She finds herself spending too much time staring out her window, though … until she realizes she’s gotten used to seeing a young man across the street staring out his window, too. It tells the tale of a young woman who moves to Tokyo after the death of her mother, hoping to get over her grief and start a career as a graphic artist. While The Lake shows off many of the features that have made Banana Yoshimoto famous-a cast of vivid and quirky characters, simple yet nuanced prose, a tight plot with an upbeat pace-it’s also one of the most darkly mysterious books she’s ever written. I still feel skeptical.Author: Banana Yoshimoto // Published: ★★ ★ Is it perhaps a cultural thing that I don't understand it? I know that literature borne of a certain culture is best understood within its own context, and that reading a book like Kitchen (translated into English) in the US means that I'm divorced from the zeitgeist of which it's a product, but. Without speaking in depth about it, I guess my main problem was that I couldn't tap into the vein of the book and get a sense for why it's liked. Yoshimoto seemed to imply that death was a common theme in their lives so they were somewhat bound to one another, but that thread weaving them philosophically close doesn't really excuse the fact that I have no idea what Yuichi is like. I am thoroughly perplexed by Yuichi and, by extension, the 'relationship' between Yuichi and the protagonist. Other characters vary in the levels of their development. It was as if the narrative were informing me that here is where emotion is taking place, so I had to, at that moment, assume that the character was feeling morose. When she cried, it always felt very staged, as if Yoshimoto were using her pen to goad tears out of her. I'm not of the camp that argues against tropes in literature, but I couldn't sense any real emotion in her.

The protagonist is a quirky, free-spirited woman, content to live free of societal expectations and pursue her own interests. Nevertheless, I'm left with the strange feeling that most of the characters in the novel were hollow.

I read 'Kitchen' right after I read Jonathan Franzen's 'The Corrections' and I'm open to the idea that the change in style was too much for me, that I may have subconsciously judged her prose for not maintaining the same sort of psychological attention to its characters that Franzen's was able to sustain throughout his encyclopedia of a novel.

I'm still thinking about why that is, considering that Yoshimoto is celebrated as one of the great contemporary Japanese writers. I read it about four days ago, and my reaction to it was ambivalent.

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