In Kitchen, Mikage Sakurai had just lost her grandmother, the last person in her family to pass away. Alone in the world and unable to cope with her university schedule, Mikage falls into a bleak existence. One day, a classmate named Yuichi Tanabe invites her to live with him and his mother in their apartment because Mikage's grandmother had a profound effect on him. Although reluctant to accept the kindness, Mikage agrees and the Tanabe's couch becomes her new home. Maybe YAs would relate to the characters better than I did (I have no idea), but I'd be reluctant to recommend it to them because of the next problem... From a cultural perspective I was embarrassed to see Japanese people represented uniformly as spoiled, privileged, emotionally isolated and selfish, devoid of effective introspection, and socially cold. The theme of loneliness and isolation comes across as a national character flaw rather than a universal aspect of grief and it makes me uncomfortable on a personal and political level. I cannot say that Banana Yoshimoto will be a contender for the Nobel Prize, but I can say that she delivers a strong argument for being one of the great writers currently writing today. Interpreting the influence of Japanese culture on the world in the first half of the 20th century, Dore confirmed, “Japanese Zen has become the archetypal form of Buddhism for the questing, alternative-culture-seeking youth of Europe and North America” (Dore, 1981, p. x). In our opinion, Banana’s hybrid narrative will become the style that many writers will imitate in the world. Viewing postmodern society from a traditional perspective, Banana has created a writing style that covers many issues not only of the current era or of exclusively Japan. The writer has planted in the reader’s heart a desire to live honestly and tolerantly.

Chika—A loyal employee who inherited the gay nightclub from Eriko and helps the relationship between Mikage and Yuichi.

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Researching early 20 th-century Japanese writers such as Hayashi Fumiko (1903–1951) and Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951), Donald Keene wrote, “The women writers of the 1930s and later, though strikingly different in their interests and modes of expression, shared many frustrations. Regardless of the nature of their books, these women were often known more for their love life than for their criticisms of society or the beauty of their prose styles” (Keene, 1987, p. 1114). To Banana, this statement is no longer true. While Banana still tells compelling love stories, social problems in her hybrid writing have brought a new face to Japanese women’s literature. After a particularly egregious section of stilted psychobabble, one character says, "What kind of talk is that? Sounds like it was translated from English." I guess the author is aware of how clunky it is. Odd.

Both stories have a dash of this. In the first, it's a dream that might be a premonition; in the second, there's an ethereal character who (maybe) shows another character a little gap in time. I was the sword in the scabbard firmly attached at Mikage’s side. I was her friend, her alter ego and champion in her quest to re-find herself, in fact her soul. I would protect her at all cost. Books are filled with girls on their own forced to make their own way in the world. Often it involves slippery tactics or compromises. Do you see these elements in Mikage? As lonely as she can be at times, is her very survival threatened? What is her economic position? How has Eriko provided a valid, if entertaining, role model? Love Exposure – quite insane, probably brilliant, unmissable, but you should be warned that it’s quite insane Chosen, constructed families feel warmer than many societal more acceptable constructs. The protagonist gets unhappy at her university and with her former, more conventional boyfriend, while her oddball roommates don't judge her, but support her in overcoming grief.The hybrid narrative is multimeaningful. The story about a tiny kitchen depicts a clear way in which the Japanese people overcome hardship together. In the adorable plots of Mikage and Yuichi, it seems that they are in love; in fact, the relationship between them is just human care, which is greater than any form of romantic love. The fact that Yuichi invites Mikage to stay at his house comes from a genuinely humane gesture during her hard time. Therefore, when Yuichi’s mother dies, Mikage switches her position with Yuichi to help him with the same suffering. From Kitchen, the readers can realize that humans usually have to overcome challenges that are out of their control. During this lonely time, one always needs some form of caring from other people to light up the dark paths. This perspective influences the whole story. Both Yuichi’s lover and Mikage’s boyfriend cannot determine what kind of relationship exists between the two protagonists. These two supporting characters are simply selfish: they are not capable of comprehending the protagonists’ hardships. People also need to respect the pricelessness of humane care more than the daily love stories of immature young people. Two broken people together don’t make a whole necessarily and sometimes the narrative steers into overly sweet territory. Still the katsu don scene is *chefs kiss*, and would work perfectly in an anime. 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.

On the deserted bridge, with the city misted over by the blue haze of dawn, my eyes absently followed the white embankment that continued on to who knows where. I rested, enveloped by the sound of the current." Banana’s battle between modernism and postmodernism ended in a very postmodern way with no one winning. The transgender individual died, but that does not confirm the victory of modernism. Banana’s genius is reflected in the crowning of traditional values under the postmodern view: people must overcome loneliness, uncertainty, and disasters. Mensen bezwijken niet onder omstandigheden en krachten van buitenaf, ze worden van binnenuit verslagen, dacht ik uit de grond van mijn hart That night, Yuichi drunkenly asks Mikage to stay for a while, and she asks him to explain if he needs her as a friend or a lover. Yuichi becomes despondent, saying he can’t think straight. Mikage discovers that Yuichi has been drinking himself to sleep every night and is in a dark place. Mikage imagines her and Yuichi climbing down a ladder to hell and realizes they can’t create a life together in this place of pain. Sotaro — Mikage's Ex Boyfriend. Broke up with Mikage when her grandmother became ill and his reasoning was that she was hard to keep up with.

Wong C (2016) Banana Yoshimoto’s improbable literary journey from waitress to writer. https://theculturetrip.com. Accessed 15 Jan 2022 Nos presenta unos personajes desorientados por la pérdida, incapaces de olvidar, que recurren a extraños hábitos para sobreponerse, pero siempre solos, sin pedir ayuda a otros seres humanos. Casi no te crees esa excesiva frialdad, esa desafección que los convierte en piedra. The hybrid narrative proved to be very attractive to readers. The signs in Kitchen, although used in a hesitant fashion according to postmodernism, are always multimeaningful. The readers can read on the surface of the text that there is a young couple who are finding out about each other to prepare for their possible marriage. However, at a deeper layer of meaning, one can find that the author uses love as a healing process for the painful and scary trauma in the subconsciousness of the Japanese. In a deeper sense, we can realize that it is an effort to escape the loss and loneliness of humanity. Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by ‘their happiness’ is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That’s not a bad thing.”

Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated - defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable. 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. Lost in Translation – what planet was everyone else on? This was a snoozefest. If you haven’t seen it, count yourself fortunate With the postmodernist inclusive approach, Banana uses traditional perspectives to deal with the issue of human loneliness and emptiness in life. Two aspects of traditionalism can be divided separately for the sake of showing a clearer picture of her interpretation: life’s impermanence and life/nature’s blessing. “Impermanence” (mujō 無常) of life: loneliness and sudden deathBanana also seems to fight against postmodernism. Somehow, she tries to preserve historical memory. Her hybrid narrative reaches beyond postmodernism. Butler wrote, “Frederic Jameson points to a defining sense of the postmodern as ‘the disappearance of a sense of history’ in the culture, a pervasive depthlessness, a ‘perpetual present’ in which the memory of tradition is gone” (Butler, 2002, p. 110). In Kitchen, Japanese tradition is still alive. Disasters: past and present From this point, it can be concluded that Banana describes traumatic events to let her characters escape and live the life of human beings. The banana creates a series of hardships for her characters to force them to fight for their lives. This is much like prominent writers worldwide, namely, Ernest Hemingway, “But man is not made for defeat. […] A man can be destroyed but not defeated” (Hemingway, 1965, p. 95) or Kobo Abe in The Woman in the Dunes: sand cannot beat human beings (Abe, 1991). Placing humans in hardship is merely a means to make them assert their values. Life has too many pitfalls to prevent people from faltering, but these hardships only make them move faster toward the beautiful destinations of their lives. During the time that Mikage spends with Eriko and her son, Yuichi, the latter who appeared to be a quiet unassuming person, was slowly transformed into a soul-mate of Mikage which rather stunned her. She felt he knew her very soul.