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Kitchen

There’s a moment in this book that I keep coming back to. A couple days after her grandmother’s passing, our protagonist, Mikage Sakurai, watches a grandmother and granddaughter talking on the bus. She realizes that she would never be able to speak to her own grandmother again, orphaned at a young age, Mikage realizes she is truly all alone. Overcome with sadness from this realization, she gets off the bus and crouches in an alleyway to cry. In the midst of her crying, she glances up in the alley and sees a warm light emanating from a window.She hears the sounds of pots and pans, soup boiling and she feels a warmth inside. Taken aback by how quickly she shifted between emotions of sadness and warmth, she picks herself up and continues towards her destination. As she walks, she says a little prayer, a hope. “I implored the gods: Please, let me live.”

This I believe is the crux and main point of Kitchen by Banaa Yoshimoto. Yoshimoto does not glorify suffering or grief, she talks about the quiet brutality of how engulfing it can get. But still, through it all, there is hope and there is warmth. Even if it does not exist in Mikage’s world right now, she knows that it exists out there somewhere. And this brief reminder that it exists, keeps her going. It fuels her, reminds her that even if the pain is all encompassing, it won’t stay forever.

The Pachinko Parlor

longer review TK