Counter-Currents
  • Archives
  • Authors
  • T&C
  • Rss
  • DLive
  • Telegram
  • Gab
  • Entropy
  • Rss
  • DLive
  • Telegram
  • Gab
  • Entropy
  • Webzine
  • Books
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Donate
  • Paywall
  • Crypto
  • Mailing List
  • About
  • Contact
  • RSS
    • Main feed
    • Comments feed
    • Podcast feed

LEVEL2

  • Webzine
  • Books
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Donate
  • Paywall
  • Crypto
  • Mailing List
  • About
  • Contact
  • RSS
    • Main feed
    • Comments feed
    • Podcast feed
  • Archives
  • Authors
  • T&C
  • Rss
  • DLive
  • Telegram
  • Gab
  • Entropy
Print
May 12, 2020 1 comments

Hungry for Substance:
Kitchen & Thirst for Love

Buttercup Dew

Banana Yoshimoto and Yukio Mishima.

2,725 words

Banana Yoshimoto
Kitchen
Translated by Megan Backus
London: Faber and Faber, 1993

Yukio Mishima
Thirst for Love
Translated by Alfred H. Marks
New York: Random House, 1999

Kitchen is a 1987 novel by Banana Yoshimoto (surely a pen-name). It is a brisk read — the mundane language and matter-of-fact writing style allow it to be breezed through in a handful of hours by a dedicated reader. What is shocking is how popular and highly approved this book is by both the reading public of Japan, and to a lesser extent the West (who will consume it simply because it’s easy and fashionably liberal to do so). It was nominated for the Yukio Mishima Award a year after its publication, and it reached British shores fairly quickly in 1993. This translation by Megan Backus is the only one so far, despite there presumably being an appetite for the next Kitchen, which is telling of its simplistic writing and vacuous plot. Most editions also include the additional story “Moonlight Shadow,” which involves cross-dressing as a central plot point of existential angst.

At a mere hundred and fifty pages in total, the Kitchen book is comparable to Thirst for Love by Mishima in its length and focus on female sensibility, but otherwise has little to offer. Thirst for Love, in contrast, is a satiating meal full of complex and challenging flavors. This essay will serve as a critical overview of Kitchen’s deficiencies as a counterpoint to the laughable praise heaped upon it.

Despite its short length, Kitchen still could have served up something filling, given the twin deaths that instigate the navel-gazing that makes up the bulk of the book. However, what’s there is spread thin. It follows an adolescent girl’s experience overcoming loss and loneliness following the death of her grandmother, which completes the death of her surrounding family and leaves her an orphan in an empty apartment.

She is taken in by a modern single mother and son, who have an uptown apartment with a lovely kitchen, something the narrator fixates on as a substitute for having a personality. By the end of the book, she and said son have developed a friendship that is foretold as love by one one-scene acquaintance. But even this friendship, developed over a hundred dreary pages of over-exposure to each other, is tentative and requires nonsensical radical action to maintain, like breaking into a hotel in the small hours of the morning to perform an ill-advised delivery of takeaway food.

The entire book fetishizes eating as a bonding experience, yet this critic cannot recall a single description of what any of the udon actually tastes like. It is written from a trite “adolescent funk,” which The New Yorker misleadingly informs us Yoshimoto “transforms into the essential,” but the book is just trite; right down to the transsexuality torpedo it fires into the protagonist and the reader early on: “‘Guess what else — she’s a man.’ This was too much. I just stared at him in wide-eyed silence. I expected any second he would say, ‘Just kidding.’” The single mother Eriko, who works at a gay club, is “dazzlingly” beautiful and used to be a regular Joe (how progressive!), who “became a woman” after his wife died because “she knew she’d never love anyone else” (how romantic!). Yuichi, the only child, explains his real mother “died when I was little” (how convenient!).

All the characters seem to do is worry, chatter, stare out of windows, and watch television. “It really was a marvelous sofa. An entire family could watch TV on it.” (p. 8) “I went back and sat on the sofa, and out came the hot tea.” (p. 10) “I just had to go back for one more look at the kitchen. It was a really good kitchen. Then I stumbled over to the sofa that was to be my bed for the night and turned out the lamp.” (p. 16) “I gave myself permission to be lazy. . . I would clean house, watch TV, bake cakes. . .” (p. 21) ”. . .both us slept into the afternoon. . . I had the strange sensation, while we were sitting in front of the TV, that we really were orphans.” (p. 54) “I’d be watching television with the sound down low in the dead quiet of midnight, and Yuichi would come out of his room and make tea.” (p. 75)

In Thirst for Love, the cast are kept occupied. Etsuko, a widow, moves into her retired father-in-law’s mansion and farm, where she falls in love with the servant boy, Saburo, whilst numbly submitting to the fumbling advances of the aged Yakichi. The rhythm and tension of farming life give the characters something to busy themselves with, allowing their natures to become evident: “Yakichi, however, was out of sorts as he worked at this task — expressionless, silent in his rubber boots, his army trousers tight on his legs as he stooped to pick up the roses. This uncommunicative, expressionless toil was the toil of a man whose blood still bespoke of his farmer’s lineage. Even Etsuko was attracted to the Yakichi of times like this.” (p. 130) In their final meal before the tragic end, they eat huddled around a naked twenty-watt bulb.

The Tanabes, who adopt Mikage, however, are frivolous with their spending. Even the otherwise dull-as-dishwater narrator is taken aback by their consumptive habits: “Unbelievable, these people, I thought.” (p. 30)

One of Kitchen’s astonishing failures is its inability to built any kind of dramatic tension. Mikage and Yuichi exist in a perpetual state of adolescent ennui. The lack of impetus becomes all the more noticeable with Banana’s annoying penchant for repetition: When Mikage is adopted by Eriko and Yuichi, she is disparagingly compared to a dog (“Woofie”) they used to have. Just to hammer the point home, Mikage tells her ex-boyfriend, who calls at just the right time seven pages later, that “they just took me in like they would a dog.” (p. 24)

The same phrasing about never seeing such-and-such again is spread across two-thirds of the novel, insinuating that there’s nothing new to come. In a futile attempt to make stuff happen in a story where the leads desire little besides sleep and sustenance, multiple characters are introduced for a single scene before being promptly forgotten. Even the pivotal mother figure of Eriko is killed off at the book’s midpoint, before her character has any time to blossom (the “blossoming” has presumably already occurred through gender transition). After Mikage’s ex-boyfriend makes the inexplicable phone call, he is never heard from again. Yuichi’s ex-girlfriend demands a futile confrontation and is driven out. A transvestite friend of Eriko’s drags Mikage out to a noodle bar, attempts to convince her that she is in love with Yuichi and vice versa, and after turning on the tears and taking a train home, she disappears from the story.

There is no development or central contention beyond optimism or lack of it. Kitchen reads like a teenage girl’s diary, and is about as interesting: “I took a hot shower while I waited for the tea water to boil. As I was sitting up in bed in my warm, fresh pajamas, the phone rang. When I answered it, the person at the desk said, “You have a telephone call. Please hold.” (This is on the penultimate page.)

You can buy Buttercup Dew’s My Nationalist Pony here

In contrast, Thirst for Love maintains a consistent focus on the family clan living on the farm. The cast makes up a small microcosm of Japanese society: Yakichi the paternal statesman, Etsuko the reluctant consort, Kensuke and Chieko, the middle management, Asako, the domestic mother, and Saburo and Miyo, the servants. It is immaculate in its planning, even if Etsuko’s extended monologues cause the execution to wobble at times. Etsuko, jilted by men and fate, drives the narrative by attempting to resolve the passion that threatens her domestic arrangements; she rests her happiness on shunning her feelings.

The setting is thoroughly detailed, cohesive, and logical; poverty and circumstance confine the characters within its boundary. There the focus rests until the tragic end. (Kitchen, by contrast, takes place across various indistinct apartments.) Background characters are merely incidental or exist to provoke the household; in one instance they are stood up by a dignitary, who announces his imminent arrival but never materializes. Catastrophe is brought about by each of them becoming corrupted by their specific human frailty in turn, causing them to fail in their allotted roles. It leads to the expulsion of one character (“To send a woman four months pregnant out of the house, wicker trunk on her back, is no small thing”) and the murder of another. [1]

Two major criticisms of Kitchen remain. Firstly is the lack of any self-awareness in the astonishingly vulgar liberal pretension it offers — the sanctimony is cloying and suffers from wince-inducing, unnecessary references: “Like Helen Keller when she understood “water” for the first time, the word burst into reality for me.” (p. 12) Helen Keller being, of course, an obscene Bolshevik fantasy about how someone blind, deaf, and dumb can become a famous international socialist writer. A cab tells her that a long journey in the early morning will be expensive, and Mikage acknowledges the fact “calmly, like Joan of Arc before the Dauphin.” (p. 93) It makes one wonder why Mikage did not instead become a welder, who bullies Yuichi into bowing to her Rosie the Riveter emancipation. Instead, she is carried through the novel like flotsam, floating on the basic necessities of maintaining a part-time job and a threadbare relationship as self-justification.

The issue of transsexuality, which handled differently could have added powwow and motive power to the story (possibly by having the son-and-father duo wrangle over differing points of view), is sadly handled without a shred of irony. Yuichi tells us that his father decided to go full-bore on a whim:

“Because she hates to do things half-way, she had everything “done,” from her face to her whatever, and with the money left over she bought that nightclub. She raised me a woman alone, as it were.” He smiled.

“What an amazing life story!” (p. 14)

There is no contemplation of the idea that undergoing extensive self-harm, solely to be seen as a mocking imitation of the opposite sex, might be construed by some as an offensive. Eriko comments in a letter:

There are people who choose to live their lives in filth, this is hard for me to understand. People who purposefully do abhorrent things, just for the attention it draws to them, until they themselves are trapped. I cannot understand it, and no matter how much they suffer, I cannot feel pity for them. (p. 52)

No one tell her about the 41% who felt trapped in their own distorted bodies, though she might not hear you over the nightclub noise anyway. For a novel purportedly about loss, this is a huge missed opportunity to explore how the coin of “becoming” (LARPing) the opposite gender is, on its flip-side, a self-immolation of one’s natural dignity and God-given gifts.

Gender dysphoria is thankfully unmentioned. In contrast to medical (and pseudo-medical) discourse about gender identity this and “brain differences” that, transsexuality is couched as a personal choice to simply drop everything, wipe the slate clean, and petition both the gods of plastic surgery and nightclub patrons for a do-over. By involving both a transvestite in Kitchen and cross-dressing in Moonlight Shadow, Yoshimoto implicitly endorses the idea that transgenderism is an extension of playing dress-up, a theatrical performance for a cosmopolitan public.

Secondly, Kitchen is just not a rewarding read. Its vocabulary and descriptive prose are appallingly basic. It should be properly categorized as young adult or even early teen fiction were it not for the subject matter, but the book is marketed as serious fiction. The soaring profundity of Mishima’s offhand observations makes “Banana” look like a brain-damaged Tumblrista.

No one’s words can compete with this mercilessly powerful rain. The only thing that can compete with the sound of this rain, that can smash this deathlike wall of sound, is the shout of a man who refuses to stoop to this chatter, the shout of a simple spirit that knows no words. Etsuko recalled the mass of rose-colour naked figures running before her in the light of the flaming poles, and the sound of their shouting, like the cries of slippery young animals. Only that shout! That’s all that’s needed! (p. 125)

Mikage’s thoughts and conversation are completely banal:

“‘Life can be so hard,’ I said, moved.” (p. 41)

Sentimentalism abounds: “Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them.” (p. 55). Do they? Characters oscillate between depression and eye-rolling resolutions to not admit “defeat” (by what?) without rhyme or reason; it is packaged and presented simply as a journey through the ever-changing present of female sentiment. The principal character (Eriko) never rises beyond passivity. “I realized the world did not exist for my benefit [and] things around me would not change. It was clear the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness. So I became a woman, and here I am.” (p. 81)

The final blow to any credible claim this book can have at being “literature” is how consistently slipshod both the writing and (I’m assuming) the translation are. Mikage’s kitchen is both “deathly silent” but also home to “the hum of the refrigerator.” (p. 5) Weather is “springlike” instead of just “spring.” There’s a Diatribe of a Mad Housewife [2] type of slip-up where Mikage refers to Eriko as “Mom” despite having known her for only a single night. Attributes got muddled when the “silence fell with a thud.” (p. 77) Mikage’s heart leaps with an “audible thump,” which if literal, sounds quite dangerous (p. 84). A snowstorm is “cold-looking,” a depressed person is “sadly cheerful,” and characters do not gossip or chitchat, but share “gossipy chitchat.”

I was puzzled as to whether Mikage was actually a boy or a girl all the way until 46 pages in, when Eriko comments she has “a smart-ass for a daughter.” It’s proof that despite the time we spend with Mikage, we barely get to know her, leading her to inform us that “for me, a night owl, this would not do” on page 103 of a story 105 pages long. There’s just no there there. Despite all the tea and comfortable furniture, the emptiness of Kitchen is an embarrassment.

If you want to support our work, please send us a donation by going to our Entropy page and selecting “send paid chat.” Entropy allows you to donate any amount from $3 and up. All comments will be read and discussed in the next episode of Counter-Currents Radio, which airs every Friday.

Notes

[1] Ryosuke, Etsuko’s philandering husband, gives in to his sadism. Etsuko witnesses his death and is unable to reconcile her desperation to be desired with the intense suffering she is burdened with, and so seeks out an impossible relationship: her masochism and impracticality lead her into infatuation with Saburo, whom she pursues throughout the novel. Miyo, the servant girl, is gotten the better of by her stupidity and lack of reflection, as she copulates with Saburo the gardener and falls pregnant, endangering her position within the household. Etsuko demands she is expelled out of jealousy, and Yakichi, who is gotten the better of by age, weakness and lust for Etsuko, washes his hands of it and allows it. Kensuke (Yakichi’s languid, lazy son) and Chieko (his wife) are gotten the better of by being know-it-alls, and while they think highly of themselves for being wise to Etsuko’s desperation, they are unable to prevent tragedy and in fact exacerbate things by being reproachful. Finally, Saburo, (“Any internal struggle to vanquish his desires was of no concern to this healthy young man”), is gotten the better of by his inclination to opportunism, and attempts to rape Etsuko. She screams and he turns to run, and she grabs his leg and is dragged along by him, as she is still desperate for his affections. When Yakichi arrives to defend her, Saburo is paralyzed by his lower social status, and Etsuko takes the mattock Yakichi has brought and murders him, thus ending her torment.

[2] The Harpooned Heart is based on Marge’s life (made all the more obvious by the fact that Temperance’s name changes to “Marge” for three paragraphs on page 72).

 

Related

  • The Halifax Grooming Gang Survivor

  • Quotations From Chairman Rabble
    Kenneth Roberts: A Patriotic Curmudgeon

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World & Me

  • The Worst Week Yet:
    March 28-April 3, 2021

  • Murder Maps:
    Agatha Christie’s Insular Imperialism

  • The de la Poer Madness:
    Before and After Lovecraft’s “Rats in the Walls”

  • “He Doesn’t Worry Too Much If Mediocre People Get Killed in Wars and Such”
    Tito Perdue’s The Smut Book & Cynosura

  • Fahrenheit 451

Tags

book reviewsButtercup DewennuigenderJapanese literaturetransgenderismYukio Mishima

Previous

« Philosophical Psychopathy:
Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro”

Next

The Shooting of Ahmaud Arbery »

1 comment

  1. Riki says:
    May 12, 2020 at 8:30 am

    An interesting read that dissects the incoherent, mundane, and lackluster work of Banana Yoshimoto and contrasts it with the far more cogent, logical, and compelling work of Yukio Mishima. Thanks to the author.

Comments are closed.

If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.

Note on comments privacy & moderation

Your email is never published nor shared.

Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.

Recent posts
  • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 336
    Interview with Jared Taylor

    Counter-Currents Radio

    7

  • The Worst Week Yet:
    April 11-17, 2021

    Jim Goad

    5

  • The Searchers

    Trevor Lynch

    2

  • Fundraiser Update, this Weekend’s Livestreams, & A New Way to Support Counter-Currents

    Greg Johnson

    3

  • Two Nationalisms

    Nicholas R. Jeelvy

    40

  • A Robertson Roundup: 
    Remembering Wilmot Robertson
    (April 16, 1915 – July 8, 2005)

    Margot Metroland

    14

  • Remembering Dominique Venner
    (April 16, 1935 – May 21, 2013)

    Greg Johnson

    10

  • I’m Not a Racist, But. . .

    Jim Goad

    43

  • The Father

    Steven Clark

    5

  • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 335
    Dark Enlightenment

    Counter-Currents Radio

    9

  • Are We Ready For “White Boy Summer”?

    Robert Hampton

    32

  • Can the Libertarian Party Become a Popular Vanguard?

    Beau Albrecht

    17

  • Every Phoenix Needs Its Ashes

    Mark Gullick

    24

  • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 334
    Greg Johnson, Millennial Woes, & Fróði Midjord

    Counter-Currents Radio

    2

  • If I Were Black, I’d Vote Democrat

    Spencer J. Quinn

    14

  • The Silence of the Scam:
    The Killing of Dr. Lesslie

    Stephen Paul Foster

    6

  • Proud of Being Guilty:
    Fighting the Stigma of Lawfare in Sweden & Winning

    HMF Medaljen

    6

  • The Halifax Grooming Gang Survivor

    Morris van de Camp

    22

  • Get on the Right Side of the Paywall

    Greg Johnson

    12

  • The Worst Week Yet:
    April 4-10, 2021

    Jim Goad

    13

  • Forthcoming from Counter-Currents:
    Jonathan Bowden’s Reactionary Modernism

    Jonathan Bowden

  • Remembering Prince Philip

    Nicholas R. Jeelvy

    16

  • Remembering Jonathan Bowden
    (April 12, 1962–March 29, 2012)

    Greg Johnson

    7

  • Today’s Livestream:
    Ask Counter-Currents with Greg Johnson, Millennial Woes, & Frodi Midjord

    Counter-Currents Radio

  • Paywall Launch, Monday, April 12th

    Greg Johnson

    10

  • Galaxy Quest:
    From Cargo Cult to Cosplay

    James J. O'Meara

    13

  • Biden to Whites: Drop Dead!

    Spencer J. Quinn

    22

  • Politicians Didn’t Invent Racial Divisions

    Robert Hampton

    7

  • London: No City for White Men

    Jim Goad

    51

  • Republicans Should Stop Pandering to Blacks

    Lipton Matthews

    18

  • Quotations From Chairman Rabble
    Kenneth Roberts: A Patriotic Curmudgeon

    Steven Clark

    6

  • Remembering Emil Cioran
    (April 8, 1911–June 20, 1995)

    Guillaume Durocher

    5

  • An Interview with Béla Incze:
    The Man Who Destroyed a BLM Statue

    Béla Incze

    15

  • Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics, Part Six:
    G. W. Leibniz’s Will-to-Power

    Collin Cleary

    12

  • The Importance of Survival Skills

    Marcus Devonshire

    22

  • The Oslo Incident

    Greg Johnson

    2

  • Mihai Eminescu:
    Romania’s Morning Star

    Amory Stern

    1

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World & Me

    Beau Albrecht

    21

  • Counter-Currents Radio Podcast No. 333
    Greg Johnson, Millennial Woes, & Fróði Midjord

    Counter-Currents Radio

    5

  • The Worst Week Yet:
    March 28-April 3, 2021

    Jim Goad

    18

  • Murder Maps:
    Agatha Christie’s Insular Imperialism

    Kathryn S.

    29

  • A Clockwork Orange

    Trevor Lynch

    21

  • Easter Livestream:
    Ask Counter-Currents with Greg Johnson, Millennial Woes, & Frodi Midjord

    Greg Johnson

    1

  • Our Big, Beautiful Wall

    Greg Johnson

    4

  • Agrarian Populism & Cargo Cult Fascism

    Nicholas R. Jeelvy

    9

  • One Carjacking Embodies the New America

    Robert Hampton

    38

  • The de la Poer Madness:
    Before and After Lovecraft’s “Rats in the Walls”

    James J. O'Meara

    9

  • Requiem for a Jigger

    Jim Goad

    39

  • The Promise & the Reality of Globalization 

    Algis Avižienis

    17

  • When They Destroy Memorials, We Raise Our Own to the Fallen

    Hawkwood

    8

Recent comments
  • White Boy Summer and Super Straight Meme are extremely popular with the zoomer crowd on twitter...
  • Agreed
  • Well at least the weather was nice lol
  • I proudly display my copy of White Identity on my Bookshelf in my study
  • The American Republic is OVER...WHITES MUST build their OWN state local power. Even if that means...
Editor-in-Chief
Greg Johnson
Our titles
  • White Identity Politics
  • Here’s the Thing
  • Trevor Lynch: Part Four of the Trilogy
  • Graduate School with Heidegger
  • It’s Okay to Be White
  • Imperium
  • The Enemy of Europe
  • The World in Flames
  • The White Nationalist Manifesto
  • From Plato to Postmodernism
  • The Gizmo
  • Return of the Son of Trevor Lynch’s CENSORED Guide to the Movies
  • Toward a New Nationalism
  • The Smut Book
  • The Alternative Right
  • My Nationalist Pony
  • Dark Right: Batman Viewed From the Right
  • The Philatelist
  • Novel Folklore
  • Confessions of an Anti-Feminist
  • East and West
  • Though We Be Dead, Yet Our Day Will Come
  • White Like You
  • The Homo and the Negro, Second Edition
  • Numinous Machines
  • Venus and Her Thugs
  • Cynosura
  • North American New Right, vol. 2
  • You Asked For It
  • More Artists of the Right
  • Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics
  • Rising
  • The Importance of James Bond
  • In Defense of Prejudice
  • Confessions of a Reluctant Hater (2nd ed.)
  • The Hypocrisies of Heaven
  • Waking Up from the American Dream
  • Green Nazis in Space!
  • Truth, Justice, and a Nice White Country
  • Heidegger in Chicago
  • The End of an Era
  • Sexual Utopia in Power
  • What is a Rune? & Other Essays
  • Son of Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies
  • The Lightning & the Sun
  • The Eldritch Evola
  • Western Civilization Bites Back
  • New Right vs. Old Right
  • Lost Violent Souls
  • Journey Late at Night: Poems and Translations
  • The Non-Hindu Indians & Indian Unity
  • Baader Meinhof ceramic pistol, Charles Kraaft 2013
  • Pulp Fascism
  • The Lost Philosopher, Second Expanded Edition
  • Trevor Lynch’s A White Nationalist Guide to the Movies
  • And Time Rolls On
  • The Homo & the Negro
  • Artists of the Right
  • North American New Right, Vol. 1
  • Some Thoughts on Hitler
  • Tikkun Olam and Other Poems
  • Under the Nihil
  • Summoning the Gods
  • Hold Back This Day
  • The Columbine Pilgrim
  • Taking Our Own Side
  • Toward the White Republic
  • Reuben
  • The Node
  • The New Austerities
  • Morning Crafts
  • The Passing of a Profit & Other Forgotten Stories
  • Gold in the Furnace
  • Defiance
Distributed Titles
  • Rss
  • DLive
  • Telegram
  • Gab
  • Entropy
Copyright © 2021 Counter-Currents Publishing, Ltd. Hungry for Substance:
Kitchen & Thirst for Love

Paywall Access





Please enter your email address. You will receive mail with link to set new password.