Love in Tokyo

Yoshimoto was 24 in 1988 when Kitchen was published in Japan,and the book novella,really set off a wave of Bananamania. Five years later,the English translation brought global fame,drawing in part from the familiarity that readers elsewhere discerned in the patch of Tokyo evoked by Yoshimoto: it was less to do with the Westernised markers of popular culture and more about the ways in which her characters located a sense of belonging in the anonymity of an urban landscape. Japanese literature had traditionally cleaved to cultural and stylistic coordinates a new generation of Japanese writers like Yoshimoto cut adrift from that and inquired what it meant to be and to belong. Rescue,it transpired,was to be found in ordinary things a good cup of green tea,a noodle soup,just observing,as her heroine in The Lake does,the placeness of a place,an arresting dream sequence,a fulfilling assignment.

In Kitchen,twentysomething Mikage is dealing with the death of her grandmother,her last living relative. Orphaned,she finds solace in kitchen spaces. Recovery comes in the form of Yuichi,a year younger than her and a friend of her grandmother8217;s he asks her to move in with him and his mother Eriko,unbelievably beautiful giver of unconditional love and refuge. Its a wild family,they are obsessed with gadgets,not so much for their utility but as a constant measure of the capacity to be surprised by what the world has to offer,they live a late-night life with group activities arranged around Erikos nightclub timings. Eriko,in any case,is not exactly your average mom she is,technically,Yuichis former father,having had her gender changed upon his wifes death,as a way of dealing with the loss. However,it will be her brutal murder that will really test Yuichi and Mikages capacity to belong by being true,good and,because there is no hippie-ish rejection of the material equation here,ambitious.

After Kitchen,Yoshimotos stories got more complex,and curiously self-involved. The Lake now though now is misleading as it8217;s taken six years to be translated into English returns her to the ambition and form of Kitchen. Chihiro,a painter of murals who mixes her idealistic view of art with a worldly guile in getting the job done,has left her provincial hometown for Tokyo after suffering a personal loss. From her new window,she would spy a young man staring back at her,they would nod at each other,and of course that would start a friendship. Nakajima,strikingly thin and possessed with an amazing capacity to concentrate,is studying genetics and wants to pursue his research in Paris. But he is also bound by a loss and the memory of a harrowing experience at the hands of a cult. What does it mean,he and Chihiro will inquire,to be human,to pare down your identity to basics,to remove the accretions of negative experiences,to sort out the essentials,and to do so in the pursuit of an ambition to succeed?

This is a book weighed down by much more sadness than Kitchen was,but in the end it is,like that debut,about getting by and getting on.

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