We sometimes wish away a bad day at work, only to then be faced with the realisation that this day is one of a finite number we have. These are big things that slip through our fingers. Perhaps it’s about a missed job opportunity or a potential partner we never had the courage to ask out. So much of what we do slips through our fingers without us ever being aware of it. Kitchen shines brightest as an elucidation of the awful transience of life in its every facet. Beauty that seems to infuse itself into the heart: I know about that.” Just when one can’t take any more, one sees the moonlight. That is what makes the life I have now possible.

“No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Death comes and goes like the wind, but still they live and they love. Death is acknowledged and understood, but not altogether embraced. To contrast much of her own history and tradition, in Kitchen Yoshimoto uses death as a backdrop a frame for the action. The writer Yukio Mishima, for example, dedicated his life to, via various platforms, mournfully proclaiming the death of his own culture at the hands of westernisation, and finally dedicating the last year of his life to planning his own death by seppuku. For many reasons deeply rooted in social structure, politics and laws, Shinto and Buddhist traditions, and myriad other factors, Japan as a culture places deep and sacred value in death. But one that reads like a puppet show, with Mikage tied to death’s right hand, and Yuichi to his left. Heaps of praise are to be showered on Yoshimoto for not only featuring a transgender character (especially in a novella written in 1988), but even more so for the way in which Eriko is not defined by being transgender, but rather celebrated for her femininity and the love she has for her son.Īnd so here we have a love story. After the death of Yuichi’s mother some years ago, Eriko made the choice to undergo a sex change and dedicate herself to continuing her wife’s legacy as a devoted mother. Yuichi lives with his mother, though it is quickly revealed that Eriko was in fact, at one time, Yuichi’s father.

From here, we are hit with the death of Mikage’s grandmother and an offer to be taken in by a young man of whom her grandmother was a great admirer: Yuichi Tanabe. I was going into junior high when my grandfather died.” After that my grandparents brought me up. “My parents both died when they were young. Mikage’s youth is spent in a shroud of death. Her originality, however, is what makes her writing truly staggering. In Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto, like Hemmingway, Steinbeck, and all the others before her, profoundly probes the theme of transience: the brevity of life, the dangerous potential of love and happiness to be painfully fleeting. Though it is rarely the themes themselves that we care about, but rather how these themes are explored.

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto