Kitchen

One of the most prolific Japanese novelists alive today, Banana Yoshimoto became a literary superstar in 1988 with the publication of her first novel, Kitchen. Divided into two sections, Kitchen first tells the story of a young woman named Mikage, left alone in the world by the death of her parents and grandparents. Suddenly homeless, she's taken in by Yuichi, a flower shop boy, who lives with his transvestite mother. The three make an unlikely but happy set, until Mikage's surrogate mother is beaten to death. Yoshimoto finishes their story by leaving Yuichi and Mikage to mourn and console themselves with food and drink. The second section tells the story of a young woman named Satsuki and her boyfriend's brother Hiiragi, who have both lost their significant others. To help themselves cope, Hiiragi takes to wearing his girlfriend's dresses, while Satsuki becomes ascetically thin, and neither can much alleviate the other's pain. The two stories of Kitchen borrow motifs and themes from each other, yet they don't comfortably or naturally fit together. The first section feels disappointingly unresolved while in the second, Yoshimoto's otherwise clean, compassionate prose gets bogged down with excessive exposition. The gestures of grief are familiar, but Yoshimoto overdetermines the emotional signifiers, leaving little mystery remaining of the process that is mourning.