Yearly Archives: 2022

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On Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen and Slowly Learning to Live With Grief

Book Reviews Recommended Reads

Book Cover for Kitchen, with a woman in a white dress standing shyly, with her arms behind her back.The novel begins with simple delight.

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!).

To break down how much this opening does in establishing its modus operandi as well as its narrator and main character, a young woman named Mikage, would take more than the fifty-seven words of that opening paragraph. In the process, I would probably remove far too much of the pleasure it creates, so I’ll just say that if a narrator or narration uses a parenthetical like the above paragraph does to describe something as potentially bland as white kitchen tile, you’ve got me: I am 100% over the moon and in your corner.

So as the short novel continues and we learn Mikage is an orphan raised by her grandmother—and that her “grandmother died the other day,” we realize we have been opened up to feel her grief as rawly as Mikage does. The only spot she’s able to sleep in the apartment she shared with her grandmother is the kitchen: “wrapped in a blanket, like Linus.” The joy of that opening paragraph has been shifted and shot through with grief.

This situation can’t (but could!) continue, so it’s with relief that we see Mikage begin to befriend Tanabe, a young man who worked in the flower shop Mikage’s grandmother frequented—and who liked Mikage’s grandmother enough that he helped with her funeral. He lives with his mother, and he arrives at Mikage’s apartment one day to suggest she come live with them for a bit. Just while she tries to figure things out. Mikage is a bit disconcerted—as most would be—but finds herself liking the idea more and more. Unsurprisingly, on her first visit to Tanabe and his mother’s apartment, she explores the kitchen first: it has a lived-in disorder balanced by the quality of its plates and various implements. “It was a good kitchen. I fell in love with it at first sight.”

Kitchen’s strength is this seeming simplicity. I will admit there are times where either the translation or Yoshimoto’s writing is too simple for me, perhaps missing some of the poetry I prefer or the verve of that opening paragraph, but those moments are few and far in-between. There are far more moments like this for devastating truthfulness:

In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions, much of one’s life history is etched in the senses. And things of no particular importance, or irreplaceable things, can suddenly resurface in a café one winter night. (p. 75)

So many of my favorite moments are ones such as these—reading, playing games, sitting on the porch and staring up at the night sky—letting those memories of important and unimportant things suddenly resurface in my mind’s eye. It’s why for Mikage—and the reader—that grief is not something you just get over or get through, it’s something that remains, becoming a companion that may hold its peace for any number of days, only to return unexpectedly with something as simple as a glancing outside a window of a café.

Most English copies of Kitchen come with a companion piece within its covers, a long story titled “Moonlight Shadow.” Knowing it was a companion piece, I was expecting to find the same characters as Kitchen, perhaps further along their respective paths, but instead it’s a story of two other young people also struggling with the loss of someone close to them: this time, a significant other.

It’s striking in the way grief plays out in similar ways, just with varied surface details. Where Kitchen’s Mikage obsessed over kitchens and cooking, the narrator of “Moonlight Shadow,” Satsuki, has taken up running to cope with the loss of her boyfriend in a car crash. She runs every morning, even when she’s not feeling particularly well, and has started to lose far too much weight. Hiragi, the brother of her deceased boyfriend, lost his girlfriend in the same automobile accident, and he’s gone to the extreme of wearing her uniform to school.

What “Moonlight Shadow” adds to the struggle of learning to live with grief is knowing that you will continue on past the death you cannot forget. That the one you once did everything with will no longer participate in your life as they once did—that you somehow survived and they did not. The story ends with Satsuki calling out to her boyfriend, hoping he will hear her:

Hitoshi:

I’ll never be able to be here again. As the minutes slide by, I move on. The flow of time is something I cannot stop. I haven’t a choice. I go.

One caravan has stopped, another starts up. There are people I have yet to meet, others I’ll never see again. People who are gone before you know it, people who are just passing through. Even as we exchange hellos, they seem to grow transparent. I must keep living with the flowing river before my eyes.

The simple things are how we live and love, as well as how we learn to live with grief, and the simple things are how we are able to continue, even as we cannot forget those we have lost.

In Appreciation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Book Reviews Recommended Reads

Book Cover to Things Fall ApartSometimes a reader is simply not prepared for the world they encounter within a book’s pages. “This dude is hard to like,” is my strongest memory from my first reading of Things Fall Apart and its main character, Okonkwo. This giant of a man is an often terrifying presence to those around him: opinionated, prideful, and patriarchal as all get-out. In one fit of rage, he even fires a gun at one of his wives, who barely escapes with her life. It would have been hard to be more ideologically at odds with a character than I was with him, and I was left feeling dismayed that I did not connect much to what was considered a great work of literature.

What I didn’t notice so strongly upon that first reading, some twenty or so years ago, was that I didn’t put the book down, even when I was most disagreeing with Okonkwo. The reasons for this are so much more clear to me now, on a second reading. From the very start, Chinua Achebe makes the world of his historical novel come to life—a reader is left feeling like they are living in Iboland, before and during the beginnings of European colonization. And he makes Okonkwo hard not to respect, despite all his faults.

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to to Mbaino. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and nights. (opening paragraph, Things Fall Apart)

It is this careful balancing of contrasts that drives the novel’s power. Okonkwo is as he is because his father was frequently in debt, preferred music to physical labor, and was deemed cowardly by their community. We can even feel sympathy (or at the very least understanding) for Okonkwo when holding to his personal ideal of masculinity and identity costs him dearly. When the village’s oracle states that Okonkwo’s adopted son must die, Okonkwo not only allows this to happen to his adopted son—a boy he loves more than his own flesh-and-blood son, Nwoye—Okonkwo even takes part in the ritual killing so as not to be seen as weak by his clan. And for weeks afterward, the man is unable to understand why he has no desire to work. The killing had to be done, and so he did it. Grief is not in his vocabulary, even if he cannot help but feel it.

The tale is more than a Shakespearean tragedy, however: it’s seen as the defining work of post-colonial literature because of how it uses contrasting details to highlight strengths and weaknesses of Ibo culture before the arrival of Europeans, as well as the damages (and benefits) Europeans brought with them. As Kwame Anthony Appiah states in his excellent introduction to the Everyman’s edition of the novel, “Achebe’s rigorous accounting includes columns both for profit and loss.”

The first Christian missionary to the region develops strong relationships with the community, becoming friends even with those he is not able to convert to his religion. When he becomes sick and departs back to England, his replacement is of the fire and brimstone variety, pushing the community to a violent confrontation that ultimately leads to Okonkwo’s death. Another notation in the column for profit, or benefit, is both missionaries’ objection to the local culture’s tradition of leaving twin babies in the woods to die (twins are seen as evil).

Even with all this careful balancing, there is a clear condemnation of the myopic and biased view of the European colonizers. By the novel’s end, we have seen the breadth of Iboland’s culture: its economy, its family life, its religion, its system of justice, even its love of wrestling (the frenzied, communal description of a wrestling event is not all that different from how a writer would try to bring to life a modern game of high school football). It is a place with its own traditions and values. Some better or worse, perhaps, but not on a qualitative whole worse than that of the Europeans who have recently arrived.

So on its final page, when the novel switches to the European viewpoint of the local district commissioner, a reader is hard pressed not to recoil when the commissioner notes the death of Okonkwo as a mere curiosity or anecdote—something to use in a book he is writing about his experiences in Africa.

One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. (final paragraph, Things Fall Apart)

Unlike Achebe’s “rigorous accounting” (as Appiah put it), this is unbalanced accounting of the worst kind. The commissioner has but one column for the Ibo—primitive—and he twists all evidence to fit this or ignores it entire. And Achebe has forced his readers to see this clearly, with no ifs, ands, or buts. What a marvel.