

Unlike many Japanese writers active in the last decade, Yoshimoto’s translations into English tend to lag five to ten years behind their original publication date. The history of her work in English translation may well create an illusion of eternal youth in the Anglosphere. Her most enduring stories date to the late 80s and early 90s. Banana Yoshimoto was in her early 20s when she published Kitchen, her most famous novel in Japan and internationally. This was, perhaps, an overpowered attack by a senior statesman of letters against an author whose work had only been in print for four years. Kenzaburō Ōe, today Japan’s only living Nobel laureate for literature, continued that, “Murakami and Yoshimoto convey the experience of a youth politically uninvolved or disaffected, content to exist within a late adolescent or post adolescent subculture.” Kitchen and its companion story, “Moonlight Shadow,” are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul.In a famous 1990 essay, one of the most respected living writers in Japan lamented that, “Serious literature and a literary readership have gone into a chronic decline, while a new tendency has emerged over the last several years … a largely economic one … reflected in the fact that the novels of certain young writers like Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto each sells several hundred thousand copies.”

As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale that recalls early Marguerite Duras.

Grieving, she is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who was once his father), Eriko. Mikage, the heroine of Kitchen, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. You can read this before Kitchen PDF EPUB full Download at the bottom.īanana Yoshimoto’s novels have made her a sensation in Japan and all over the world, and Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, is an enchantingly original and deeply affecting book about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan.

Here is a quick description and cover image of book Kitchen written by Banana Yoshimoto which was published in. Brief Summary of Book: Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
