Welcome to my review space!

Dawn

If you knew what choice someone was going to make, would you go through the trouble of posing the question to them? If someone internally wanted something but externally expressed rejection, which side would you give the priority to? Octavia Butler’s Dawn, the first in the Lilith’s Brood series, asks this question through the presence of the Oankali, an all knowing alien species that “saved” humans who survived their nuclear war and are studying them for their genetics aboard a ship.

Our main character, Lilith, is awakened from a coma and is conditioned to live with the Oankali, eventually being modified herself so that she can awaken other humans aboard the ship and teach them before they are all released to Earth.(which, after centuries of isolation, is healing and regrowing without humans)

The Oankali’s indifference to the humans, their belief that they know better, and the strife it causes between them and the humans poses the question of consent to us, the reader. The Oankali know what their humans internally want and know what they desire, this makes them think that the initial verbal rejection from the humans is nothing but an adjustment to brush aside. But, should their initial rejection and confusion really be brushed aside just because the Oankali “know better”? Ultimately, Butler poses the age-old question, “Do the ends justify the means?”

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