I liked it back then and I still do. Not love, because her books don’t give me that kind of strong emotions, and yet I liked it and I’d recommend it to anyone, because this is something else. It’s a peculiar thing, Yoshimoto at her best. It’s a tragic story, full of deaths and sadness and bad things and bad people, like all her books for that matter, but you never really “feel” the real intensity of the tragedy because her tone is so soft, so matter-of-fact, so down-to-earth even when she speaks of strange things, you just keep reading, the same way we all keep living. Which is more or less her moral, in want of a better word. There is death but there is life, you lose someone but you can find someone. Her characters are often peculiar but at the same time they are rather ordinary, like well, like real people.
About Kitchen, the first page is very famous, when she says “there isn’t a place in the world that I like more than the kitchen. It doesn’t matter where or how it is, as long as it’s a kitchen, a place where you can cook food, I feel good.” and so on (or something like that, I read it in Italian of course).
It’s Mikage Sakurai thinking that. She’s the protagonist. She lost her parents when she was a child and was raised by her grandparents. She lost her grandpa when she was around twelve and was left with only her grandma, who died right before the beginning of the book. We meet her lying in the kitchen, not eating, not living, feeling so lonely after losing her, now she has nobody else in the world.
At the funeral, she meets Yuichi Tanabe, he goes to her school but they never interacted much. He’s sad for her grandma’s death, they met each other from time to time (in the shops I think, maybe buying flowers, I think, I’m not sure I remember this already). He’s a reserved guy, with something sad about him. Soon Yuichi tells her to go live with him. Not as a couple, of course, but simply so she won’t be alone. He lives with his mother Eriko. She accepts, and is blown away by Eriko’s beauty and her joie-de-vivre. She can’t believe it when Yuichi tells her that Eriko used to be his father. He only loved one woman, and when she died he was left with a son. He reasoned that he better be a mother for him, and that anyway he wouldn’t love another woman again, so he changed sex and became Eriko. Yuichi very simply tells her that he calls her ‘mom’ because how could you call someone like that ‘dad’? She looks like a beautiful woman, with her hair, dresses and heels. And a very loving and lovable mom at that. She works in a club (a gay bar or a night club or something like that), and Mikage starts living with them. She feels comfortable, they don’t expect her to get well in a day, they let her go through it her own way, they simply give her a home and some company.
She stays with them a few months, and the first part of the book ends.
Second part: at the beginning of Autumn she leaves, at the end of Autumn Yuichi calls her to tell her that Eriko was killed. There was a guy stalking her, and when he found out that she had been a man he felt I-don’t-know-what and killed her. (Unfortunately the world is full of these weak, pathetic monsters who feel powerful only with a weapon :’( )
It’s now Winter. Mikage has found a position working for a cook. She goes to spend a day with him, and right away a girl goes to her workplace to make a big scene saying she should let him be :-/ (the usual sad story all over the world, girls/women fighting each other over men, when will they finally wake up and realise that women should help each other? )
A friend of Eriko tells her that Yuichi sort of ran away, shut himself in some hotel to be alone. She has to go away with the cook, a trip to study other type of food or something, they go to Izu although I don’t know where that is.
One night, she goes out because she’s hungry and eats something delicious. She’s struck by the thought that he would like it, and she goes all the way to him in a taxi with some take-away food.
When she gets there, she has to climb to his room because the doors are closed (this was the bit I liked less, the fact that it’s basically luck that she got to his room after all, but she ‘sensed’ that that was his room so she tried...)
They eat together then she goes back to her group.
When the trip ends, he calls her in her hotel, she tells him that she’ll be back the next day, and he says that he’ll come meet her and take her home. It ends like that.
You see, there isn’t much ‘story’, there is no action, but there’s a lot of feelings and meaning. She lost her family but she found a new one. A part of her life ended, but she made a new one for herself. The story with Yuichi is not one of passion but it’s not less important for that. It’s a story of understanding, of sense of belonging, of family.
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