re:mote voices: literature

Title: Kitchen
Author: Banana Yoshimoto
Publisher: Faber and Faber

I wonder where the line between what counts as short story and what counts as a novel is as I read Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen. The book is under 140 pages and contains two stories. The first of those two stories being in two parts, such that it could easily be two stories - the initial piece and the follow up. Thematically the three parts of this book have similar themes - primarily of death and its effect on the young characters, secondarily it is about love and relationships.

The title story is the story of Misakage, who takes the role of narrator, and as can often be the case in these instances the facts we know are those that come up, with which we have a certain sense of gaps in who the character is. Through her young life she has experienced several deaths, so that for much of her life she has been raised by her grand mother as her only living relative. With the start of Kitchen her gran has died and she is all alone in the world. So it comes as something of a surprise when a guy about the same age as her approaches her at the funeral and invites her to move in with him and his mother. Things continue to get odd as she realises the boy has something in common with her, in that his mother died when he was young - his father having got a sex change after the mothers death and taking on the role of mother for his son. Despite the unconventional life style Misakage moves in to their home and befriends the two. The title comes from the fact that Misakage has always felt most comfortable in the kitchen, with the kitchen in this new house being particularly attractive to her. It is here that she repays the pair, cooking for them.

In the second part of kitchen we get more into the relationship of the boy and girl. Time has passed and Misakage has moved on, working as a trainee chef and living on her own. Death touches their lives once more and in doing so forces them to face up to what there is between them.

The third part is again told from a girl's view point, a girl who has lost her boyfriend of four years in a car crash. At the same time her boyfriend's brother lost his girlfriend in the same accident, and the story deals with how they are each coping with this event.

Banana's writing is relatively sparse. While probably an unfair comparison to make, one feels that there are parallels to the work of Haruki Murakami, possibly because he is the only other Japanese writer I have read. With that Murakami has also written about relationships and tragedy, but where he would get several hundred pages out of the plot Yoshimoto's work is considerably briefer. The end result of this is that while her work is readable, while she is certainly capable and does have a certain quirkiness informing her work one can't help but feel that there could be so much more to this.

RVWR: PTR
November 2002