Kitchen is transformative. Despite being a narrative driven by loss and grief, Yoshimoto reminds us with every line that there is a quiet beauty to being alive. She takes universal concepts like love and loss, heartache and happiness, euphoria and sorrow, and writes about the inextricable link between them all in a way that makes you feel as though you’re discovering something new and miraculous. The personal becomes new and unfamiliar in both Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow, then it becomes devastatingly personal all over again. I went into this book completely oblivious and left 150 pages later a changed individual.

It’s hard to pluck specific lines from this book while retaining their impact because the slow build of the book’s atmosphere is so essential to each line, but here are some ones that make me ache anyway:

”Why is it that everything I eat with you is so delicious?”

”…but we’re all brothers and sisters when we’re alone, aren’t we? I care about you so much, I just want to crawl into bed with you.”