“She was my mother, my father…”

When I began reading as a hobby in 2017, I had read and really enjoyed Kitchen. I felt it must have been heavily influenced by Murakami, who was my favorite writer, due to a few of its motifs echoing a few of Murakami’s, like adolescent life, love, and loss in contemporary Japanese society and a curiosity about the possibility of other worlds. As I read now, there is certainly a thread of Murakami running through Kitchen, which I’ll explain more below, but Yoshimoto has also carved out a novel that is quite distinct in its themes. Kitchen is essentially a simple love story at its core with a few bizarre twists and turns. There is a prominent transgender character whom I enjoyed reading because Yoshimoto doesn’t imbue her story with boring and hackneyed social commentary, but rather writes a compelling and rather weird character who seemed to change her gender to cope with the loss of her wife. It highlights the strength of love, another cloying-on-the-surface theme which Yoshimoto handles quite delicately and idiosyncratically. Eriko, the transgender mother of Yuichi (the main character’s love interest), also exemplifies the escapism with which Yoshimoto seems fascinated. Her transition is a way of becoming an entirely new person, one who has more control over herself, and most importantly, a way to redefine her family unit amidst loss. Kitchen shows us, through the shifting members and recombinations of family members within a family unit, that loss and gain are both integral to family structure. Family members are binded by their experiences, and the unconventional family unit should be celebrated. Love is the glue within a family – sometimes romantic love between partners, and sometimes familial love – it’s all OK. As far as the blatant kitchen symbol, as the embodiment of family, I found it appropriate but not fully tied together. The kitchen is ever-present in the narrative and does cleverly represent the ultimate family gathering spot, but nothing really comes of it. There is no “delivery” on the kitchen as a symbol in the lives of these characters, which disappointed me, especially at the end.

As far as writing style, I appreciate how Kitchen manages to maintain some literary authenticity despite its simplicity. Yoshimoto (at least in this story and Moonlight Shadow, its complementary novella) has a talent for writing in a sort of juvenile way, but that doesn’t detract from her storytelling or prose. The reader often feels nostalgic or that they’re breathing in Yoshimoto’s imagery because the youthful eyes from which they’re seeing the narrative seem to be authentically seeing the world from a young perspective. I found Yoshimoto’s observations thoughtful and delicate. She describes the seasons especially well; the feeling of being sick and breathing in cold air; the infantile buds growing from trees in the spring; and the slow-moving clouds dividing the world into light and dark. She illustrates scenes by focusing on the small actions and details in a person’s life. The menial tasks and quotidian thoughts that occupy a person’s day. Despite having such a small canvas (of ~100 pages), Kitchen is comfortably less of a plot and more of a window into the odd world of an unusual adolescent figuring out life and love after loss. It is a sensitive bildungsroman that provokes nostalgia and thought.