Kitchen (eBook)

Banana Yoshimoto (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
160 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-39329-9 (ISBN)

Infos

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'Lucid, earnest and disarming.' New York Times 'A perfect jewel of a novel.' LENA DUNHAM 'The sensuality is extraordinarily powerful.' Chicago Tribune Kitchen comprises Banana Yoshimoto's two classic tales about mothers, trans identity, bereavement, kitchens, love and tragedy. First published in 1987, it won two of Japan's most prestigious literary prizes, remained at the top of the bestseller lists for over a year and has gone on to be a much-loved international bestseller.

Banana Yoshimoto is the prize-winning and internationally bestselling author of Kitchen, N.P., Lizard, Amrita, Asleep and Goodbye Tsugumi. She has published ten books in English translation and her work has been translated and published in over thirty countries. She lives in Tokyo.

Textauszug

1

KITCHEN

The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!).

I love even incredibly dirty kitchens to distraction—vegetable droppings all over the floor, so dirty your slippers turn black on the bottom. Strangely, it’s better if this kind of kitchen is large. I lean up against the silver door of a towering, giant refrigerator stocked with enough food to get through a winter. When I raise my eyes from the oil-spattered gas burner and the rusty kitchen knife, outside the window stars are glittering, lonely.

Now only the kitchen and I are left. It’s just a little nicer than being all alone.

When I’m dead worn out, in a reverie, I often think that when it comes time to die, I want to breathe my last in a kitchen. Whether it’s cold and I’m all alone, or somebody’s there and it’s warm, I’ll stare death fearlessly in the eye. If it’s a kitchen, I’ll think, “How good.”

Before the Tanabe family took me in, I spent every night in the kitchen. After my grandmother died, I couldn’t sleep. One morning at dawn I trundled out of my room in search of comfort and found that the one place I could sleep was beside the refrigerator.

My parents—my name is Mikage Sakurai—both died when they were young. After that my grandparents brought me up. I was going into junior high when my grandfather died. From then on, it was just my grandmother and me.

When my grandmother died the other day, I was taken by surprise. My family had steadily decreased one by one as the years went by, but when it suddenly dawned on me that I was all alone, everything before my eyes seemed false. The fact that time continued to pass in the usual way in this apartment where I grew up, even though now I was here all alone, amazed me. It was total science fiction. The blackness of the cosmos.

Three days after the funeral I was still in a daze. Steeped in a sadness so great I could barely cry, shuffling softly in gentle drowsiness, I pulled my futon into the deathly silent, gleaming kitchen. Wrapped in a blanket, like Linus, I slept. The hum of the refrigerator kept me from thinking of my loneliness. There, the long night came on in perfect peace, and morning came.

But … I just wanted to sleep under the stars.

I wanted to wake up in the morning light.

Aside from that, I just drifted, listless.

* * *

However! I couldn’t exist like that. Reality is wonderful.

I thought of the money my grandmother had left me—just enough. The place was too big, too expensive, for one person. I had to look for another apartment. There was no way around it. I thumbed through the listings, but when I saw so many places all the same lined up like that, it made my head swim. Moving takes a lot of time and trouble. It takes energy.

I had no strength; my joints ached from sleeping in the kitchen day and night. When I realized how much effort moving would require—I’d have to pull myself together and go look at places. Move my stuff. Get a phone installed—I lay around instead, sleeping, in despair. It was then that a miracle, a godsend, came calling one afternoon. I remember it well.

* * *

Dingdong. Suddenly the doorbell rang.

It was a somewhat cloudy spring afternoon. I was intently involved in tying up old magazines with string while glancing at the apartment listings with half an eye but no interest, wondering how I was going to move. Flustered, looking like I’d just gotten out of bed, I ran out and without thinking undid the latch and opened the door. Thank god it wasn’t a robber. There stood Yuichi Tanabe.

“Thank you for your help the other day,” I said. He was a nice young man, a year younger than me, who had helped out a lot at the funeral. I think he’d said he went to the same university I did. I was taking time off.

“Not at all,” he said. “Did you decide on a place to live yet?”

“Not even close.” I smiled.

“I see.”

“Would you like to come in for some tea?”

“No. I’m on my way somewhere and I’m kind of in a hurry.” He grinned. “I just stopped by to ask you something. I was talking to my mother, and we were thinking you ought to come to our house for a while.”

“Huh?” I said.

“In any case, why don’t you come over tonight around seven? Here’s the directions.”

“Okay …” I said vacantly, taking the slip of paper.

“All right, then, good. Mom and I are both looking forward to your coming.” His smile was so bright as he stood in my doorway that I zoomed in for a closeup on his pupils. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I think I heard a spirit call my name.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

Bad as it sounds, it was like I was possessed. His attitude was so totally “cool,” though, I felt I could trust him. In the black gloom before my eyes (as it always is in cases of bewitchment), I saw a straight road leading from me to him. He seemed to glow with white light. That was the effect he had on me.

“Okay, see you later,” he said, smiling, and left.

* * *

Before my grandmother’s funeral I had barely known him. On the day itself, when Yuichi Tanabe showed up all of a sudden, I actually wondered if he had been her lover. His hands trembled as he lit the incense; his eyes were swollen from crying. When he saw my grandmother’s picture on the altar, again his tears fell like rain. My first thought when I saw that was that my love for my own grandmother was nothing compared to this boy’s, whoever he was. He looked that sad.

Then, mopping his face with a handkerchief, he said, “Let me help with something.” After that, he helped me a lot.

* * *

Yuichi Tanabe … I must have been quite confused if I took that long to remember when I’d heard grandmother mention his name.

He was the boy who worked part-time at my grandmother’s favorite flower shop. I remembered hearing her say, any number of times, things like, “What a nice boy they have working there. … That Tanabe boy … today, again …” Grandmother loved cut flowers. Because the ones in our kitchen were not allowed to wilt, she’d go to the flower shop a couple of times a week. When I thought of that, I remembered him walking behind my grandmother, a large potted plant in his arms.

He was a long-limbed young man with pretty features. I didn’t know anything more about him, but I might have seen him hard at work in the flower shop. Even after I got to know him a little I still had an impression of aloofness. No matter how nice his manner and expression, he seemed like a loner. I barely knew him, really.

It was raining that hazy spring night. A gentle, warm rain enveloped the neighborhood as I walked with directions in hand.

My apartment building and the one where the Tanabes lived were separated by Chuo Park. As I crossed through, I was inundated with the green smell of the night. I walked, sloshing down the shiny wet path that glittered with the colors of the rainbow.

To be frank, I was only going because they’d asked me. I didn’t think about it beyond that. I looked up at the towering apartment building and thought, their apartment on the tenth floor is so high, the view must be beautiful at night….

Getting off the elevator, I was alarmed by the sound of my own footsteps in the hall. I rang the bell, and abruptly, Yuichi opened the door. “Come in.”

“Thanks.” I stepped inside. The room was truly strange.

First thing, as I looked toward the kitchen, my gaze landed with a thud on the enormous sofa in the living room. Against the backdrop of the large kitchen with its shelves of pots and pans—no table, no carpet, just “it.” Covered in beige fabric, it looked like something out of a commercial. An entire family could watch TV on it. A dog too big to keep in Japan could stretch out across it—sideways. It was really a marvelous sofa.

In front of the large window leading onto the terrace was a jungle of plants growing in bowls, planters, and all kinds of pots. Looking around, I saw that the whole house was filled with flowers; there were vases full of spring blooms everywhere.

“My mother says she’ll get away from work soon. Take a look around if you’d like. Should I give you the tour? Or pick a room, then I’ll know what kind of person you are,” said Yuichi, making tea.

“What kind? …” I seated myself on the deep, comfy sofa.

“I mean, what you want to know about a house and the people who live there, their tastes. A lot of people would say you learn a...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.5.2024
• Übersetzer: Megan Backus
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-571-39329-2 / 0571393292
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-39329-9 / 9780571393299