Kitchen

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Chika—A loyal employee who inherited the gay nightclub from Eriko and helps the relationship between Mikage and Yuichi. On the deserted bridge, with the city misted over by the blue haze of dawn, my eyes absently followed the white embankment that continued on to who knows where. I rested, enveloped by the sound of the current." Sometimes, no matter how intensely I would be staring at him, I would have the feeling that Hitoshi wasn’t there” (p. 111). How does Yoshimoto craft this elegant, eerie tale? What early hints does she drop that we are on the edge of a paranormal experience? The second story of Kitchen is Full Moon, which also centers around Yuichi and Mikage. The opening informs the readers of another disaster, the death of mother Eriko. Mikage at this time has overcome her loss, left Yuichi’s house, and lived on her own; Yuichi takes a turn at coping with loss. The father–mother died. The two parts of the book start off with death. Banana seems to demonstrate vulnerable cases that are very Japanese. From the traditional period to the present day, sudden deaths are mainly caused by detrimental earthquakes and tsunamis; if not for these two reasons, it is the two atomic bombs that destroyed two cities in Japan.

Oniki Y (1996) A brief overview of J-Pop fiction. http://jpop.com/feature/02jfiction/yoshimoto/html. Accessed 8 Jan 2022 In the first part of Kitchen an orphan needs to leave her home. She is taken in by a boy and his trans parent, who works in clubs and bars. Loneliness and loss play major parts, and overall I got strong Tokyo Godfather vibes, in the sense that Banana Yoshimoto presents us a story of outcasts bonding together in a rather inhospitable, normative world. Banana also seems to fight against postmodernism. Somehow, she tries to preserve historical memory. Her hybrid narrative reaches beyond postmodernism. Butler wrote, “Frederic Jameson points to a defining sense of the postmodern as ‘the disappearance of a sense of history’ in the culture, a pervasive depthlessness, a ‘perpetual present’ in which the memory of tradition is gone” (Butler, 2002, p. 110). In Kitchen, Japanese tradition is still alive. Disasters: past and present I felt that I was the only person alive and moving in a world brought to a stop. Houses always feel like that after someone has died."Although Banana humbly claims to write for “entertainment”, the issues in Banana’s works are essential for Japanese young people. These are “the exhaustion of young Japanese in modern Japan” and “the way in which terrible experiences shape a person’s life” (Lee, 2014). Critics tend to compare Banana with Haruki Murakami due to their common postmodern style. Fuminobu Murakami analyzed the difference between them, noting that if Haruki Murakami’s “early works try to keep a sense of detachment from others… in contrast, Yoshimoto Banana’s work attempts to discover the difference in totality or commonness in individuality by changing the form of desire” (Fuminobu, 2005, p. 58). We agree with Fuminobu that inclusiveness is one of the foundations of Banana’s hybrid narrative.

The essence of the hybrid narrative is “saying more from less”. That is, from a certain limited number of words, readers can create many layers of meaning in the text. The writer is very careful with words and considers how readers can be called to the possibility of co-creation. With that in mind, the images in Banana’s fiction are highly symbolic.If this is the much celebrated minimalist prose that won so many awards, I dread the thought of her attempt at detailed long fiction. Maybe YAs would relate to the characters better than I did (I have no idea), but I'd be reluctant to recommend it to them because of the next problem... 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." The sudden death of loved ones is a unifying aspect of both stories. They all find awkward support from each other, and one finds solace in kitchens and food, another in jogging (and the river that had divided them, been their meeting place, and was ultimately where they were separated for ever). Mikage becomes rooted in the kitchen. It becomes her compass by which she compares all homes that she has ever entered. Upon arriving, she takes over cooking for Yuichi and his mother Eriko, a transvestite who runs an all night club. Both lead busy lives and emit positive energy, encouraging Mikage to engage in her newfound passion of cooking. The three make up a new family unit until Mikage can recover from all the death around her.