Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Review of our recent book club read by IBC members!
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto is a deeply moving exploration of profound loss and the quiet acts of love that help us persevere.
With a deceptively simple narrative voice, Yoshimoto draws readers into the solitary world of Mikage, a young woman grieving the recent death of her grandmother who raised her.
Apoorva
After reading Moonlight Shadow by Banana it was very obvious to me that Kitchen would also be a beautiful story and I was not disappointed. I didn’t want the story to end. It is a story about the human need for companionship to survive in challenging times (which are bound to be many in one's life).
This story is about food, love, death and loneliness. The Female Protagonist's relationship with a stranger boy and his mother is beautifully portrayed. Kitchen is used as a symbol of the continuity of life despite the death of loved ones striking the main characters throughout.
Grief and happy memories are intertwined so beautifully that sometimes the reader cannot understand how to react to a paragraph. This story leaves you with hope and also humbles you. The story would have had the same impact even without the last Bollywood ending-type sequence where the heroine is randomly guessing the correct room of the hero and trespassing successfully to meet him.
Harvansh
“Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time.”
‘Kitchen’ is a story of Mikage Sakurai’s journey through loneliness and the grief of losing her grandmother. The plot is tethered with her love for kitchens and food. Food serves as the sensory connection to all notable moments of her story.
Even in this short novella, we see the different ways loneliness and grief can manifest themselves through the journey of all the different characters. Although it explores the theme of sadness and devastation, it has so much hope and light within it.
Unlike most stories of growth through grief, where the character transforms into a whole new more ambitious person by the end, ‘Kitchen’ depicts a more realistic ending where the characters learn to move on from a cycle of self-loathing and towards more hopeful things in their life. They are still alone but are no more lonely.
Yoshimoto does a wonderful job of portraying the liminal stage of grief when you’re in between things and finally have to grow and change to get out of it. Her writing style feels so welcoming and warm. The magical realism involved in the ending is absolutely stunning and beautiful and really helps to uplift the tone of the story.
Happy Reading!