Kitchen - Yoshimoto Banana

I don't like vagueness.

I take it as one of the reasons I don't like The Reader. I told my friends the minute we stepped out of the theater that if only the two main characters, Hanna Schmitz and Michael Berg, talked about their problems and shared their feelings toward each other, Hanna wouldn't have to die pathetically.

She committed suicide because there was no reaction from Michael when she tried to reach out for him.

I said "How hard could it be just to talk things out? People must talk, especially to their love ones or the ones they really care about, because they can't expect others to understand them every single time. See how the movie ends? All those horrible things wouldn't happen if they just friggin' talked."

One of my friends responded to my remark quietly "Noey, Not everyone is like you."

OK, that's fine, Vagueness can be really annoying to me and I still don't see the point of it.

Until I read Kitchen by Yoshimoto Banana.


The Kitchen's writing style is as Japanese as you can get - simplicity with slow moving pace which focus on human's feelings and some metaphors between human's circle of life and the beauty of nature.

Usually I'm not too fond of Japanese writing style because of its (Do I need to say more?) vagueness.

But Kitchen is different. It is one of the novels that I feel it touches human depth and soul with best description of a young girl trying to cope with losses in her life and the loneliness of human in general.

Yoshimoto's writing makes me feel as if I know the main character, Mikage Sakurai, and many of the scenes when she is too afraid to tell Yuichi, a guy she's been staying with after her grandmother's death, that she might be able to support him after his loss, but at the same time she's still unsure of her feelings and capability to fight and go on with her life. Both of them are in emotional wreck that it makes their relationship more special and complicated than others.

I start to understand a little more of vagueness and silence between two people. Kitchen opens my eyes a bit that it can be really hard to talk things out when some devastating circumstances happen in life.

The Thai translation captured the Japanese sense of the novel quite well. I like most of the delicate, emotional expressions that the translator use because it fits the atmosphere of the novel, though some of her choices of words are a bit strange. (For example, can we say "กระด่างกระดำ"? Isn't it supposed to be "กระดำกระด่าง"?)

I'm glad when I learn something from the books I read. Kitchen is one of the books I plan to re-read and mull over thoroughly in the future.