GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | FICTION
Kitchenby Banana Yoshimoto
Grove Press, New York, 1993, 152 pp, $22
A pair of long whimsical short stories about young Japanese women coming to terms with loss.
EXCERPT
he 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 floors, so dirty your slippers rurn black on the bottrom.
Strangely, it's better if this kind of kitchen is large. I learn 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 dawened 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 a 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 kitchen. 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.
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