From this cultural archetype, the readers may understand Banana’s intentions when she placed two stories in her book (the stories of Mikage-Yuichi and Satsuki-Hitoshi), which is formally in three parts (Part I includes Kitchen and Full Moon, while part II is Moonlight Shadow). The three short stories are about a grandmother who dies because of her old age, a mother who dies due to a crazy man with an obsession, and a lover who dies due to a traffic accident. Instead of making the reader feel sympathetic to the survivors of these losses, these details lead to the impression that these people live on with their own situations. From a comparative perspective, we can view this as if it is an interior power of a hybrid narrative that is dominated by the impermanence of life. And so here we have a love story. But one that reads like a puppet show, with Mikage tied to death’s right hand, and Yuichi to his left. For many reasons deeply rooted in social structure, politics and laws, Shinto and Buddhist traditions, and myriad other factors, Japan as a culture places deep and sacred value in death. The second story of Kitchen is Full Moon, which also centers around Yuichi and Mikage. The opening informs the readers of another disaster, the death of mother Eriko. Mikage at this time has overcome her loss, left Yuichi’s house, and lived on her own; Yuichi takes a turn at coping with loss. The father–mother died. The two parts of the book start off with death. Banana seems to demonstrate vulnerable cases that are very Japanese. From the traditional period to the present day, sudden deaths are mainly caused by detrimental earthquakes and tsunamis; if not for these two reasons, it is the two atomic bombs that destroyed two cities in Japan. Mikage becomes rooted in the kitchen. It becomes her compass by which she compares all homes that she has ever entered. Upon arriving, she takes over cooking for Yuichi and his mother Eriko, a transvestite who runs an all night club. Both lead busy lives and emit positive energy, encouraging Mikage to engage in her newfound passion of cooking. The three make up a new family unit until Mikage can recover from all the death around her. In Kitchen, Mikage Sakurai had just lost her grandmother, the last person in her family to pass away. Alone in the world and unable to cope with her university schedule, Mikage falls into a bleak existence. One day, a classmate named Yuichi Tanabe invites her to live with him and his mother in their apartment because Mikage's grandmother had a profound effect on him. Although reluctant to accept the kindness, Mikage agrees and the Tanabe's couch becomes her new home.

Bac LH, Hang DTT, Phuong LN (2021) The Bakhtin Circle’s dialog in Vietnam. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8:159. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00840-8 The happy lives of the four are short. The car accident takes Hiiragi and Satsuki’s lovers away suddenly. Therefore, they seem to yearn for an opportunity for the last good-bye, somehow, between the living and the dead realms. Belief in the grace of life/nature has kept them hopeful. The encounter with Urara on the bridge is similar to fate. Urara plays the role of a mysterious prophet. She can understand Satsuki’s deepest thoughts, know Satsuki’s phone number based on her intuition, figure out there will be a once-in-a-blue-moon event on this bridge, and so on. Their first conversation is such a surprise for Satsuki because it is as if Urara knows everything about her already. Satsuki is so overcome that she cannot react to the requests and conclusions about a miraculous meeting with someone that can only happen once in a hundred years. If you know you have six months to live, you’d be mad to wish away an hour. So why do we find ourselves wishing away days, even the bad ones? Because we so often refuse to believe that life ends. That we don’t just go on living. And this unavoidable truth is at the heart of Kitchen. Due to the complexity of the layers of metaphor, Banana’s stories seem to barely have any connection, which, in fact, is untrue. Its complexity reaches an advanced level at which the characters themselves can produce different meanings as readers reinterpret and try to relate them to their personal lives. The storyline is written in a postmodernist style, and there are few details to create dramatic conflicts such as in older forms of narrative found in Akutagawa or Mishima’s fiction. However, this does not mean that this story has no conflict. This narrative still maintains conflicts; they appear in the depth of cultural meaning instead of being expressed explicitly, creating forever internal conversations and making the “meanings” of the story change according to how the readers interpret it at different times. Chosen, constructed families feel warmer than many societal more acceptable constructs. The protagonist gets unhappy at her university and with her former, more conventional boyfriend, while her oddball roommates don't judge her, but support her in overcoming grief.Bondanella P (1997) Umberto eco and the open text: semiotics, fiction, popular culture. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Mikage Sakurai has lost her dearly beloved grandmother whom she had been living with, and she feels lost, alone and vulnerable. She’s now an orphan as there are no other relatives. The tide has gone out and she doesn’t know when or whether it will return. She knows she has to find a new apartment to live in but hesitates. So when a casual acquaintance, Yuichi Tanabe, who used to work part-time in her grandmother’s favourite flower shop, invites her to stay with him and his mother, Eriko, she agrees, especially when she sees the enormous sofa, which would be her bed, in the living room and finally the kitchen. She was a particular lover of kitchens.

With the postmodernist inclusive approach, Banana uses traditional perspectives to deal with the issue of human loneliness and emptiness in life. Two aspects of traditionalism can be divided separately for the sake of showing a clearer picture of her interpretation: life’s impermanence and life/nature’s blessing. “Impermanence” (mujō 無常) of life: loneliness and sudden deathNo matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive. That is what makes the life I have now possible. One day, Eriko is gracefully watering the plants and telling Mikage about the time when Yuichi’s biological mother died. Eriko tells Mikage that life can be very hard, but those who never suffer can never understand joy. Mikage is comforted by Eriko’s words and thinks to herself that she’ll experience many moments of pain in her life but knows that she’ll keep going and won’t let her spirit be broken.

Yuji Oniki made an interesting observation: “Reading a Yoshimoto story is a lot like watching a Japanese TV commercial” (Oniki, 1996). This idea points out hybridity in Banana’s fiction. The hybrid narrative is related not only to postmodernism but also to traditional beauty and to the shojo culture that Carl Cassegård once interpreted. Summarizing Treat, he wrote, “Approaching her work through a discussion of shojo culture or ‘cute culture’ in Japan—the popular culture of young girls centered on the supreme value of cuteness—John W. Treat emphasizes the narcissistic and desexualized nature of this culture” (Cassegård, 2007, p. 76). During the time that Mikage spends with Eriko and her son, Yuichi, the latter who appeared to be a quiet unassuming person, was slowly transformed into a soul-mate of Mikage which rather stunned her. She felt he knew her very soul. Creating characters who share the same situation makes Banana’s work always in-depth and leads readers to suspect a persistent, obsessive, and unending event might happen next. We know about the younger brother, Hiiragi, from the earlier story. Now, we learn that Urara also bears the same loss. It is just that the narrator does not reveal what Urara suffers from. We can guess from the conversations between Satsuki and Urara that Urara comes to the river to try for a chance to bid farewell to her friend who suddenly died. Satsuki and Urara both suffer from this loss of a person close to them, so it is easy for them to empathize. From the reader’s perspective, these two characters have a supportive role for each other: Satsuki’s story is clearly in traditionalism while Urara’s is more postmodern, which is presented with only a few clues for the reader to draw inferences. This narrative creates more mysterious tension, evocative of a miraculous fairytale, cause in part by the vagueness of their current lives. The postmodernist society, which obtains its symbol from the car accident, can end everything to create a tragedy for couples such as those in this story. However, in the end, it can never end their relationship, their love, and their interaction, even in the form of a dream. It is the miracle of life. There were glimpses of something deeper. When overtly self-analytical, I don't think they worked, but some were genuinely poignant and thought-provoking.

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Yuichi’s excited to eat Mikage’s food because she’s a professional now. Mikage became obsessed with cooking over the summer when living with Eriko and Yuichi, and poured her heart and soul into it, feeling utterly blissful. She now works for a famous cooking teacher. Mikage feels that although the students in the cooking school seem happy in their comfortable lives, their happiness falls short of her own joy. Mikage cooks with a profound joy that she can only appreciate because of the suffering she’s experienced. I was expecting lyrical language, and quirky insights into Japanese attitudes to death and LGBTQ issues. I was sadly disappointed, but kept going because it was short and because I gave up part way through my previous book (something I rarely do). After a particularly egregious section of stilted psychobabble, one character says, "What kind of talk is that? Sounds like it was translated from English." I guess the author is aware of how clunky it is. Odd. Most editions also include a novella entitled Moonlight Shadow, which is also a tragedy dealing with loss and love.