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Kitchen

Kitchen

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Satsuki often goes to the bridge where she used to meet Hitoshi and one day she meets a young woman called Urara. And due to this meeting, Satsuki and even Hiiragi have these metaphysical experiences. This story is all rather dream-like and so dif Mikage was an orphan, raised by her grandmother: "I was always aware that my family consisted of only one other person. The space that cannot be filled, no matter how cheerfully a child and an old person live together - the deathly silence that, panting in the corner of the room, pushes its way in like a shudder." (The punctuation is a little odd, though.) Mikage Sakurai — Young Japanese woman. Main character. Struggling with the loss of her grandmother, who was her last surviving relative. She moves in with Yuichi Tanabe and Eriko Tanabe after her grandmother's death. Sometimes, no matter how intensely I would be staring at him, I would have the feeling that Hitoshi wasn’t there” (p. 111). How does Yoshimoto craft this elegant, eerie tale? What early hints does she drop that we are on the edge of a paranormal experience? There's something about Japanese writers. They have the unparalleled ability of transforming an extremely ordinary scene from our everyday mundane lives into something magical and other-worldly.

Banana Y (2017) Nap bien [Lid of the Sea] (trans: Hoa DT). Writers Association Publishing House, Hanoi Such interesting characters are to be found in this rather philosophical work, individuals in fact who I continued to think about after I finished the book. Banana creates a hybrid first-person narrator. These people play two roles: following the lives outside and observing themselves. “I” compels the readers by being frank with both themselves and their surroundings. Therefore, this narrative always creates credibility and consistency in Banana’s fiction and urges audiences to look at things from different perspectives. A certain tension is created in narrative parts: “The faint colors of his form, even the heat of the tears running down my cheeks: I desperately struggled to memorize it all. The arching lines described by his arm remained, like an afterimage, suspended in the air” (Banana, 1993, p. 146). The small happiness of Tsugumi’s little family is similar to a kitchen that is always unstable. The moments they spend together consistently bear a likelihood of uncertainty and farewell. Even the father, who only meets his daughter, offers lessons that sometimes show his uncertain ego or feelings about the past. The daughter’s ego, in parallel with the “I” of the narrator, has reflected a sweet paternal love while sketching the uncertain perspective of unpredictable things in the future. Banana’s works, even though minimalist in the train of thought, are always warm and humane. Wong writes, “She is hence recognized as a ‘Healing-Kei’ writer—one who brings positivity, love, and warmth to readers” (Wong, 2016). Maybe this is the way Banana hopes her readers practice creating happiness for themselves and society. In the first part of Kitchen an orphan needs to leave her home. She is taken in by a boy and his trans parent, who works in clubs and bars. Loneliness and loss play major parts, and overall I got strong Tokyo Godfather vibes, in the sense that Banana Yoshimoto presents us a story of outcasts bonding together in a rather inhospitable, normative world. Ze volgt altijd haar intuïtie, ik vind het fantastisch dat ze ook de kracht heeft dat te realiseren

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I really needed this. Oftentimes we read books, they touch us and we cry but after a few hours it’s completely out of mind. Sometimes though, just sometimes we encounter a book that touches us so directly that it isn’t readily manifested by external emotions. This book is one of those. I didn’t cry, but I suffered. The last paragraph is nothing but one of the most beautiful things I have ever read. It stirred something inside me and after reading I felt a deep tranquility. I felt at peace. It seemed like a heavy burden was lifted from me and after, a delicious calm radiated through me. It still does. Banana also seems to fight against postmodernism. Somehow, she tries to preserve historical memory. Her hybrid narrative reaches beyond postmodernism. Butler wrote, “Frederic Jameson points to a defining sense of the postmodern as ‘the disappearance of a sense of history’ in the culture, a pervasive depthlessness, a ‘perpetual present’ in which the memory of tradition is gone” (Butler, 2002, p. 110). In Kitchen, Japanese tradition is still alive. Disasters: past and present I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit,’ Eriko tells Mikage, ‘ It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me.’ Life will always be hard, but finding love and happiness must still go on and we must always get up and keep going. ‘ Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated - defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable.’ Maybe this is the main idea that Japanese writers aim for. Getting accustomed to one’s own new situation is the foremost rule of survival. The Japanese people are born in a land filled with death, so they have developed their strangely brave and patient characteristics. The same applies to Banana. While writing about disasters and accidents, she is fully aware of the spirit of the Japanese—they are ready to face their challenges calmly. This is how Banana tells the rest of humanity that the Japanese can overcome any injury. However, how do they overcome them? And if so, are they the winner in all cases?

After a particularly egregious section of stilted psychobabble, one character says, "What kind of talk is that? Sounds like it was translated from English." I guess the author is aware of how clunky it is. Odd.if a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I'm grateful for it.

Yosimoto es minuciosa en el tratamiento de temas escabrosos y delicados (muerte, soledad, familia, sexo…) y lo hace de manera natural, sencilla, nada soez. Y, aunque su visión es realmente pesimista, parece que al final deja un rayo de luz para la redención. Telkens als ik met hem had afgesproken gebeurde hetzelfde: dan werd ik verdrietig omdat ik was wie ik wasCreating characters who share the same situation makes Banana’s work always in-depth and leads readers to suspect a persistent, obsessive, and unending event might happen next. We know about the younger brother, Hiiragi, from the earlier story. Now, we learn that Urara also bears the same loss. It is just that the narrator does not reveal what Urara suffers from. We can guess from the conversations between Satsuki and Urara that Urara comes to the river to try for a chance to bid farewell to her friend who suddenly died. Satsuki and Urara both suffer from this loss of a person close to them, so it is easy for them to empathize. From the reader’s perspective, these two characters have a supportive role for each other: Satsuki’s story is clearly in traditionalism while Urara’s is more postmodern, which is presented with only a few clues for the reader to draw inferences. This narrative creates more mysterious tension, evocative of a miraculous fairytale, cause in part by the vagueness of their current lives. The postmodernist society, which obtains its symbol from the car accident, can end everything to create a tragedy for couples such as those in this story. However, in the end, it can never end their relationship, their love, and their interaction, even in the form of a dream. It is the miracle of life. Mikage becomes rooted in the kitchen. It becomes her compass by which she compares all homes that she has ever entered. Upon arriving, she takes over cooking for Yuichi and his mother Eriko, a transvestite who runs an all night club. Both lead busy lives and emit positive energy, encouraging Mikage to engage in her newfound passion of cooking. The three make up a new family unit until Mikage can recover from all the death around her. Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends. Perhaps Eriko's was only a minor kind of greatness, but her light was sorely missed. Yuichi’s excited to eat Mikage’s food because she’s a professional now. Mikage became obsessed with cooking over the summer when living with Eriko and Yuichi, and poured her heart and soul into it, feeling utterly blissful. She now works for a famous cooking teacher. Mikage feels that although the students in the cooking school seem happy in their comfortable lives, their happiness falls short of her own joy. Mikage cooks with a profound joy that she can only appreciate because of the suffering she’s experienced.

Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by ‘their happiness’ is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That’s not a bad thing.” Bac LH, Hang DTT, Phuong LN (2021) The Bakhtin Circle’s dialog in Vietnam. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8:159. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00840-8 One of the many things I love about goodreads is that a person is able to see what other “friends” think about a novel before committing oneself to reading it. I would have never read KITCHEN had I not seen that Mariel, Oriana, and Jason Pettus, three of my friends, all thought highly of this slim book. The weaknesses here made me sad. Both stories are narrated by a (different) young woman. The language is often simple, but rather than the spare beauty I vaguely associate with Japanese and Chinese writing, it's mostly just banal and awkward. That may be how angst-ridden, love-up, bereaved Japanese YAs really speak (or spoke, 30 years ago) or it may be the translation, but the result is the same. Modernists view the world in binary, divided opposition, whereas postmodernists view the world as a unity of oppositions. With modernism, men are men, and women are women; there is no such thing as a woman living with a male biological nature. Banana’s postmodern vision offers a unique “hybridity” to her character’s image. Eriko/Yuji is a genderfluid character. Banana uses them to defy traditional notions of masculinity, affirming the role of women. This character’s gender identity manifests just how people freely express their gender. However, the death of Eriko/Yuji, on the one hand, shows the traditional Japanese conception of ephemeral beauty, expressed by authors such as Kawabata or Mishima; on the other hand, the moment represents the fierceness of modernist views against the genderfluidity of postmodernism.In Kitchen, Mikage Sakurai had just lost her grandmother, the last person in her family to pass away. Alone in the world and unable to cope with her university schedule, Mikage falls into a bleak existence. One day, a classmate named Yuichi Tanabe invites her to live with him and his mother in their apartment because Mikage's grandmother had a profound effect on him. Although reluctant to accept the kindness, Mikage agrees and the Tanabe's couch becomes her new home. And I have to say I loved the use of a kitchen as a metaphor for life and life’s daily interactions. When you stop to think about it, there are a lot of events that happen in a kitchen over the course of the day. I had never stopped to give this much thought. (In graduate school I did read some essays by a sociologist and anthropologist team that ventured across Europe studying bathrooms as a way to see into a country’s culture.) But if the kitchen metaphor was only a stand-a-lone point of the story, the book would have floundered. So Yoshimoto supplies whatever actions happen in a kitchen (home, apartment, restaurant, even the simple act of eating as communion) with direct language that is sparse, beautiful, and laden with underlying messages. You see, the real question of this novel is: What does love mean to a person when it becomes absent in one’s life? Kitchen and its accompanying story Moonlight Shadow comprise the first novella by award winning Japanese novelist Banana Yoshimoto. Both stories are told through the eyes of young women grieving following the death of a loved one, and deal with how that death plays a profound role in relationships going forward. Told in straight forward prose leaving nothing to chance, Yoshimoto tells two elegant stories.



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