Kitchen is the novel that truly made Banana Yoshimoto, considered one of Japan’s most esteemed contemporary writers, famous and earned her the acclamation of critics and the public alike. Published in 1987, it rapidly became a bestseller; to date, it has sold 20 million copies.
Kitchen earned Yoshimoto the Kaien Magazine New Writers’ Prize the year it was published. One of the judges, Nakamura Shin’ichiro, stated: “this is not a work written on a throne, and with a sensibility, that the older generation of which I am part could not have imagined. It is the product of an abandon completely indifferent to literary traditions. Its naive rejection of the very question of whether it does or does not conform to conventional concepts is precisely what makes it strike me as a new sort of literature.” It was so well-received by the public that culture-watchers deemed the frenzy over the author and her works “Bananamania.”
In 1992, her publisher extensively advertised the book in the U.S., thus catapulting her up the bestseller lists when it finally came out in 1993. Its New York Times review wasn’t overly effusive, but was indeed positive: “Banana Yoshimoto's first novel evokes this modern opulence even in its title, which uses the trendy English loan-word kitchen rather than the Japanese term, daidokoro. Ms. Yoshimoto was all of 24 years old when Kitchen was published in Japan in 1988; with its kooky young woman protagonist, Mikage Sakurai, the novel—a bestseller that is now in its 57th printing—clearly has spoken to the author's contemporaries.”
Kitchen was adapted into movies in 1989 (Japan) and 1997 (Hong Kong).
Kitchen, like Yoshimoto’s other works, combines traditional Japanese themes, contemporary liberal and American influences, and elements typical of manga comics, such as androgyny and psychic phenomena. Therefore, it is not surprising to find references to the Peanuts, Denny's, or Bewitched in a novella with a transgender mother figure.
