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If there is a colour for the prose of Banana Yoshimoto, it is blue. Reading ‘Kitchen� is like walking in the clear crisp air of a blue night in Tokyo. She works beautifully with surrealistic imagery, with artless simplicity. The images of the night, the houses in the streetlight, the colour of the sunset and the sky, the moonlight in the kitchen transpire again and again in the beautifully sparse writing until one breathes completely in the dreamlike quality of it. These images do not convey the sinister, furtive, darkness of night: it is but the beautiful melancholy of night where dreams and reality conflate. The loneliness of the characters flows and merges with these images. How evocative a description of pain, loneliness, separation, and human mortality! Death and loss can truly be a binding force for people, drawing them closer, reshaping their sensitivities, in coming to terms with their loss. And there is the knowledge that no one can understand your loss except for someone who has been through a similar sadness. Yoshimoto’s characters, in their unusual ordinariness, adopt a number of contrivances for a liberation from their grief. Some change homes, some change their gender. They cook extravagant meals, find shelter in some secluded monastery with a waterfall or in the simple domesticity of the Kitchen. Some keep the grief hidden so that it doesn't take the form of perceptible reality. Memories are shining and bright, and they live on but they also keep sucking their bearer away from the present. Moving on gets difficult. And it’s a pain in itself to come to a delivery where one learns to take care of a memory as a memory; something that has passed and doesn’t belong to the present.

"I'll never be able to be here again. As the minutes slide by, I move on. The flow of time is something I cannot stop. I haven't a choice. I go.

One caravan has stopped, another starts up. There are people I've yet to meet, others I'll never see again. People who are gone before you know it, people who are just passing through. Even as we exchange hellos, they seem to grow transparent. I must keep living with the flowing river before my eyes."