Books_Heal-_Kitchen_by_Banana_Yoshimoto

Books Heal Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen is a healing story of how a woman, Mikage-- who loses all her family members and an important person is healed, and also a story that heals me. Mikage, who suffers from the death of both parents from childhood, grows up with her grandparents. The story begins when Mikage loses both her grandparents. The death of her grandmother makes Mikage unable to carry on her normal life. She withdraws from the university after her grandmother’s funeral, and she spends most her time sleeping in the kitchen with the humming of the refrigerator. After a few days, Yuichi, a man who works in the flower shop where Mikage’s grandmother often went to, invited Mikage to move to his home and live with Yuichi and his “mother”. Yuichi’s “mother”-- Eriko was actually his father who became a transsexual after his wife’s death. Mikage, Yuichi, and Eriko live together for a period of time. During that time, Mikage seems to recover from her grandmother’s death and has a very good time living with them. She and Eriko often spend their time talking in the kitchen. Mikage’s favorite place in the world is kitchen. In Japanese houses, the kitchen is the place for both cooking and dining. It is a place for family members to get together; it’s the center of the whole family. Thus, kitchen helps healing Mikage as being a companion and a substitute for Mikage’s lost family members that keeps company with Mikage through her bad times. Mikage regains her energy to live on after a while. However, after she gets a job to work as an assistant for a cooking teacher and moves out, Eriko was killed. The death of Eriko forces Mikage to reconsider the eternal losses—the death of beloved ones. It is the time that Mikage finds out that she always lives in a sense of fear of losing loved ones, even during the happy time living with Eriko and Yuichi. From the death of Yuichi’s “mother”, Mikage has realized that to live is to suffer. And the strong power that carries her along to find out many things about life and death is her love for Yuichi. She said, “ No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive (59).” Mikage, going through so many great losses for life, finally figured out that “ Over and over, we begin again (103).” That is how the world works. Mikage has to carry on her life journey all alone until the day she herself dies. Before that day, she has to start life over and over again. The story ends in the circumstance that Mikage and Yuichi both go traveling. Mikage at last finds out that Yuichi is so important and she wants to be together with him. She carries the delicious food and takes a taxi for a long distance to bring it to Yuichi. It’s an interesting connection between food-- the final key to their relation and the kitchen that means so much to Mikage. It is like that the food—a part of kitchen and family relation finally becomes the salvation to Mikage. And it may also symbolize the connection between Mikage and Yuichi— as a family. While reading Kitchen, I’ve led to my own memory. I have never experienced any close friend’s or family member’s death yet, but I still find the similarity between Mikage and I—that is to lose (may refers to something else but death) loved one(s). Throughout the process of reading Kitchen, I could not help thinking of my ex-girlfriend. We met each other two years ago in the French course held in NTNU. She is the kind of person I would never have the chance to know if I had not been to the French course. She was 29 years old and had a nice job in business industry while I was 17 and a senior high school student who was going to major in English. But we met there, and we fell in love. Then we grew the power by accident to connect each other’s minds/souls. For example, I could feel her heartache and she could feel my headache. I don’t know if it was the differences between us that brought me to somewhere so deep I had never been to. The sex and the dates and everything were all unimaginable perfect. I felt like knowing so many things for the first time in my life. Maybe that was what brought us out of the “normal” track of life. We were crazy, dying for seeing each other for every single second. And things were getting out of control. She would skip the business meeting to go out with me. I tasted the bliss of life for the first time (I can be sure if it was the same for her), but the crazy bliss scared her. After two or three months of being together, she wrote me a long e-mail. She said that it was too unbearable for her because she had made a lot of efforts to keep her life—both mental and economic ones—stable. She could not afford to lose the life she had. The concern of losing her life made her uncomfortable that also affected our relationship and me. So she decided that it was the time for our relationship to end. I lost her, as a lover, from then on. At last, after much struggling and several fights, we remain our relation as friends now. She still lives in Taipei, and we stay in touch now and then. But every single detail in Kitchen, which talks about the loss and the missing, brings me back to my memories. I suffered for those mind journeys led by Kitchen (or Mikage') back to the painful days after my ex-girlfriend left me. I had done all things I could to try to be her lover again, but I failed. I started to go out very often and got drunk all the time. I went out with a female friend and had sex for several times; I skipped a lot of classes for the hangover or lack of sleep; I had an one night stand with a male friend; I went to a pub and got drunk and was raped by someone I did not even know. The perfect and blissful mind connection between us turned out to be the biggest suffering when I could even feel her having sex with someone else. It was so unbearable. I started to cut myself again and was considered having depression and was taking medicine for that. I was not healed; I was just suspended from the insane acts when I realized I was raped. I might indeed have a certain kind of sickness that was not only some loss. Being carried along with the plots in Kitchen, somehow a kind of equivalence has grown inside me to almost identify myself being Mikage, to make her story into my own one. It is very interesting because Mikage is only a character in a story; she’s not even real. But I have easily identified Mikage as another me, a part of me carrying on the story. It is like I myself am Mikage, living, suffering, and growing in Kitchen. Finally she is saved in the end. She is saved by love. I was also saved at the moment Mikage was saved because Mikage was the suffering me. In the end, I felt like I’ve been saved too. The fascinating power of reading books is the power of taking the readers into the stories and leading the readers to go on mind journeys. The story opens a door to another life which is totally different from the readers’. In some way, it is like to give readers the power, which is impossible to gain in real life, to go into other people’s minds and life, only that the other people may be unreal. Once the readers are carried along by that life (the plots) created in the story, the sense of identification grows in readers’ minds, and that’s how readers identify the characters in stories as themselves. This may be the main factor that makes story have fascinating power. And the power can either be the power of healing, or the power of being unmatchable (in martial stories or sci-fi), or any other kind of power that the readers lack for in reality. Take myself for example, I always lack of the power to recover my loss and pain so that makes me especially fond of stories like Kitchen which has the power to heal. And the fascinating power is one of the important reasons that make so many people (at least for myself) addicted to reading.