Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

As we decided where to meet, I looked up at the window. The sky outside was a dull gray. Waves of clouds were being pushed around by the wind with amazing force. In this world there is no place for sadness. No place; not one.

Two years ago, at 11:00am, I got a phone call from my dad, telling me that my Aunt Rhonda and her husband, Ted, had been in a car crash and died instantly. I'll never forget that moment, but I often feel like I can't remember that day at all. How did I feel? Shocked. What did I do? Collapse into a chair and not move. What happened the next day? The next? How did I grieve? Slowly and awkwardly and in unexpected ways. In some ways, Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen is about the long walk in the days and weeks after unexpected loss, the ambiguity of grief, the difficulty and desirability of moving on.

The novel is really made up of two novellas, the titular Kitchen and the shorter Moonlight Shadow. Both are told from the perspective of a young Japanese girl, both are in a (mostly) realist mode, and both are about death and the aftermath. These books aren't really plotty but I'm going to fully spoil them below.

In Kitchen, Mikage's grandmother has died, and she moves in with the Tanabes, son Yuichi and mother Eriko. Eriko is what we'd now call trans, I think, or at least non-binary:

After my real mother died, Eriko quit her job, gathered me up, and asked herself, ‘What do I want to do now?’ What she decided was, ‘Become a woman.’ She knew she’d never love anybody else. She says that before she became a woman she was very shy. Because she hates to do things halfway, she had everything ‘done,’ from her face to her whatever, and with the money she had left over she bought that nightclub. She raised me a woman alone, as it were.” He smiled.

She's a loving, kind presence in the household and when she's killed by a stalker at the nightclub where she works, Mikage is forced to deal with both her grandmother and surrogate mother's deaths. 

In Moonlight Shadow, Satsuki, a college-aged girl, is reeling after the death of her boyfriend Hitoshi, who died along with his brother Hiiragi's girlfriend, in, yeah, an automobile accident. She meets a mysterious woman named Uraru while staring out at the river, and at the end of the novella, has a vision of her boyfriend waving goodbye before he fades away.

The writing throughout is simple but moving. A couple excerpts I really loved:

I understood what she was trying to say, and I remember thinking, listlessly, is this what it means to be happy? But now I feel it in my gut. Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated—defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Still, to cease living is unacceptable.

And this, about greatness:

Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends. Perhaps Eriko’s was only a minor kind of greatness, but her light was sorely missed.

6 months ago, on the 18 month anniversary of my Aunt's death, I had a dream where I met her and told her how much I missed her. She got to say hello to my youngest, Samuel, who never had a chance to meet and I was hugging her and sobbing when I woke up. So many sections of Kitchen resonated so perfectly with my experience, I could hardly help but love it. As David Foster Wallace said, good fiction makes us feel less alone. Maybe experiencing death, sadness, and progression through the eyes of others is the only way we can really lay claim to our own lives.

For waving goodbye, I thank you.