The Culture Blog For Connoisseurs Of Everything

Laura Noble is an artist, lecturer, serial blogger & author of The Art of Collecting Photography with primary essays in many photographic monographs & journals. This is her website and her blog is here.

When browsing the shelves of a friend’s library I was thrilled to find a selection of Japanese authors I had yet to come across. One such was Banana Yoshimoto. The title that appealed most was Kitchen perhaps as it was New Year’s morning and I was hungry. As it turned out I went home and found it for 1p on Amazon. So began my now obsessive reading of all of her work.

Since reading Kitchen I have discovered she’s vastly popular in Japan and also that it’s inspired two feature films (I’m glad to have come across her writing first as films rarely meet up to expectations). The book includes two stories, Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow. Each deals with the subject of bereavement with a gentle pace that lulls you into a dreamlike state of understanding throughout the reading of it. She manages to amble along with such grace that you are almost unaware of the profundity, weaving messages into her stories with a fine gossamer thread almost invisible to mere humans until it is re-read or quoted. 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.

There is an unpretentious simplicity in her language which is constantly refreshing. Moonlight Shadow is a short story really, also full of wonderful ideas, near to magic realism in a way but done in an ultimately Japanese fashion. If you enjoy Haruki Murikami you will love Banana Yoshimoto. Both authors employ a subtle blend of the weird coincidences that happen in life, the beauty of small things, internal fears and admissions, all with an acute understanding of the human condition.

Loss is a recurrent theme in Yoshimoto’s work. In Kitchen, a young woman (Mikage Sakurai) orphaned as a child loses the grandmother who had raised her, leaving her utterly alone. The comfort of being in the kitchen with its familiar smells and the warmth of the refrigerator, to which she nestles up to at night, help her begin the slow process of recovering and living again.

Her characters reveal themselves slowly. My favorite by far is not the main protagonist but the transsexual ‘mother’ of the friend Mikage ends up staying with, Eriko, rarely at home due to her working nights. The descriptions of this woman who floats in and out of the apartment are charming to a fault. Although Eriko was once a man you find yourself utterly believing the yearning description of her provided by Mikage. This instils in the reader their own need to get to know her better (a bittersweet notion as it turns out) or at least catch a glimpse of this wonderful creature.

Domestic scenes permeate the book and encourage you to sit curled up with it until the end. The only problem with this – as with all great reads – is that there is an overwhelming sadness to confront when you finish reading it. I encourage you to read Kitchen armed with another book by Yoshimoto to avoid this inevitable dilemma.