Kitchen
Yoshimoto's debut is a brief, piercing love story about grief and food and the strange warmth of unexpected family. Mikage and Yuichi's relationship forms in the wreckage of their respective losses. The Japanese pop-literary voice is entirely its own; the love story is gentle and specific and genuinely moving.
Eriko, the trans character at the center of Mikage's makeshift family, gets written with muddled, dated terms and a repeated reminder that “she used to be a man,” which readers flag as reductive even accounting for the 1988 publication date. The prose itself splits opinion hard: some blame flat, contradictory writing on the original text and others on a stilted translation, with one reviewer summing the dialogue up as “quirky, lazy, sloppy” and another going further, calling it “awkward, contradictory, inconsistent, hackneyed and immature.” A cluster of readers say the characters' emotions swing without buildup and that they never connected with Mikage specifically. Some readers give up despite the book's short length, one stopping roughly halfway through, and others push back on the sentimentality itself, finding the tone cloying rather than genuinely melancholic even where fans call the same restraint devastating.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
