Kitchen

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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. The happy lives of the four are short. The car accident takes Hiiragi and Satsuki’s lovers away suddenly. Therefore, they seem to yearn for an opportunity for the last good-bye, somehow, between the living and the dead realms. Belief in the grace of life/nature has kept them hopeful. The encounter with Urara on the bridge is similar to fate. Urara plays the role of a mysterious prophet. She can understand Satsuki’s deepest thoughts, know Satsuki’s phone number based on her intuition, figure out there will be a once-in-a-blue-moon event on this bridge, and so on. Their first conversation is such a surprise for Satsuki because it is as if Urara knows everything about her already. Satsuki is so overcome that she cannot react to the requests and conclusions about a miraculous meeting with someone that can only happen once in a hundred years. Mikage the orphan is lonely, having no one to lean on and no motivation to live on. At that time, her life is filled with emptiness. While losing her will to live, a “prince” Yuichi appears. The flow of the plot appears to be similar to a fairytale set in a peaceful kitchen. Life/nature’s blessing: Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow 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.

Yuji Oniki made an interesting observation: “Reading a Yoshimoto story is a lot like watching a Japanese TV commercial” (Oniki, 1996). This idea points out hybridity in Banana’s fiction. The hybrid narrative is related not only to postmodernism but also to traditional beauty and to the shojo culture that Carl Cassegård once interpreted. Summarizing Treat, he wrote, “Approaching her work through a discussion of shojo culture or ‘cute culture’ in Japan—the popular culture of young girls centered on the supreme value of cuteness—John W. Treat emphasizes the narcissistic and desexualized nature of this culture” (Cassegård, 2007, p. 76). 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. After a particularly egregious section of stilted psychobabble, one character says, "What kind of talk is that? Sounds like it was translated from English." I guess the author is aware of how clunky it is. Odd.

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Some love stories are also told in Banana’s fiction. Unlike modern Japanese writers such as Jun’ichirō Tanizaki or Yasunari Kawabata, Banana did not write with the intention of fighting for feminism. This has its historical reasons: “Today, ‘love marriages are more common than the arranged kind […]. Writers like Yoshimoto Banana have a huge following of young readers who understand love quite differently than their grandparents did” (Goossen, 1997, p. xxiv). She writes about something beyond women’s rights: transgender identities and the lost way of women in a postindustrial society when they owned their rights. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the other Marukami guy – I LOVED this because it was so easy to parody and gave me my top scoring review (While I was reading it was a different story) The weaknesses here made me cross. Anyone concerned with LGBTQ issues (especially trans ones) may feel the urge to throw this book at the wall. One has to remember it's a different culture, a generation ago, but the trouble is, it doesn't feel like a historical novel. Banana creates a hybrid first-person narrator. These people play two roles: following the lives outside and observing themselves. “I” compels the readers by being frank with both themselves and their surroundings. Therefore, this narrative always creates credibility and consistency in Banana’s fiction and urges audiences to look at things from different perspectives. A certain tension is created in narrative parts: “The faint colors of his form, even the heat of the tears running down my cheeks: I desperately struggled to memorize it all. The arching lines described by his arm remained, like an afterimage, suspended in the air” (Banana, 1993, p. 146). The small happiness of Tsugumi’s little family is similar to a kitchen that is always unstable. The moments they spend together consistently bear a likelihood of uncertainty and farewell. Even the father, who only meets his daughter, offers lessons that sometimes show his uncertain ego or feelings about the past. The daughter’s ego, in parallel with the “I” of the narrator, has reflected a sweet paternal love while sketching the uncertain perspective of unpredictable things in the future. Banana’s works, even though minimalist in the train of thought, are always warm and humane. Wong writes, “She is hence recognized as a ‘Healing-Kei’ writer—one who brings positivity, love, and warmth to readers” (Wong, 2016). Maybe this is the way Banana hopes her readers practice creating happiness for themselves and society.

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? 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.I was the sword in the scabbard firmly attached at Mikage’s side. I was her friend, her alter ego and champion in her quest to re-find herself, in fact her soul. I would protect her at all cost. If you know you have six months to live, you’d be mad to wish away an hour. So why do we find ourselves wishing away days, even the bad ones? Because we so often refuse to believe that life ends. That we don’t just go on living. And this unavoidable truth is at the heart of Kitchen. Banana Y (2022) FAQ in the interviews. http://www.yoshimotobanana.com/question_e/ Accessed 3 Feb 2022 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.

During the time that Mikage spends with Eriko and her son, Yuichi, the latter who appeared to be a quiet unassuming person, was slowly transformed into a soul-mate of Mikage which rather stunned her. She felt he knew her very soul. Banana tells the story of a kitchen, but the main idea is about the overcoming of loneliness and unhappiness in the postmodern era, where humans may even be absolutely free but still have their own troubles. Kitchen is not a very romantic setting for a love story in the unconsciousness of many Eastern cultures, especially the Vietnamese and Japanese. It is a romantic story between a couple who fall in love or seem to be as such. In short, they are highly likely to develop feelings for each other. They both love the kitchen, not just one that is clean but also whichever one has basic functions, even when it does not seem that clean. Two lonely people meet in a lonely kitchen. This kind of “Banana loneliness” seems to represent the Japanese people who view life as so meaningless that all effort to put their life together appears to be futile act. Her admittance of that causes her so much pain because she knows that naiveté is dangerous, but the other side of this is freedom. Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge, understanding, is freedom. Yet, with all of that knowledge, in her selflessness she still hopes to avoid others feeling what she feels . She admits that, while she is wise, perhaps it’s easier for some not to be, to avoid the pain. Can Urara be rationally explained? “The expression on her face was like that of a demon turned into a human who suddenly caught herself feeling emotion and was warning herself that she wasn’t permitted to’ (p. 124). What are the weird details about this character? How does she first appear? The telephone number? Satsuki’s dream? “I saw the shadow of a person coming up the sidewalk in front of my house” (p. 139). What else? 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."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. Nolan IT, Kuhner CJ, Dy GW (2019) Demographic and temporal trends in transgender identities and gender confirming surgery. Transl Androl Urol 8(3):184–190. https://doi.org/10.21037/tau.2019.04.09 If I had lost a parent, partner or child, maybe I'd have been more engaged with this book, but I suspect my experience would be so different as to be barely comparable. I'm grateful that I'm not in the position to compare. Most editions also include a novella entitled Moonlight Shadow, which is also a tragedy dealing with loss and love. In addition, there are innumerable turns of phrase that are unforgettable but I particularly liked:

The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s the kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).

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. Revolving around the theme of dealing with loss, Kitchen focuses on two young women as protagonists and their perceptions of life and death. Oniki Y (1996) A brief overview of J-Pop fiction. http://jpop.com/feature/02jfiction/yoshimoto/html. Accessed 8 Jan 2022 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.