Kitchen – Banana Yoshimoto
The narrator Mikage is an orphan raised by her grandmother. Mikage attends college. Before she died, Mikage’s grandmother sang the praises of a college-aged boy, Yuichi, who totes and lifts in the neighborhood flower shop. After granny died, Yuichi called Mikage and invited her to stay with his mother Eriko and him until Mikage felt better.
A heavy and bittersweet story unfolds quietly. Mikage and Yuichi both seem to be too alone for their age. They don’t seem to have friends they can talk to, so the death of a family member feels to them like being pushed to the edge of despair. In deep depression and anxiety due to grief, Mikage is rescued by Yuichi. Later Yuichi has to deal with a senseless sudden death, and Mikage helps him. The mutual support between the two characters is reassuring and full of hope.
The author matter-of-factly uses magic realism in terms of dreams. A good novice cook, Mikage works for a celebrity chef so the content about food is done, well, deliciously, bringing to mind and tastebuds that other 1980s love letter to eating Tampopo. Another reference that plunged me into nostalgia was to okonomiyaki, literally “your favorite yaki,” rendered as “egg and vegetable pancakes.” In a cute climax, when she finds out that Yuichi is suffering at a retreat that serves only tofu dishes, she scales walls to deliver to him take-away katsudon.
One wonders if this novel is one written with university-aged readers as the target audience. The author deals with the theme of ` young people dealing with grief' in an unflinching way, maybe in a revealing way for young readers but maybe less than novel to older readers who have buried parents but also have had to say sudden goodbyes to friends and colleagues taken too soon in their forties and fifties.
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