This essay does contain some SPOILERS****
Last night I finished Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. The book juggles the topic of grief and the comforting stability of any kitchen that makes itself available to the main character, Mikage Sakurai. This was the first Japanese novel I ever read. I am excited to pick up another.
Yoshimoto kept the whole book within a length of about a hundred pages. Yet, there are parallel dreams, crazy girlfriends, scaling buildings, glowing telephones, sad pineapple plants, and of course death.
Mikage has had nothing in life. She has encountered death from a young age and it has left her completely alone. Her parents and grandparents have also both passed. “To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I have become hardened. Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities?”(pg. 56) But even before we hear about Mikage’s aloneness, we learn about her love for kitchens. She loves all kitchens, dirty ones, clean ones, big ones, and small ones. Of course, she has some preferences but manages to emphasize within the first two pages “Whether it’s cold and I am alone or somebody’s there and it’s warm, I’ll stare death fearlessly in the eye. If there is a kitchen, I’ll think, ‘How good.’”
Growing up in and around kitchens/people who love to cook/the food industry taught me the patience it takes to make a stranger (sometimes even a loved one) food. The essence of cooking has always felt very primal to me. We need food to survive and have evolved to make it beautiful and sometimes even artful. The most thoughtful and wholesome gifts I’ve received have been ones that have sat me down at a table to eat, and the meaning I’ve made out of them is so embedded in me I can’t put it into words. It’s poetic, ancient, and mythic far beyond my comprehension. It’s good to build strong relationships with yourself and others in environments that remind you of your mortality.
After the funeral of her grandmother and spending days and nights lying by the refrigerator in the kitchen, a boy knocks on the door who works at a flower shop that her grandmother used to shop at. His name is Yuichi Tanabe. He takes her in while she’s grieving and she stays with him and his mother.
The struggle through death and how to maintain a relationship’s romantic potential when you come out of the other side of grief is one of the main themes reoccurring in this story. We follow Yuichi and Mikage’s grief. We understand their intimacy and how their separate mourning processes warp it. Mikage’s ability to see the dependency forming in Yuichi causes her to run away from it - maybe as a way to remind herself that she can. Yuichi is lost without parents - just like her - they search for the thing that will tell them who they are and how to live.
Parents are never simple people, Yuchi’s is by no means any exception. His mother died from cancer when he was young and soon after this, his father transitioned from a man to a woman. Eriko Tanabe takes Mikage under her wing when she moves in with them. They grow close and mold into each other’s schedules/routines. She owns a nightclub and is working through most of the night. Mikage wakes up when she comes home and makes her breakfast.
Sometimes all it takes is proximity and openness, before you know it you’re tied together with an unbreakable bond.
I have been very fortunate in life not to have had too many encounters with death. Within these hundred pages, Mikage wrestles with inexperienced people like me and how being someone like her who has lost so much, has made her the person she is. How being alone for so long from a young age changes you fundamentally. How death/being alone splits you down the middle and leaves you vulnerable, belly up. The meaning you make out of life young determines so much going forward. It can make you mean and resentful. She acknowledges this on page 59 when she says “What I mean by ‘their happiness’ is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. … Dressing in their aprons, their smiling faces like flowers, learning to cook, absorbed in their little troubles and perplexities, they fall in love and marry. …. I would make carrot cakes that included a bit of my soul. At the supermarket I would stare at a bright red tomato, loving it for dear life. … Beauty that seems to infuse itself into the heart: I know about that.” She’s right, we are all alone and constantly trying to convince ourselves that we are not. We can never own anything or anyone. We feel this in the awkward tug back and forth between Yuichi and Mikage as they try to deny their aloneness. They knew of this aloneness before they came face to face with death but still weren’t expecting it so early in life, with so much of their own life left to live. Like I said before, we deny deny deny through resentment, projection, and filling roles given to us by our parents or ourselves - like picking up someone else’s skin and pulling it over our head - we pretend pretend pretend until we lose ourselves in it.
It’s easy to read books that hide the tricks of life through fictional stories that reflect something in us. Banana Yoshimoto does this beautifully in this short story, if you have the time, it’s worth the read.
You just have to stop editing at some point.
It’s sooo good