Book Review: Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
The back of my copy of Kitchen (which is actually my mother’s copy, that I stuffed in my bag coming back to school) proclaims that “Bananamania Is Here!” Apparently I missed Bananamania, as I’d only heard about the Japanese writer this year reading reviews of her recent novel The Lake. I wanted to read The Lake and kept finding reference to this debut, so when I found the book while walking by my parents’ bookshelf I had to read it immediately.
Sorry for the serendipity story. I tend to like them more than other people do, but it seemed fitting for this tiny book with big themes that I would come across it on a whim while home with family.
Death, mourning, and learning to love again through cooking: every time I try to write a simple synopsis of the book it sounds like a clichéd mass-market that I wouldn’t read if it were free. But that is the gist of it: a young woman, Mikage Sakurai, is left an orphan when her grandmother dies, and an acquaintance takes her in. Another death and some periphery characters add another level of sorrow for both characters and complicate any easy path to happiness. The point in these tiny pages seems to be that eventually, however, we’ll get there.
The sparsity works well for the story. The quirkiness made the opening pages read almost twee (the acquaintance Yuichi Tanabe lives with his biological father who is now a woman, there are overlapping dreams) until the deeper truisms barrel pass them. There is still the unique prose and the wit, but it does not belittle the themes.
It is uplifting because there is no “happily ever after.”
As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won’t let my spirit be destroyed.
Uplifted yet? I was surprised how often I went from wishing the characters would smile to underlining a quote about happiness even on bad days. I believe there have already been movies/TV shows made based on the work but in my head it was all a little bit like Amélie. Thoughts and sequences zoom. We’re in one place and suddenly another, with onomatopoeia adding vision and sound to airy descriptions. It’s not a jarring dichotomy, the prose and the themes; they work together to make a sad book about universal themes different and new.
A minor complaint, for a tiny book, was the dialogue. I sometimes had to suspend belief that everyone spoke in these lush soliloquies. Maybe they do in Tokyo, but I imagine it is either something to do with translation or something to do with Japanese novels. There are some great lines, as if Lord Henry Wotton read more philosophy and made judgements on life rather than beauty.
Lines like“over and over, we begin again” ended paragraphs, and I didn’t roll my eyes. Watching a character find a way to smile and begin again—not through booze binges or flighty trips across the globe, but through the honest act of picking oneself each morning and keeping one foot in front of the other while walking down the street—makes the truisms more than well-rehearsed phrases.
Other characters and events add dynamic, but it really is the Mikage and Yuichi show. The fact that the reader doesn’t know every detail of their lives keeps the book short and the focus up front. It could have been longer, had more dialogue, had more exposition. But as it is it’s beautiful, and as heartbreaking as the characters were I had to force myself to sleep after I finished it and not start the trauma over again.
by Danielle Bukowski