SCHEDA DI LETTURA  Martin Elisa

TITLE  OF WORK

Edition :

Level:

Kitchen

Faber & Faber, London

Unabridged edition

AUTHOR Name:Banana Yoshimoto

 

KIND OF NOVEL

(Horror, crime, love, adventure

 Novel about modern life

 

SUMMARY

 

 

 

 

 

 

After her grandmother’s death, Mikage Sakurai couldn’t stay anywhere but in the kitchen. It was the only place where she didn’t feel lonely and confused. Both her parents had died when she was only a baby and she had always grown up whit her grandma. So after her death she was pretty down –hearted. She had no relatives. But one day her doorbell rang. It was Yuichi Tenabe, a young boy, who went to the same university as Mikage. He had often helped her grendma and he was a very nice guy. That day he offered Mikage to move in his apartment, because living alone might have been not too easy. It was a strange situation and Mikage didn’t know much about him. Anyway she couldn’t refuse the offer and in a short time she became part of Tenabe’s family. Yuichi lived with his mothr, Eriko, a wonderful woman. She was also really kind. Mikage didn’t see her a lot,because she worked in a nightclub. This woman shocked Mikage for the beauty of her figure: she was even too perfect to be real. And actually Eriko wasn’t a proper woman. She was a man. Yuichi’s real mother had died a long time before, and Eriko was her husband. But after his wife’s death he was so hopeless that he decided to become a woman and he had plastic surgery. Yuichi and Mikage usually spent a lot of time together, expecially cooking and eating or talking. But  things weren’t all that good, because both of them had problems and their lives were pretty difficult. Sometimes reality wasn’t fair. One bad day Eriko was killed and for Yuichi it was a hard moment. The two friends didn’t see each other a lot and Mikage came back to her old apartment. With that a lot of sad memories made her think about the past. Again her only shelter was her kitchen. She wasn’t able to forget Yuichi and she wanted to help him, but she didn’t know how. Maybe she was even in love with him but she wasn’t sure of it .

After a while Mikage and Yuichi met each other again and both of them were grown up, because of their sad experiences, both of them had lost their parents and now they were alone in this world.the destiny hadn’t been very generous with them, but anyway they had learnt to be happy even just for daily things. And most of all they weren’t lonely,because theirs was a very deep friendship.  

SETTING TIME: ‘90s

PLACE:Japan

CHARACTERS Description:

Mikage : she’s a japanese young girl, she’s about twenty and she really likes food. She loves cooking and eating and her favourite place in the world is her kitchen. She’s alone, because her grandmother is dead. Also her parents died when she was a baby.

Yuichi is a young boy who lives with Eriko, her “mother”. He is really kind and mature.

Eriko actually is Yuichi’s father, but now she’s become a woman. She’s really beautiful. She’s got a night-club and some strange bad friends and businesses.

THEMES Friendship,love,family and transsexuality

 

PERSONAL  COMMENTS

(give your opinion but substantiate !)

Kitchen is the story of a big frindship, something which is maybe a true love,made of respect and sincerity. It’s also a sad story of daily problems and uneasiness in modern society.

It’s original and realistic. It speaks about the importance of friends, who help you going through bad moments, because everyone of us is just a human, and we can’t live alone. We need the help of the others to face the unfair reality of everyday-life.

POINTS YOU HAVE SELECTED FROM THE TEXT “ Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scatterd into the blackness of time. I’ve always lived with that knowledge rooted in my being.”

“We all believe we can choose our own path from among the many alternatives. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we make the choice unconsciously. I think I did – but now I knew it, because now I was able to put it into words. But I don’t mean this in a fatalistic sense; we are constantly making choices. With the breaths we take every day, with the expression in our eyes, with the daily actions we do over and over, we decide as though by instinct”. 

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