikage feels strangely comfortable in their apartment and agrees to stay, sleeping on the giant sofa in the kitchen, next to a window framing a dark sky dotted with stars. Mikage stays with Yuichi and Eriko for several months, falling into an easy rhythm of working part-time and tending to the house. She cooks for Eriko and Yuichi often and they enjoy sharing meals together. Eriko is very motherly towards Mikage, which warms Mikage’s heart.