Kitchen

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Just when one can't take anymore, one sees the moonlight. Beauty that seems to infuse itself into the heart: I know about that.’

Nolan IT, Kuhner CJ, Dy GW (2019) Demographic and temporal trends in transgender identities and gender confirming surgery. Transl Androl Urol 8(3):184–190. https://doi.org/10.21037/tau.2019.04.09 Creating 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.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. And so here we have a love story. But one that reads like a puppet show, with Mikage tied to death’s right hand, and Yuichi to his left. 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.

El mundo no existe sólo para mí. El porcentaje de cosas amargas que me sucedan no variará. Yo no puedo decidirlo. Por eso, comprendí que es mejor ser alegre. Describe the river and the bridge, symbolic to the young lovers, even in life. How does the author tighten the suspense toward the end? How do the hypnotic roaring current and the small tinkling bell work together? Ze volgt altijd haar intuïtie, ik vind het fantastisch dat ze ook de kracht heeft dat te realiseren 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.Due to the complexity of the layers of metaphor, Banana’s stories seem to barely have any connection, which, in fact, is untrue. Its complexity reaches an advanced level at which the characters themselves can produce different meanings as readers reinterpret and try to relate them to their personal lives. The storyline is written in a postmodernist style, and there are few details to create dramatic conflicts such as in older forms of narrative found in Akutagawa or Mishima’s fiction. However, this does not mean that this story has no conflict. This narrative still maintains conflicts; they appear in the depth of cultural meaning instead of being expressed explicitly, creating forever internal conversations and making the “meanings” of the story change according to how the readers interpret it at different times. The hybrid narrative cares about ephemeral beauty in nature and humans, including sudden disasters. In Kitchen, the first story, Kitchen, has three characters, who are actually four if we count the deceased grandmother who still lives on in the admiration and love in the narration by the other characters. From this introduction, Mikage, the first-person narrator immediately shows signs of her incoming disastrous events. Placing these events at the beginning of the story leads the reader to a sad and miserable atmosphere. All the following events, which are mostly successive disasters, force Mikage to cope with them and become more mature. 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. Wong C (2016) Banana Yoshimoto’s improbable literary journey from waitress to writer. https://theculturetrip.com. Accessed 15 Jan 2022

Siguiendo con mi costumbre de no alejarme demasiado tiempo de la literatura japonesa, elijo Kichen (1988) la ópera prima de Banana Yosimoto (1964-) para mi lectura. El libro consta de dos novelas cortas independientes (la segunda más breve, casi un cuento), pero con un nexo común: la muerte como tema principal. La muerte y, especialmente, los efectos que ésta causa sobre las personas que rodean a los fallecidos y que sienten un gran afecto por ellos. Japanese writers have a tradition of using dreams in narratives. Kawabata is an excellent master in this field. In The Sound of The Mountain, Kawabata lets Shingo, the old man, drowned in dreams. Every dream reminds him of a painful and regretful memory. In the newer generation of writers, both Murakami and Banana applied this method to reinforce the sense of mystery and vagueness in their stories. According to Freud, dreams are a gateway to our unconsciousness (Freud, 1913), where it is full of confusion, and people can only feel and intuit meaning rather than directly understand it. Dreams are a form of inclusiveness. Writers use dreams as though creating an underground scene lying below the main scene, a path that exists within other roads; no matter how professional the readers are, they can only guess a partial meaning. This vague narrative seems to be useful in creating more layers of meaning for the text. Because human dreams are always unpredictable, they have their roots somewhere deep in the dark realms of the soul. Perhaps it would be easy to label this as just a sentimental novel by an overrated novelist—but that may be missing the point. This is a powerful novel if allowed to be read as a powerful novel. It tries to give answers to difficult questions. Sometimes the novel succeeds. Sometimes it fails, even, dare I say, becomes hokey. But all of that can be whitewashed over by the simple notion that this novel achieves what other great novels achieve: the ability to be whatever the reader wants it to be. In addition, there are innumerable turns of phrase that are unforgettable but I particularly liked: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.