"No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive. That is what makes the life I have now possible."
~ Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
In Kitchen, Mikage Sakurai is a 20-something orphan whose grandmother, her only living relative, has just passed away. Having always loved being in kitchens, she finds herself having no will to live after her grandmother's death and ends up sleeping in the kitchen all day and night.
She is brought out of such an existence by the arrival of Yuichi Tanabe, a young man her age who worked part-time at her grandmother's favourite flower shop. He suggests that Mikage move in with his mum and himself as he thinks she needs some help. Yuichi tells Mikage that her grandmother was always nice to him, and he thought that it'd only be right to extend a helping hand to her.
After some contemplation, Mikage decides to move in with Yuichi and his mother, Eriko, who is really his father. Eriko underwent a sex change after the death of Yuichi's mother and is now one of the top hostesses in a club. The story offers a charming but bittersweet look into the lives of these three individuals who learn to live and love one another in their own ways.
Moonlight Shadow, the companion story to Kitchen, deals with the grief and the overcoming of loss of a loved one. Satsuki, a young girl on the cusp of adulthood, has just lost her highschool sweetheart to a motorcycle accident. A beautiful and moving story which touches on love, tragedy and the supernatural.
As mentioned in Yoshimoto's Afterword, Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow are about growth and the overcoming of obstacles. In both stories, we see how the characters become stronger and wiser after they've learnt to deal with their losses.
N.P. is a little darker in tone. In this novel, a celebrated Japanese writer has committed suicide, leaving behind his work N.P., a collection of short stories written in English. Translators who have tried to translate the work into his native Japanese inevitably stop short at the 98th story as after that they choose to take their own lives too. This includes the protagonist Kazami Kano's boyfriend, Shoji.
Having never been able to fully get over Shoji's death, Kazami is drawn to three young people whose lives are initimately bound to the late writer and N.P. Love found, love lost, incest, friendship and mystery are things that Kazami finds having to face over the course of a summer where she will discover the truth behind the 98th story and have her own life bound to these people she has gotten acquainted with.
The beauty of Yoshimoto's writing is that her characters are always flawed which truly reflects on all of us as humans. Her characters are also quirky and interesting because there's always something bizarre about them. Veering on the side of alternative perhaps. Her language is sparse and simple, yet leaves the reader wistful with her astute observations about human existence.
Posted by DSD at February 14, 2005 10:48 AM | TrackBack