Kitchen

Aware of two recent titles by Banana Yoshimoto, I wasn't convinced how much point there was in them. She hasn't got much in common with Dick Francis but once you've read one you've very much got the idea. So, I went back to the original, reputation-making Kitchen. Firstly in a very warm 'garden' and then indoors with the Beethoven Violin Concerto and Brahms 4 on the wireless.

She's somewhere in between therapy and literature, indulging in deep feelings of both loneliness and profound attachment,

The times of great happiness and great sorrow were too intense; it was impossible to reconcile them with the routine of daily life. 

And from this template of a 100-page novella come all the others. Mikage's back story is one of serial family bereavement. We are told of the early deaths of her parents and then grandparents by the end of the second page and then Eriko, the transgender mother/ex-father of her friend Yuichi, is killed, too. If that is a thoroughgoing way of establishing a young person's status as 'alone in the world' then the otherwise gratuitous trans issue is no less subtle in questioning gender roles. Eriko is awesomely beautiful even having had plastic surgery in the way that maybe similarly 'magic realist' Haruki Murakami has a character whose ears are so beautiful they stop traffic. But food is of crucial importance to these people, Mikage's penchant for kitchen's apparently being something to do with 1980's consumerism and cuisine being their associated aesthetic of choice. 

The story gathers pace in a sublime act of devotion, delivering a second helping of the best-ever katsudon - pork with egg over rice- to Yuichi in an episode reprised later in Dreaming of Kimchee. And after triangular jealousies, chaste soul-mate devotion, trauma, loss and outrageous levels of gorgeousness, it looks as if Mikage and Yuichi have a future.

I have chronically worried whether Banana Yoshimoto is 'any good' or a 'guilty pleasure' and, despite my asking, nobody's ever told me. She could easily be both without ever being quoted in the betting for the Nobel Prize for Literature as Murakami often is. I don't think Sebastian Faulks is, either. I don't feel guilty about the pleasure gained from the music of Cliff Richard that is rarely compared with that of Bob Dylan.

So that is the answer.

I may or may not need Dead-End Memories and The Premonition. Having been given the titles, the books almost seem to write themselves, as would Steward's Enquiry by Dick Francis or John Francome but at least one knows what to expect, one is unlikely to be disappointed and they are tremendous successful authors. In the meantime, with itchy fingers so intent on ordering something new for the library, it doesn't need any and is serving its purpose. If I disposed of books once read I'd have a spare room in which to put something else but I don't, for good reason.