Banana Yoshimoto
Kitchen

----- City Pop: Life on Japanese Telephone Lines.

(Tokyo Blues) Incipit.
There is no place in the world I love more than the kitchen. It doesn't matter where it is, how it's made: as long as it's a kitchen, a place where food is made, I'm happy. If possible, I prefer them functional and well-used. Maybe with lots of dry, clean towels and white tiles that sparkle. Even incredibly dirty kitchens delight me. I like them with the floor scattered with tiny bits of vegetables, so dirty that the soles of slippers turn black quickly, and large, excessively large. With a huge fridge full of supplies that could easily last an entire winter, an imposing fridge.
And if by chance I look up from the grease-spattered stove, outside the stars shine sadly.

The opening of Kitchen is one of the most beautiful and luminous I've ever read. Published in 1988, it's a novel about a post-adolescence, of great popular success and yet with an allure that confines it in almost absolute solitude. Mikage Sakurai lost her parents very early, after the death of her last relative, her grandmother, she is completely alone and is taken in by the Tanabe family.
The narrative is mostly set in nighttime domesticity.
Inside are indoor plants, electronic gadgets, a centrifuge, outside are flower shops.
One in the morning, a phone rings, the receiver in the dark. Mikage associated the phone with the desolation of the phonebook itself. But in a future darkness, the calm voice of Yūichi would travel through the wires and surpass the darkness of those hours. Sleeping at night was the thing Mikage feared the most. The darkness of the cosmos. She met her eyes in the large window where the night scene, veiled by rain, faded into the darkness. In the undefined flow of time and moods, much of the story appeared inscribed in the senses, and things of no importance, irreplaceable, returned suddenly. Mikage saw with her own eyes how immense the world was, and the depth of darkness and the infinite allure and solitude of it all. Mikage only wanted to sleep peacefully in the starlight, lulled by the breath of plants, whose shapes in front of the window looked down on the streets. Mikage wished to be happy, Mikage wished for all the people she loved to be happier than they were.
Mikage wanted to wake up in the glow of the morning, in a room full of light like a solarium.

At the end of an autumn, Eriko is dead. Eriko no longer existed, nowhere.
Eriko was Jūji, in a previous state of existence. A man who cried couldn't take a taxi, it was a trap to be born and be a man. In his demi-world, the nocturnal beauty of his crying was unforgettable. Mikage began another day of reality, thrown into a pale and still time.
Thinking about how life repeated itself made her shiver. The thought that there would be a tomorrow, and then a day after tomorrow, and then a week had never seemed so unbearable. It was as if in the people who were close to people, there was always death. The people she loved had gone away or were still with her, but it wasn't the same. Presences so conspicuously absent that they shone like neon signs. Trees collapsing, ice melting. A strange sense of emptiness. Many were the days when not even love could help. One day or another, everyone would be lost in the darkness of time and disappear, and that other one had grown old, she thought moved.
It was just her imagination, and imagination was sometimes worse than reality.
A pineapple plant. In that world, there was no place for sad things, no place at all.

Rows of windows in the tall building suspended in blue light. The elevators went up and down, shining in silence as if about to dissolve into the evening's darkness. Mikage wondered which window was Yūichi's among so many others, all the same. In the distance, a blimp hung in the sky. Who knows where.
At the traffic light, people passing in front of the windshield shone in the headlights' light. The phone booths on the streets in the late evening seemed to shine, twinkling. Night visited their rooms, Mikage watched from the TV at low volume a cooking show she had recorded. Again shadows descended, the same over the whole earth, a night where everyone struggled with drowsy and restless sleep. The whole house, in silent stillness, listened to the invisible that was there. In that transparent night that seemed almost to hear the distant sound of stars crossing the sky, salad, pie, stew, croquettes, fried tofu, vegetables boiled with soy sauce, sweet and sour pork, Chinese dumplings. Omelette, tempura, sashimi, shrimps, wild boar. Tsukimi udon. Katsudon. Under the lamp of that small room suspended in darkness, sensing the presence of the night landscape behind the curtains. Nostalgia has a utopian dimension that exploits a fundamental and indispensable ability of the human mind, that of being able to project itself elsewhere.

Kitchen is a short novel of just under a hundred pages that generates ghostly visions, it should be read at night. Inside, certain topics were addressed long before Tokyo's urban solitude, cross-dressing, gender dysphoria, resulting mtf transition, here perceived also as a necessity for complementarity, happiness, love, death, trauma spirits, the effects of mourning faced by the young, family as choice, became famous themes turned into material for TV shows and shopping channels.
Banana Yoshimoto, Mahoko chose herself a delightful nom de plume.
Incorporeal confluence in a Naples restaurant, Keys to Shibuya - City Zen.
(Photo taken at 12:24 PM, November 13, 2008). Kitchen will be the memory of a surreal time.
The kitchen is a minimal space, the kitchen was already a liminal space-time. An immersive sensory, out-of-body experience. It is the dead of night, outside it is dark and silent, nothing moves. Quiet Life.

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(Kitchin 3) Blue hour.
The blue hour is that passage between night and dawn when everything is silent. It is not an hour, but just a brief segment of time. A moment before the dawn, there is a pause of silence. The nocturnal fliers are already asleep, the diurnal ones are not yet awake. The only moment when it seems that nature has ceased to breathe.

The sky moved slowly, Satsuki had only recently discovered that in the blue of dawn all things appeared so, as if purified in the echoing air of hymns. The feeling was that the previous night had been just a dream. It had already happened a long time ago, they had already talked in a dream, she had heard their voices echoing in an empty house in the absolute silence of the early morning hours. Satsuki saw him again in another dream, on a night that was real. She prayed to remember everything about that opportunity, but in the succession of sleep and awakenings that would come, this too was destined to become a dream. Urara, immersed in the ‘Tanabata phenomenon’, a correspondence between the thoughts of the world of the dead and the pain of the world of the living. Something many people cannot see, because they simply cannot.
七夕, the seventh night. Vega and Altair separated by the river of the sky, the Milky Way. The song of eternal regret.
That something would pass and flee away, and indeed then it went, mingling with the waves of people filling the morning streets. It was not her consciousness that disconnected, but the fabric of tangible reality containing holes. Urara was the flow of time existing while watching the river flowing. Exit: Plenilunio.

Kitchen/Moonlight Shadow are home, a domestic portal, an aliasing in a non-place.
The home is an explicit. The kitchen is a room lit on the 9th floor, suspended in silence, in the void of night. A state of hypnagogic flow, a temporal phase shift.
A sense of suspension that allows the opening of a domestic threshold and the generation of an intermediate zone.
A bliss, an inner place, a panorama of consciousness. Atarashī Hi No Tanjō. Hitoshi. Still Life.