I’ve always lived with that knowledge rooted in my being.”
Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time. “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. They have a deep melancholy to them, and despite being about rather mundane things that eventually touch each and every one of us, they had a surreal bend (the second flirts with some magical realism toward the end) that somehow made me feel them all the more deeply. Both stories see the protagonists grapple with their tragedies and grief, but they are also very much about hope and love.
In Moonlight Shadow, a different young woman loses her lover in an accident. Loss is the main theme in Kitchen, as well as in its companion story: In the first, a young woman struggles to overcome the passing of her grandmother, her last living relative. What struck me the most about Yoshimoto’s simple tales is how, despite (or perhaps because of?) her airy, even whimsical prose, the most ordinary scenes took on a dreamlike, eerie quality that somehow made them seem like the most profound of epiphanies. Kitchen collects the titular novella, as well as a short story titled Moonlight Shadow, partly inspired by the Mike Oldfield song of the same name.
Year of publication: 1988 (translated into English in 1993) Title: Kitchen (original Japanese title: キッチン)
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