It’s not easy being a woman,” says the gender-enhanced mother (p. 41). She also says, “I have cheerfully chosen to make my body my fortune. I am beautiful! I am dazzling!” As Yuichi says, “It was so like her not to die in some normal way” (p. 50). What do we learn about Eriko and her transvestite friend Chika, behind the flamboyant facades? That night, Mikage reads Eriko’s will. Even in death, Eriko is empowered. Her will is a cheerful letter assuring Yuichi that if she’s dead now, he should remember that she was—in body and soul—a beautiful woman and mother who loved her life, no matter what end she met. Eriko also writes that she thinks of Mikage like a daughter. Mikage misses Eriko so much that she feels she’ll go mad and cries herself to sleep. The hybrid narrative expresses the hesitation in artistic thinking between tradition and postmodernism. In Kitchen, the female writer interweaves traditional elements in postmodernity and vice versa. She points out that loneliness, disaster, the multiplicity of life, and the desire to escape, which existed long before, are now exploding in the postmodern era. People need to seriously consider their behavior so that life is not destroyed by human greed and carelessness.

The second story of Kitchen is Full Moon, which also centers around Yuichi and Mikage. The opening informs the readers of another disaster, the death of mother Eriko. Mikage at this time has overcome her loss, left Yuichi’s house, and lived on her own; Yuichi takes a turn at coping with loss. The father–mother died. The two parts of the book start off with death. Banana seems to demonstrate vulnerable cases that are very Japanese. From the traditional period to the present day, sudden deaths are mainly caused by detrimental earthquakes and tsunamis; if not for these two reasons, it is the two atomic bombs that destroyed two cities in Japan. 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? Yuichi Tanabe — Son of Eriko Tanabe. Main character. His mother died of cancer when Yuichi was a very young child. He lives with his loving transgender mother and supports Mikage in her time of grieving. He eventually loses his mother, and relies on emotional support from Mikage.Mikage remarks that when Yuichi and Eriko smile, they both look like Buddhas. Here she is joking, but how are the Buddhist ideas of the transitory nature of things and obligation to stay aware of mortality pertinent to Kitchen? For instance, the deaths of her grandmother and the mother figure Eriko ring like tolling bells for Mikage, reminding her of loss and fragility. Do these memories also enrich her and give her impetus to go on? Live meaningfully?

Dore R (1981) Foreword. In: Kato S (ed) A history of Japanese literature, vol 1 (trans: Chibbett D). Kodansha International, Tokyo, New York, London If this is the much celebrated minimalist prose that won so many awards, I dread the thought of her attempt at detailed long fiction.

In Kitchen, a young Japanese woman named Mikage Sakurai struggles to overcome the death of her grandmother. She gradually grows close to one of her grandmother's friends, Yuichi, from a flower shop and ends up staying with him and his transgender mother, Eriko. During her stay, she develops affection for Yuichi and Eriko, almost becoming part of their family. However, she moves out after six months as she finds a new job as a culinary teacher's assistant. When she finds that Eriko was murdered, she tries to support Yuichi through the difficult time, and realises that Yuichi is probably in love with her. Reluctant to face her own feelings for him, she goes away to Izu for a work assignment, while Yuichi stays in a guest-house. However, after going to a restaurant to eat katsudon, she realises she wants to bring it to Yuichi. She goes to Yuichi’s guest-house and sneaks inside his room in the middle of the night to bring him katsudon. There Mikage tells him she doesn’t want to lose him and proposes to build a new life together. The sudden deaths of beloved others also appear in many of Banana’s other works. Traditional Japanese writers are keenly aware of the mortality of humans. In Lid of the sea, the death of the grandmother drastically changed the fate of Hajime or in The Lake, the narrator Chihiro, a woman going on 30, also felt very sad after the death of her mother. Banana expresses Chihiro’s haunting loneliness in a thoughtful and simple style, just as Orthofer observed, “Presented in typical Yoshimoto-fashion, the style deceptively artless, the account seemingly straightforward and simple, the characters adrift” (Orthofer, 2011).