Kitchen

Title: Kitchen
Author: Banana Yoshimoto
Published: 2001, but 1993 in English for the first time, and 1988 in Japanese.
Genre: Sad love song
Pages: 150


I just finished this, so I'm still a little wahh. Sniffle. First time I read Kitchen was years ago, and in Finnish. But it kept haunting me, even if just a little. And last xmas I got it! Yay. So I got to read it again.

Kitchen includes two short-shortish stories about death and love. Especially the latter one is good for crying, which is why I finished it now at home, and not at work. First one tells of a young woman who, orphaned as a child, has now just lost her only living relative left, her grandmother. A boy she hardly knows asks her to come and live with him and his eccentric mother. The book gets its title from this story's main character's love for a good kitchen. The second one, named Moonlight Shadow after the Mike Oldfield song is about a young girl who has just lost her first love, and then happens to meet a woman who promises to show her something special.

I don't usually read love stories. Well, okay, I do every now and then, but I prefer it when they're just a part of a bigger picture. But this was pure sad love. Pretty and short and sad and sweet and all that. Haunting and a little extraordinary.


"We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it's more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did - but now I knew it, because now I was able to put it into words. But I don't mean this in the fatalistic sense; we're constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct. And so some of us will inevitably find ourselves rolling around in a puddle on some roof in a strange place with a takeout katsudon in the middle of winter, looking up at the night sky, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"Ah, but the moon was lovely.

"I stood up and knocked on Yuichi's window."


Apparently, there's a movie of Kitchen. I may have to look for this...