Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

Jammed between my own bags, stopped over, I sobbed. I had never cried this way in my life. As the hot tears poured out, I remembered that I had never had a proper cry over my grandmother's death. I had a feeling that I wasn't crying over any one sad thing, but rather for many.

Looking up, I saw white steam rising, in the dark, out of a brightly lit window overhead. I listened. From inside came the sound of happy voices at work, soup boiling, knives and pots and pans clanging.

It was a kitchen.

I was puzzled, smiling about how I had just gone from the darkest despair to feeling wonderful. I stood up, smoothed down my skirt, and started back for the Tanabes'.

I implored the gods: Please, let me live.

Mikage's grandmother dies, leaving her alone in the world. A young man she barely knows, Yuichi, who knew her grandmother as a customer at his flower shop, invites her to come and live with him and his mother for a while. His mother, Eriko, is the most beautiful woman Mikage has ever seen, but Yuichi confesses that Eriko is actually his biological father who has been living as a woman since the death of Yuichi's mother. Together, Mikage, Yuichi, and Eriko make a kind of ad hoc family, emblemized by Mikage's love of kitchens, the center of the household and the hearth. Later, in the second section of Yoshomito's novella, Eriko is suddenly murdered by an obsessed stalker, and Mikage returns to Yuichi's life to once again convene around a shared grief.

Kitchen is a subtle and touching work about the aftermath of death. Although Eriko is killed in a way that is startling and gruesome, Yoshimoto sees death and grief as fundamentally woven into the human experience, and they are inescapable:

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.

But Mikage's closeness to Yuichi is a choice, though it's not a choice everyone--like Yuichi's girlfriend, for example--seems to understand. Neither Mikage or Yuichi seem sure whether their relationship is romantic or platonic; it seems to follow no recognizable pattern or rule, and yet in the context of the permanency of loss it seems incredibly logical. Grief cannot be overcome, but it can be lived through, and such a life starts in the kitchen.

I was really interested in the way that Kitchen deals with Eriko's identity as a trans woman. Written in 1988, Yoshimoto doesn't seem to have our modern language at hand, and Yuichi himself seems to vacillate between calling Eriko his mother and his father. An appended story, "Moonlight Shadow," repeats many of the same themes: it's about a woman who loses her boyfriend in a car accident along with the girlfriend of her boyfriend's brother. The brother has taken to wearing his dead girlfriend's school uniform, complete with swishy skirt, as a way of keeping her alive. Is Eriko's transition about embodying his dead wife? Perhaps, but in a touching letter Eriko leaves behind, Yoshimoto dismisses the idea that Eriko's feminity is a costume or a crutch:

Just this once I wanted to write using men's language, and I've really tried. But it's funny--I get embarrassed and the pen won't go. I guess I thought that even though I've lived all these years as a woman, somewhere inside me was my male self, that I've been playing a role all these years. But I find that I'm body and soul a woman. A mother in name and fact. I have to laugh.

That's rather lovely, I think, and fundamentally different than the school uniform of "Moonlight Shadow." But both stories are about the possibility of transformation in the wake of grief, and neither one offers what you might expect: the blithe confidence that loss can be "gotten over." Both are optimistic in a way, but only in the sense that they believe that life tinged by loss is still precious and worth living.