Reading Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen yesterday I felt as if I had an audience with a smart but wacky twenty-something seer. Yoshimoto uses a fresh narrative style of simple sentences set to a conversational and confessional pace to lay out sophisticated truths that are so accurate they are breathtaking. She is an absolutely lovely writer.
Kitchen tells the story of two orphans and their circling around life and each other, as roommates, then friends, then true mates of the soul. “Circling” is the word to use because that is what they do; their passage to each other is not linear and sequential, it is constellation-like, with gravity pulling them together slowly, patiently, tidally. I think it is actually very true of many of the choices we make in life (including our deepest relationships) that there is a waxing and a waning, a rhythm of rising and falling, and then a matched rolling and a coming together. Mikage and Yuichi are both mourners, having lost so much, and protective of themselves. They are unsure if they prefer to be alone or with each other. Together, apart, together: they each have their moments of relying, in turns, on each other.
Nothing is obvious in this novel, everything is subtle yet simple, and expressively conveyed without shouting or screaming or reader-head-bashing. Characters speak freely to each other and express what could be terribly sad conclusions in ways that make it all sound very hopeful and reassuring. For example, “I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn’t up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness. So I became a woman, and here I am.“ This said by a man who has become a woman. Or, “I told myself, there will be so much pleasure, so much suffering. With or without Yuigi.“ Mikage is now allowing herself to move forward into her life; she is no longer circling around her choices, she is making them.
Why the title “Kitchen”? For Mikage, the kitchen is “mother”, it is her comfort zone, the place of nurture and support, and Yuichi is content to meet her there. They share time in the kitchen, they move away from each other, they are brought together again by a tragedy, they pull away, and food, again, brings them together. There is no sex on this novel, there is kitchen, and it is enough.
Together with my edition of Kitchen is a story called “Moonlight Shadow” which tells of a once-a-century happening when the dead can meet for one last time with those left behind. Satsuki has lost her boyfriend of four years to a car accident. To get through the days of pain, she begins jogging every morning, stopping for a mid-run rest on the bridge where she last saw her boyfriend, their usual meeting and parting place. One morning she meets a strange woman as she rests on the bridge and they begin a strange friendship. Through this woman, Satsuki is given what any of us who have lost someone would want most of all, second only to having that person back again: having a chance to see that person one last time, to once again to share a wave, some words, and to make what we now understand will be the final parting. This is a lovely story, told like Kitchen with an easy pace. Yoshimoto takes her time to build each character and setting and mood, and then grants us a lingering glimpse into whole new dimensions of possibilities.
