Kitchen

  Praise for Kitchen:

  “Banana Yoshimoto has become one of Tokyo’s trendiest writers, spinning off-beat tales with a zany, blunt wit.”

  —Time

  “It’s easy to delight in Yoshimoto’s light and airy (but never carefree) style. . . . Themes of death and renewal abound in this novella of existential struggle and moral retrieval, though it does not lack in its honest presentation of the costs of violence and loss in urban life.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Love, death, mourning, and the gradual recovery of the will to live are staple themes in fiction. But they receive a delightfully fresh expression in Kitchen . . . a beautifully understated work.”

  —Newsday

  “Kitchen . . . gives you the sense that you’re meeting a real young woman. . . . Yoshimoto’s attraction to weirdness and her unpretentious approach to it—she’s not trying to be hip, just faithful to her sense of people as they are—are what might make Western readers want more of her.”

  —The New Yorker

  “A deeply moving tale filled with unique characters and themes. Along the way, readers get a taste of contemporary Japan, with its mesh of popular American food and culture. . . . Yoshimoto confirms that art is perhaps the best ambassador among nations.”

  —Library Journal

  “Kitchen is cool, gentle, and neat, even within the most chaotic of life crises. . . . This is a modern-day fable . . . [that] leaves a lingering taste for more. Yoshimoto is a writer to watch.”

  —Boston Herald

  “It’s clear there’s a significant talent at work here, one not limited by international boundaries . . . a roundabout, touchingly portrayed journey.”

  —The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly

  “Charming . . . [Kitchen’s] Mikage is both as blameless and as innocently subversive as Holden Caulfield.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Supple, precise prose . . . A sense of the fragility of life permeates these works . . . but Yoshimoto’s message, articulated with delicacy and maturity, is that humans have the intellectual and spiritual resilience to overcome tragedy and find meaning in existence.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Ms. Yoshimoto’s writing is . . . as emotionally observant as Jane Smiley’s, as fluently readable as Anne Tyler’s. . . . She has a wonderful tactile ability to convey a mood or sensation through her descriptions of light and sound and touch, as well as an effortless ability to penetrate her characters’ hearts.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Yoshimoto works with a humorous touch, a sense of the absurd clinging to the humdrum of everyday life. . . . Elegant, whimsical explorations of how we learn to face down our inevitable griefs.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Timeless emotions, elegantly evoked with impressive originality and strength . . . Yoshimoto combines traditional sensitivity to nuance and setting with a youthful sense of belonging to a wider, less specifically Japanese world.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “There are passages of startling beauty and an assured voice which promises great things to come.”

  —West Coast Review of Books

  “Dark and light themes are plaited throughout Kitchen. . . . There is something about the fresh and disingenuous way Yoshimoto writes. She fills her prose with images seemingly lifted from haiku . . . and gives it a nearly irresistible airiness.”

  —Trenton Times

  KITCHEN

  BANANA YOSHIMOTO

  Translated from the Japanese by Megan Backus

  GROVE PRESS NEW YORK

  Copyright © 1988 by Banana Yoshimoto

  English translation rights arranged with Fukutake Publishing Co., Ltd., through the Japan Foreign-Rights Centre.

  Translation copyright © 1993 by Megan Backus

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Cover design by Adriane Stark

  Cover photographs © Sigrid Estrada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Yoshimoto, Banana, 1964-

  [Kitchin. English]

  Kitchen / Banana Yoshimoto.

  p. cm.

  Translation of: Kitchin.

  ISBN: 978-0-8021-4244-3

  eISBN: 978-0-8021-9046-8

  I. Title.

  PL865.07138K5813 1993

  895.6’35—dc20 92-12781

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  13 14 15 11 10 9 8

  CONTENTS

  Kitchen

  Moonlight Shadow

  Afterword

  KITCHEN

  1 KITCHEN

  The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).

  I love even incredibly dirty kitchens to distraction—vegetable droppings all over the floor, so dirty your slippers turn black on the bottom. Strangely, it’s better if this kind of kitchen is large. I lean up against the silver door of a towering, giant refrigerator stocked with enough food to get through a winter. When I raise my eyes from the oil-spattered gas burner and the rusty kitchen knife, outside the window stars are glittering, lonely.

  Now only the kitchen and I are left. It’s just a little nicer than being all alone.

  When I’m dead worn out, in a reverie, I often think that when it comes time to die, I want to breathe my last in a kitchen. Whether it’s cold and I’m all alone, or somebody’s there and it’s warm, I’ll stare death fearlessly in the eye. If it’s a kitchen, I’ll think, “How good.”

  Before the Tanabe family took me in, I spent every night in the kitchen. After my grandmother died, I couldn’t sleep. One morning at dawn I trundled out of my room in search of comfort and found that the one place I could sleep was beside the refrigerator.

  My parents—my name is Mikage Sakurai—both died when they were young. After that my grandparents brought me up. I was going into junior high when my grandfather died. From then on, it was just my grandmother and me.

  When my grandmother died the other day, I was taken by surprise. My family had steadily decreased one by one as the years went by, but when it suddenly dawned on me that I was all alone, everything before my eyes seemed false. The fact that time continued to pass in the usual way in this apartment where I grew up, even though now I was here all alone, amazed me. It was total science fiction. The blackness of the cosmos.

  Three days after the funeral I was still in a daze. Steeped in a sadness so great I could barely cry, shuffling softly in gentle drowsiness, I pulled my futon into the deathly silent, gleaming kit
chen. Wrapped in a blanket, like Linus, I slept. The hum of the refrigerator kept me from thinking of my loneliness. There, the long night came on in perfect peace, and morning came.

  But . . . I just wanted to sleep under the stars.

  I wanted to wake up in the morning light.

  Aside from that, I just drifted, listless.

  However! I couldn’t exist like that. Reality is wonderful.

  I thought of the money my grandmother had left me—just enough. The place was too big, too expensive, for one person. I had to look for another apartment. There was no way around it. I thumbed through the listings, but when I saw so many places all the same lined up like that, it made my head swim. Moving takes a lot of time and trouble. It takes energy.

  I had no strength; my joints ached from sleeping in the kitchen day and night. When I realized how much effort moving would require—I’d have to pull myself together and go look at places. Move my stuff. Get a phone installed—I lay around instead, sleeping, in despair. It was then that a miracle, a godsend, came calling one afternoon. I remember it well.

  Dingdong. Suddenly the doorbell rang.

  It was a somewhat cloudy spring afternoon. I was intently involved in tying up old magazines with string while glancing at the apartment listings with half an eye but no interest, wondering how I was going to move. Flustered, looking like I’d just gotten out of bed, I ran out and without thinking undid the latch and opened the door. Thank god it wasn’t a robber. There stood Yuichi Tanabe.

  “Thank you for your help the other day,” I said. He was a nice young man, a year younger than me, who had helped out a lot at the funeral. I think he’d said he went to the same university I did. I was taking time off.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Did you decide on a place to live yet?”

  “Not even close.” I smiled.

  “I see.”

  “Would you like to come in for some tea?”

  “No. I’m on my way somewhere and I’m kind of in a hurry.” He grinned. “I just stopped by to ask you something. I was talking to my mother, and we were thinking you ought to come to our house for a while.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “In any case, why don’t you come over tonight around seven? Here’s the directions.”

  “Okay . . .” I said vacantly, taking the slip of paper.

  “All right, then, good. Mom and I are both looking forward to your coming.” His smile was so bright as he stood in my doorway that I zoomed in for a closeup on his pupils. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I think I heard a spirit call my name.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

  Bad as it sounds, it was like I was possessed. His attitude was so totally “cool,” though, I felt I could trust him. In the black gloom before my eyes (as it always is in cases of bewitchment), I saw a straight road leading from me to him. He seemed to glow with white light. That was the effect he had on me.

  “Okay, see you later,” he said, smiling, and left.

  Before my grandmother’s funeral I had barely known him. On the day itself, when Yuichi Tanabe showed up all of a sudden, I actually wondered if he had been her lover. His hands trembled as he lit the incense; his eyes were swollen from crying. When he saw my grandmother’s picture on the altar, again his tears fell like rain. My first thought when I saw that was that my love for my own grandmother was nothing compared to this boy’s, whoever he was. He looked that sad.

  Then, mopping his face with a handkerchief, he said, “Let me help with something.” After that, he helped me a lot.

  Yuichi Tanabe . . . I must have been quite confused if I took that long to remember when I’d heard grandmother mention his name.

  He was the boy who worked part-time at my grandmother’s favorite flower shop. I remembered hearing her say, any number of times, things like, “What a nice boy they have working there. . . . That Tanabe boy . . . today, again . . .” Grandmother loved cut flowers. Because the ones in our kitchen were not allowed to wilt, she’d go to the flower shop a couple of times a week. When I thought of that, I remembered him walking behind my grandmother, a large potted plant in his arms.

  He was a long-limbed young man with pretty features. I didn’t know anything more about him, but I might have seen him hard at work in the flower shop. Even after I got to know him a little I still had an impression of aloofness. No matter how nice his manner and expression, he seemed like a loner. I barely knew him, really.

  It was raining that hazy spring night. A gentle, warm rain enveloped the neighborhood as I walked with directions in hand.

  My apartment building and the one where the Tanabes lived were separated by Chuo Park. As I crossed through, I was inundated with the green smell of the night. I walked, sloshing down the shiny wet path that glittered with the colors of the rainbow.

  To be frank, I was only going because they’d asked me. I didn’t think about it beyond that. I looked up at the towering apartment building and thought, their apartment on the tenth floor is so high, the view must be beautiful at night. . . .

  Getting off the elevator, I was alarmed by the sound of my own footsteps in the hall. I rang the bell, and abruptly, Yuichi opened the door. “Come in.”

  “Thanks.” I stepped inside. The room was truly strange.

  First thing, as I looked toward the kitchen, my gaze landed with a thud on the enormous sofa in the living room. Against the backdrop of the large kitchen with its shelves of pots and pans—no table, no carpet, just “it.” Covered in beige fabric, it looked like something out of a commercial. An entire family could watch TV on it. A dog too big to keep in Japan could stretch out across it—sideways. It was really a marvelous sofa.

  In front of the large window leading onto the terrace was a jungle of plants growing in bowls, planters, and all kinds of pots. Looking around, I saw that the whole house was filled with flowers; there were vases full of spring blooms everywhere.

  “My mother says she’ll get away from work soon. Take a look around if you’d like. Should I give you the tour? Or pick a room, then I’ll know what kind of person you are,” said Yuichi, making tea.

  “What kind? . . .” I seated myself on the deep, comfy sofa.

  “I mean, what you want to know about a house and the people who live there, their tastes. A lot of people would say you learn a lot from the toilet,” he said, smiling, unconcerned. He had a very relaxed way of talking.

  “The kitchen,” I said.

  “Well, here it is. Look at whatever you want.”

  While he made tea, I explored the kitchen. I took everything in: the good quality of the mat on the wood floor and of Yuichi’s slippers; a practical minimum of well-worn kitchen things, precisely arranged. A Silverstone frying pan and a delightful German-made vegetable peeler—a peeler to make even the laziest grandmother enjoy slip, slipping those skins off.

  Lit by a small fluorescent lamp, all kinds of plates silently awaited their turns; glasses sparkled. It was clear that in spite of the disorder everything was of the finest quality. There were things with special uses, like . . . porcelain bowls, gratin dishes, gigantic platters, two beer steins. Somehow it was all very satisfying. I even opened the small refrigerator (Yuichi said it was okay)—everything was neatly organized, nothing just “left.”

  I looked around, nodding and murmuring approvingly, “Mmm, mmm.” It was a good kitchen. I fell in love with it at first sight.

  I went back and sat on the sofa, and out came hot tea.

  Usually, the first time I go to a house, face to face with people I barely know, I feel an immense loneliness. I saw myself reflected in the glass of the large terrace window while black gloom spread over the rain-hounded night panorama. I was tied by blood to no creature in this world. I could go anywhere, do anything. It was dizzying.

  Suddenly, to see that the world was so large, the cosmos so black. The unbounded fascination of it, the unbounded loneliness. . . For the first time, these days, I was touching it with these hands, these eyes.
I’ve been looking at the world half-blind, I thought.

  “Why did you invite me here?” I asked.

  “We thought you might be having a hard time,” Yuichi said, peering kindly at me. “Your grandmother was always so sweet to me, and look at this house, we have all this room. Shouldn’t you be moving?”

  “Yes. Although the landlord’s been nice enough to give me extra time.”

  “So why not move in with us?” he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  He struck just the right note, neither cold nor oppressively kind. It made me warm to him; my heart welled up to the point of tears. Just then, with the scratch of a key in the door, an incredibly beautiful woman came running in, all out of breath.

  I was so stunned, I gaped. Though she didn’t seem young, she was truly beautiful. From her outfit and dramatic makeup, which really wouldn’t do for daytime, I understood that hers was night work.

  Yuichi introduced me: “This is Mikage Sakurai.”

  “How do you do,” she said in a slightly husky voice, still panting, with a smile. “I’m Yuichi’s mother. My name is Eriko.”

  This was his mother? Dumbfounded, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Hair that rustled like silk to her shoulders; the deep sparkle of her long, narrow eyes; well-formed lips, a nose with a high, straight bridge—the whole of her gave off a marvelous light that seemed to vibrate with life force. She didn’t look human. I had never seen anyone like her.

  I was staring to the point of rudeness. “How do you do,” I replied at last, smiling back at her.

  “We’re so pleased to have you here,” she said to me warmly, and then, turning to Yuichi, “I’m sorry, Yuichi. I just can’t get away tonight. I dashed out for a second saying that I was off to the bathroom. But I’ll have plenty of time in the morning. I hope Mikage will agree to spend the night.” She was in a rush and ran to the door, red dress flying.