One of the many attractions of Banana Yoshimoto Kitchen’s novel is that it deals with feelings that everyone can relate to. Everyone has been hungry, and images of hunger, food, and meals abound in the novel. Other common feelings also arise, especially sadness and loneliness.
At the beginning of the book, the reader discovers that the protagonist, Mikage Sakurai, was orphaned as a child and that her family had dwindled until she was the only one left. Mikage feels that she is truly “alone”. At one point, he says: “We live like the humblest worms. Always defeated, defeated, we prepare dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying.”
However, despite the many sad events in the book, his tone is rarely sad. This is because, despite all the negative turns of events in their lives, the characters know how to deal with unhappiness. Mikage, Eriko, and Yuichi know how to be happy.
At first, Yuichi doesn’t seem to have a good way of dealing with the things that worry him. This fact is mentioned for the first time by his mother, Eriko. Eriko tells Mikage that she knows that she has not been the perfect mother for Yuichi, because although he is “a good boy”, there are some things that he could not teach him, things that “escaped him”. Eriko knows that he did not teach Yuichi an effective way to deal with other people and as a result, “he is confused about emotional things and is strangely distant with people.”
Yuichi shows this in the way he reacts to Eriko’s death. Avoid calling Mikage to tell her until a month after it happened. His reasoning was that telling Mikage would make Eriko’s death real to him. Yuichi didn’t want to have to deal with Mikage’s reaction. When he finally calls her and they sit down to talk about it, Yuichi is drunk. In fact, he has been drinking often in the weeks after Eriko’s death.
Yuichi learns to happen when, still feeling terrible about the death of his mother, he goes to see Chika, a close friend of the family. Chika sends him to an inn where he can be alone to think. Yuichi had been thinking about living with Mikage, but felt like he needed to “get over it” first. While at the inn, Yuichi realizes that he really wants to be with her. Yoshimoto ends his novel with Yuichi’s cheerful declaration that he will pick up Mikage at the station. Readers have a feeling that he has finally recovered and can be happy with Mikage now.
Eriko had also had a time in her life when she was sad and confused about what to do. Yuichi tells Mikage that her “real” mother was another woman and that Eriko, who is transgender, is Yuichi’s biological father. “After my real mother died,” Yuichi says, “Eriko left her job, picked me up, and wondered, ‘What do I want to do now?’ felt the same confusion that Yuichi felt after Eriko’s death.
This man then adopted the life that would allow him to be happy. Yuichi explains, “What he decided was, ‘Become a woman.’ It was this decision that allowed Eriko to become the person she really wanted to be. She wrote in the letter to Yuichi, “But I have happily chosen to make my body my fortune. I am beautiful! I am dazzling! … I have loved my life.” The way Eriko chose to live made her happy.
Another aspect of Eriko’s happiness was her philosophy of life. She believed that one could be happy despite bad things happening. She tells Mikage, “The ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It was not up to me. It was clear that the best thing I could do was adopt a kind of confused joy.” She also expressed this philosophy in her letter to Yuichi. There are “people who do abominable things,” he told his son, so there was a possibility that something might happen to him. Despite that, he wrote, Eriko would continue to live her life.
For Mikage, the key to happiness is remembering the good things in life. Often times, what Mikage loves has to do with food. She makes a living working for a cooking magazine, but more than that, she really enjoys cooking. Her idea of paradise is “living like a housewife”. Enjoy the sight of well-prepared food as much as you enjoy eating.
Mikage also loves kitchens. Yoshimoto opens his novel with Mikage’s words: “The place I like the most in the world is the kitchen.” In the scene where Mikage collapses and cries on the bus, she takes comfort in seeing a kitchen. She goes from despair to happiness in that scene simply by looking at something that gives her pleasure.
The three main characters in Kitchen have discovered how to be happy in a world that does not always facilitate happiness. Yoshimoto never allows his characters to get desperate. “If a person has not experienced true despair, they grow old without knowing how to assess where they are in life, without understanding what joy really is,” says Eriko. Yoshimoto lets just enough desperation into Kitchen to create dramatic suspense. Will Mikage and Yuichi end up alone or will they stay together? Because Yoshimoto has left his characters well equipped to deal with life’s quirks and unpleasant surprises, the reader has every reason to be optimistic.