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.

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.

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

This is the third book by Haruki Murakami that I've read (the others being Kafka on the Shore and Pinball, 1973). I've noticed a positive correlation between how recently one of his books was published and how strange it is. While I prefer his more bizarre works - those that include old men who can speak cat and Colonel Sanders as a spirit guide - this was still an engaging and powerful book, and fits in perfectly on his upward trend of oddness.

Like Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood is a coming of age story, set in Japan in 1970. Toru Watanabe is an eighteen year-old, apathetic college student in Tokyo. A lot of Murakami's own passions are reflected in the character (jazz and classical music, American Literature). Slightly semi-autobiographical, the story is wrought with a series of tragic events that almost seem absurd in their regularity and predictability. Each one feels like another crushing blow to Toru Watanabe, whose broody musings can really be chilling at times.

Death exists - in a paperweight, in four red and white billiard balls on a table - and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

I lived through the following spring, at eighteen, with that knot of air in my chest, but I struggled all the while against becoming serious. Becoming serious was not the same thing as approaching truth, I sensed, however vaguely. But death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. Stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, I went on endlessly spinning in circles. Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.

It's a gripping, nostalgic story that left me feeling miserable. Poor Toru Watanabe is a brilliant kid whose hit with one horrible mishap after another, and left alone and floundering for anything of meaning and substance. This book is dark, at times depressing, and plenty erotic (though not as wildly or strangely erotic as Kafka on the Shore). Kafka on the Shore still stands as my favorite Murakami book, but I'd recommend this one too if you're not that into otherworldly stones or disappearing isolated mountain towns.