Kitchen (A Black cat book) |  | Author: Banana Yoshimoto
Creator: Megan Backus
Publisher: Grove Press
List Price: $14.00
Buy Used: $1.29
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Seller: bayfrontbooks
Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 152196
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st Black cat ed
Pages: 160
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0802142443
Dewey Decimal Number: 895.635
EAN: 9780802142443
ASIN: 0802142443
Publication Date: April 17, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
With the publication of Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, the literary world realized that Yoshimoto was a young writer of enduring talent whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. Kitchen is an enchantingly original book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father) Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart.
In a whimsical style that recalls the early Marguerite Duras, "Kitchen" and its companion story, "Moonlight Shadow," are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a very special writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
 The Magic of Loss and Love January 23, 2009
Tracy Fox (Illinois)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Kitchen took me by surprise. It is a thin book pairing two novellas, Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow, that both deal with loss and its aftermath. At first the author's light, easygoing style tricked me into underestimating my emotional involvement with the story. Kitchen begins when Mikage loses her beloved grandmother and is taken in by the Tanabe family she barely knows. From there, Mikage's relationship with the Tanabes--a transvestite nightclub owner and his son--deepens based on shared late-night meals and three lives brushing up against each other in a small Japanese apartment. I was unprepared for the turns this 100-page novella took and how anxiously I rushed to the end, hoping to see Mikage find respite from her overwhelming sense of being alone in the world.
The second novella, Moonlight Shadow, contrasted the reactions of Satsuki and Hiirage who both lost loved ones in a tragic accident. Satsuki deals with the loss of her beloved Hitoshi by eating less and less and jogging more and more. Hiirage copes with his double loss--his brother Hitoshi and his girlfriend Yumiko--by wearing Yumiko's old school uniform. Their attempts to console each other are awkward yet touching. As the novella built toward a promised surprise ending, I ached for them to find happiness as well.
Excellent! December 30, 2008
Omar Fernández (Boston, MA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Kitchen" by Banana Yoshimoto is a fantastic read. I read it as part of an Introduction to Japanese Culture class at MIT, and I must say it was one of the most entertaining reads I've had to do for a class. The world created by Yoshimoto is mysterious and thrilling. An excellent work of fiction, "Kitchen" tells the a story that is easy to read, but at the same time very profound. "Kitchen" tells the sad story of two young people and how after losing their families they come together to support each other. The story is written in a way that allows you to submerge yourself into it as deep as you want, giving you the amount of details about each scene that allows you to fully understand the setting and what is happening.
Banana Yoshimoto's "Kitchen" is a book that must be read by anyone looking for an excellent fiction book, and is a must read for anyone interested in Japan and Japanese culture. Although it might not teach you directly about Japanese culture, the fact that this book has sold millions of copies in Japan is something that will make you wonder what it is about it that the Japanese found so appealing.
Disarming, haunting, and disguised in simple prose... December 13, 2008
Kara Allison Stambach
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The symbolism and emotion contained in the simple and unabashedly honest sentences of this novella--a translation, no less--impressed me deeply. For example, I can't think of a better way to describe the shock, emptiness, and psychological turmoil of a recently orphaned protagonist than the way Yoshimoto pens this passage:
"When my grandmother died the other day, I was taken by surprise. My family had steadily decreased one by one as the years went by, but when it suddenly dawned on me that I was all alone, everything before my eyes seemed false. The fact that time continued to pass in the usual way in this apartment where I grew up, even though now I was here all alone, amazed me. It was total science fiction. The blackness of the cosmos.
Three days after the funeral I was still in a daze. Steeped in a sadness so great I could barely cry, shuffling softly in gentle drowsiness, I pulled my futon into the deathly silent, gleaming kitchen. Wrapped in a blanket, like Linus, I slept. The hum of the refrigerator kept me from thinking of my loneliness. There, the long night came on in perfect peace, and morning came.
But . . . I just wanted to sleep under the stars.
I wanted to wake up in the morning light.
Aside from that, I just drifted, listless."
I love how Yoshimoto's prose never gets purple or heavy, but it lasts and lasts. The flavor of her words stay with me even now, a taste as sharp as the first day I encountered it, seven years ago...
A beautiful, gentle trio of novellettes October 29, 2008
Zack Davisson (Seattle, WA, USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"Kitchen" is not at all what I thought it was going to be. I was expecting a "magical kitchen" type story, similar to Like Water for Chocolate where the kitchen is a metaphor or someplace where things happen. I was expecting cooking and ingredients, detailed recipes, manic energy and that sort of thing.
Instead, I got three sweet novellas, only two of them directly connected, about unspoken emotions and complex relationships, with the kitchen playing little more role than the title. Much of my expectations came from Banana Yoshimoto's being hailed as a "young author" in Japan. A young author she may be, but she carries the legacy of Japanese literature and influence, and her subtle, underplayed emotions and simple/complex characters and plots are as alive and moving as Soseki.
There is magic here, of a quaint sort. And a ghost of two. A transvestite. But for the most part, this is the real world. The three novellas are connected in tone, if not in plot and characters. Each has its own charm, and each carries and ocean of depth beneath a seemingly shallow surface, which is the hallmark of Japanese literature. Love moves the world, but lovers must find and recognize each other.
Simply, a great book.
 The First Banana October 20, 2008
Daitokuji31 (Black Glass)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
A couple of years ago, while waiting outside my Japanese teacher's office, I was flipping through a book of Yoshimoto Banana's essays paying particular interest to one titled Oyogu hitobito or "People Swimming." It was a simple essay concerning a drunken Yoshimoto and an outing that she had with her drunken friends. Anyway, while I was reading the book, a visiting professor from the Kyoto University bent down, I was sitting on the floor at the time, and he asked me what I was reading. I showed him the book, he laughed, and said that Yoshimoto was only for young women.
Oh well.
I read my first Yoshimoto novella during the summer of 2001 between readings of a couple of Murakami Ryu's novels and, of course, that novel was Yoshimoto's debut novella Kitchen. Judging the book by its cover, I can definitely agree that it looks like it belongs in the "chick-lit" section, as do the rest of her novels, but I believe that Kitchen carries a bit more weight than say the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
Yoshimoto is often lumped with her fellow contemporary writer Murakami Haruki because their writings are quite well-received in the West and that they both weave fictional worlds threaded with magical realism. Another similarity is that the theme of death looms over the majority of their fictional landscapes. However, unlike the gloomy, Lacanian worlds of desire that Murakami weaves, one can never acquire again the object of one's desire because only substitutes for said desire exists, Yoshimoto's characters, although still in a melancholy state, are able to heal the emptiness left by the loss of a loved one.
Kitchen centers on Sakurai Mikage, a young woman whose grandmother has just passed away. In a state of shock, Mikage spends her nights sleeping in the kitchen next to the constantly humming fridge. However, the apartment is too big and too expensive for her to live in alone, so she must move out. Yet, because of her current situation she is unable to gain the motivation to do so. At that moment fate enters the story. One day while tidying up some magazines for recycling, Tanabe Yuichi rings her doorbell. A fellow student, Mikage knows little about Yuichi besides the fact that he works at a flower shop and that her grandmother favored him highly. Therefore, she is quite surprised when he asks her to move in with him and his mother... While quite shocked at first, Mikage soon falls in love with the Tanabes' couch and kitchen and slowly with Yuichi himself because she can see a lot of herself within him.
Yoshimoto's book is quite simple, but it does work its way into one's heart especially if one has recently gone through a loss similar to the one Mikage has suffered from. While she has written many more novels, novellas, short story collections, and essay collections, Kitchen, which she wrote at twenty-four, is still quite a slice of nostalgic sweetness enwrapped in almost dreamlike language. Easy to read in one sitting, and if liked or not, I believe that Kitchen should be read by most individuals interested in contemporary Japanese literature.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 10
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