The Day I Was Called by a Book: Banana Yoshimoto's 'Kitchen'

There are times when I feel like I have been called by a book.
I don't think this book was written specifically for me.
But I believe the reason I hadn't picked it up until now is that it was being kept for me until the right time to read it arrived.
For me, Banana Yoshimoto's 'Kitchen' is one such book.

Three years ago, when my father passed away, I was so busy acting as the chief mourner that I began to have this strange feeling as if the inside of my heart was gradually being hollowed out.
I went into a bookstore, thinking I would just buy as many books as I liked that day, and I chose books from the stacks and shelves based solely on their titles, then bought them and went home.

Since it was called 'Kitchen,' I thought it might be a book with many scenes of cooking.
However, by the second page, Mikage's grandmother passes away. A few days later—

“I dragged along the soft drowsiness that accompanies a saturated grief where tears don't really come, and laid out my futon in the kitchen that shone in the silence.
I just wanted to sleep under the stars.”

Ah, I understand.
I understand so well.
And I have come to really love the way hiragana is used for words like 'drowsiness' and 'shone in the silence'.

Please allow me to quote a few more passages that I love.

“The world is so vast, the darkness is so deep, and I have recently touched that endless fascination and loneliness with these hands and these eyes for the first time.”

“The kitchen window. A friend's smile, the vivid green of the university garden seen over Sotaro's profile, my grandmother's voice on the other end of a late-night phone call, the cold morning futon, the sound of my grandmother's slippers echoing in the hallway, the color of the curtains... the tatami... the grandfather clock.
All of it. Everything that I can no longer be a part of.”

I think this is modern poetry. Absolutely.
The rhythm of 'so vast, and so deep'.
The layering of 'with these hands and these eyes'.
Starting from 'The kitchen window,' moving to a friend, then to the university garden.
Before long, it becomes sound, then the tactile sensation of a futon, the sounds heard while drifting in and out of sleep, the colors seen, and then it stops abruptly with the 'grandfather clock'.
“All of it. Everything that I can no longer be a part of.” The silence of that punctuation.

But what is most wonderful is how it teaches the essence of literature: that the more personal something is, the more universal it becomes.

Actually, there is one more thing I love about 'Kitchen'.
It is how the grammar of shojo manga—the 'large panel plus narration outside the speech bubble'—is internalized into the prose style of the novel.
Print culture and manga culture are beautifully fused together. For example,

“My hair, resting on my shoulders, swayed softly. How many days there are when I think that there are piles of unpleasant things, and the road ahead is so steep I want to look away... Even love cannot save everything. Still, wrapped in the twilight of the setting sun, this person is watering the plants with thin hands.”

Here, the transition from 'My hair, resting on my shoulders, swayed softly' to
'There are piles of unpleasant things...'
looks like a cut in a shojo manga where the scene shifts from a wide shot to internal narration.
The softness of 'How many days there are' is the very sensation of narration outside a speech bubble speaking directly to the reader.

This fluctuation of perspective.
It seems to depict the scene from the outside, then suddenly becomes an internal voice.
What is handled in shojo manga by layering pictures and text, Banana Yoshimoto switches smoothly within the flow of a single sentence.

This way of switching, and the breathing of the dialogue, reminds me of Yumiko Oshima's short stories.
The lines are delicate, with plenty of white space.
There is a white, smooth, soft texture, as if it were written in hiragana. I wonder if Banana Yoshimoto isn't doing the same thing with printed text.
When I searched for it with that thought in mind, I found that Banana Yoshimoto herself spoke about the influence of Yumiko Oshima in an interview.

In the season of keichitsu, when living things emerge from hibernation, the violets in the garden have also begun to bloom.
I finished writing this while drinking my third cup of tea.
Next, I want to read 'TUGUMI'.

※ All quotes are from 'Kitchen' (Banana Yoshimoto, Kadokawa Bunko, 59th printing, Reiwa 2)