“The place I like best in the world is the kitchen.” After sharing a kitchen with fifteen other girls (plus Sylvia Plath), it’s nothing short of a miracle that I feel the same. But Yoshimoto’s story captures everything that is magical about sharing a kitchen, no matter how messy, dirty, crowded. It follows Mikage Sakurai in and out of lonely spots, as she finds companionship in cooking, warmth in the glow of a refrigerator. People and places, however fleeting in Mikage’s life, are sharply defined in Yoshimoto’s luminous prose:
“The kitchen window. The smiling faces of friends, the fresh greenery of the university campus a backdrop to Sotaro’s profile, my grandmother’s voice on the phone when I called her late at night … All of it. Everything that was no longer there.”
First published in Kitchen, Faber, 1997
A Personal Anthology 