The Thin Book Club 2: Banana Yoshimoto's "Kitchen"

Before I chose Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen (150 pages) as my next thin book, I read Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse (130 pages), which happened to be in our library in English, to see if it was worthy. 

Sagan wrote the book when she was 17. It tells about a girl called Cécile of the same age (and very much like the writer herself). She is a kind of socialite with a widowed playboy father who is loved by two beautiful women competing over his affection. Cécile is extroverted and has a natural social talent for reading visual cues of facial expressions, gestures, and reactions. She is used to doing what she wants - partying, drinking, sailing, driving and ignoring her studies. When her father decides to marry one of two women and the chosen one begins to control Cécile's life, she starts manipulating people close to her to destroy her father's marriage plans. This ultimately has tragic consequences and makes her enter the world of tristesse, something her superficial life has spared her.

Although the book was an overnight success in 1954 when it came out, has stood time well, and is (in my mind, just barely) a development story, it did not appeal to me enough to win an entry to the club (but managed to sneak in anyway). 

When I started reading Kitchen (published 1987) which I had read before and which is also the first book of a young (Japanese) writer but in her early 20s, it felt calming and refreshing after the nervous, smooth and clever wit of Bonjour Tristesse.

Also this book tells about a young girl, Mikage. She lives with her grandmother who is the only family she has left. Then also the grandmother dies, and the kitchen - the most important place in Mikage's life - loses its warmth. Overcome with grief, Mikage plans moving out, also because the apartment is too expensive for her. However, a young friend of her grandmother invites her to stay with himself and his mother who previously was his father. She finds a new haven in their kitchen, sleeping on the sofa next to it. She stays there for six months and during this time, she makes it into her ambition to learn to cook and does so, cooking and baking for this new family of two that has temporarily adopted her. With persistence, she learns to do this so well that she gets a job as a culinary teacher's assistant.

The central themes in the book are the loss of loved ones, grief, loneliness and the importance of good food enjoyed with people who matter. Yoshimoto's writing is reflective and the borderline between reality and dream is not always clear.

Yoshimoto's first published text was actually not Kitchen but a short story Moonlight Shadow which is now included at the end of Kitchen. It has been inspired by a song written by Mike Oldfield with the same name and also tells about losses and love mixing dream and reality.

Having seen almost all of Hayao Miyazaki's animations and read some Japanese books, I have wondered why so many Japanese animators and writers focus on childhood and youth as if life after these periods would lose all interest, genuineness and depth, becoming a predestined rut. Yoshimoto herself says that one of her themes is "the exhaustion of young Japanese in contemporary Japan". The pressure on the young is high to concentrate only on studying and finding successful careers and then let themselves be swallowed by work. 

This brings to my mind Wim Wenders's great film Perfect Days which rebels against all this and depicts a middle-aged Japanese man who, despite having had other options, has chosen to work as a public toilet cleaner and has found happiness and serenity in this humble and simple life. In Kitchen, Yoshimoto conveys something similar about what is important in life.