Limited coexistence with our loved ones is a reality. Therefore, lifelong grief is inevitable. In the works of Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto, suffering and loneliness are not denied, but she also seeks to depict the beauty of life through routine details.
At least that’s what Yoshimoto claims to be his goal in the afterword to his first novel, The Kitchen, now republished in Brazil by Estação Liberdade. Originally released in 1988, it became a bestseller and has been translated into more than 20 languages.
“The Kitchen” is a two-part novel based on the story of Mikage Sakurai. After her grandmother died, she realized that the kitchen was the only room in the house where she felt comfortable. Only with the refrigerator motor on can he sleep. Faced with this discomfort, she agrees to live with an acquaintance of her relative, Yuichi Tanabe, and her mother, Eriko.
In the first part, we follow Mikage’s adjustment amidst his longing to live with his grandmother, the new rituals between this unusual family that are being formed and the protagonist’s awakening interest in the art of cooking.
Typical Japanese dishes, such as rice soup with egg and cucumber salad, and ramen and katsudon, are highlighted throughout the plot, both in the careful preparation and in the consumption itself, leading the reader into a relaxed atmosphere.
In Part 2, Mikage and Yuichi share a new grieving process, and between meetings, nostalgia, and communication noise, they begin to understand the nuances of their relationship. “Since I was able to understand that despair need not perish, I was able to live my life,” the protagonist thinks at a certain moment in the narrative.
Yoshimoto says it’s 37 years after the first release Bound whose writing style is similar to, but less healing than, The Kitchen. “When I read it now, it seems like a work of my youth and immaturity,” he says.
Loss is also present in the short story “Moonlight Shadow”, at the end of the book – it was Yoshimoto’s graduation thesis. In this novel, the young woman Satsuki mourns the death of her friend in a car accident and longs for a final farewell.
Three decades later, Yoshimoto still argues for the need to talk about mourning in literature. “It is important to acquire the ability to imagine other people’s pain, as well as to bear your own pain,” he says. “If we lose that, I think we will lose the greatest virtue of humanity.”
Intrigues flirt with the world of dreams. In “The Kitchen,” for example, the characters meet in the same dream, and naturally they talk about it when they wake up. “It’s not as if reality is limited to what’s in front of our eyes,” Yoshimoto says. “We live among the world inside our heads, the power of the subconscious.”
“‘Kitchen’ is about a character who has to deal with her real life, so I used a more realistic style, whereas in ‘Moonlight Shadow’ we have an abstract style that depicts the mind of a person scattered in half a reality after the death of a loved one. However, because I was young, there are parts where this writing doesn’t work well.”
Another aspect of this edition of “The Kitchen” is that the translators Leka Hashimoto, Lui Navarro, and Fabio Saldanha mention, among the challenges of this work, the absence of gender identification in the Japanese language.
Therefore, when describing the character of Eriko, a transgender woman, the translators chose neutral terms before the transition and feminine terms for the rest of the plot. Masculine nouns and pronouns are only attributed to them when the author explicitly chooses them.
Regarding the wave of “therapeutic literature” books, whose plots centered on the search for fulfillment and quick resolution of conflicts, Yoshimoto says he does not consider his works to be part of this movement.
She has previously stated that she believes barriers between what is considered serious literature and entertainment literature are more prevalent. The point is that it highlights the difficulty of thinking about the healing process.
“It involves pain and going through hard times to recover,” he says. “I don’t see much benefit in literature that’s comforting and sweet, but I think it’s a positive thing if there’s some depth that goes with it.”