Review : Kitchen

Posted by kay on April 13, 2009 2:31 am in 4 stars reads | 3 comments

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Pages : 150
Genre : fiction
My Rating :

Despite being a short read, I found Kitchen to be really inspiring and incredibly realistic. With simple words and short sentences, the author touched difficult subjects like death, nostalgia and loneliness. Still, the pages were also filled with hope and kindness, without never being excessively pessimistic or impossibly romantic. Her style is direct, poetic, with an honesty I haven’t seen enough in litterature; it’s also a style that proves that you don’t need crazy metaphores and thirteen-syllables-words to make your point, even with the most difficult emotions. I could recognize my thoughts in Mikage’s, the character of Kitchen.

When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely. Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear scattered into the blackness of time.

Despite some depressing thoughts, the story left me with a light feeling, a twinkle of hope and joy. My rating might have been a little higher if I hadn’t been surprised by the second half of the book. There are two stories in it, which confused me at first since I began reading Moonlight Shadows thinking it was the second part of the book. Maybe that’s why I felt a little let down by that story, but I couldn’t connect as much with its characters as I had with Mikage.

Still, I already took note of the “Banana shelf” at my library, planning to read more from her.