Accepting Fate and Inevitable Death in Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen and “Moonlight Shadow

Mai’s fear of losing the memories of her family leads her to realize the significance of her life and ultimately the possibility of losing her understanding.

Ji-Li successfully argues that in a time of despair, families can overcome their sadness and rise up again; Ji-Li is able to prove this point effectively by providing her own detailed story and including not only her perspective, but also the perspectives of different people such as her classmates and teachers.

Death is a topic that unites all of humanity. While it can be uncomfortable to think about, confronting death in unavoidable. “Dying” addresses that discomfort and universal unwillingness to consider the inevitability of death. Pinsky’s use of imagery, symbolism, and tone create a poetic experience that is like death, something every reader can relate to. In “Dying,” Pinsky describes how people are oblivious and almost uncaring when it comes to the thought of death. Pinsky is trying to convince the reader that they shouldn’t ignore the concept of death because life is shorter than it seems.

‘How to live?’ I’m sure many of us are trying to figure it out. We learn about the meaning of life every second. Many people get lost and most of them think that they know what their hearts beat for and they are successful. Yet, they are just chasing fortune and fame, so as the author, when he was graduated from college. He buried himself

My first art portfolio, my favorite keychain, my broken bike…1.2.3. No one ever speaks to you about your own ending. How you die is left up to your own imagination. To you, your death can maybe either be due to a glorious, heroic act in which you met a righteous end or a pathetic closing to what you may believe to be a pretty uneventful existence. No one speaks about endings in general, though. Endings only tend to make us feel anything but content. Yet we dream on, foolishly writing silly ends to our lives, forgetting that the ends we create may be plausible one day. College, family, career…1.2.3. My breaths get weary, my heart slows from boisterous thuds to faint, lethargic thumps. Bright rays gleam above, showering me in what is meant to be warmth, but all I feel is cold. My freezing limbs waft slowly within the water, my feet dangling below, my hair flowing behind. My mother’s laughter, my father’s tears of joy, my friends’ bright smiles…1.2.3. I never dreamt my foolish imagination would collide with the inevitable so soon. My days of compiling were over, my good days, my sad days, my sweet, sweet mundane days, would soon come to an end…Air, air, air, air,

Today’s culture includes a melting pot of struggling people. Regardless of their background, it can be assumed that they constantly grapple with the meaning of life. With postmodern ideas stressing individualism and nonconformity, it is no wonder why so many people feel lost. The mystery is not how we came to this predicament, but how Phillip K. dick and Ridely Scott predicted these outcome decades in advance.

Following Spring was the “one summer of bliss” (59) occurring “in [the Tanabe’s] kitchen’’ (59). This period containing longer, bright days of joy and fullness demonstrates to the readers the extent of Mikage’s contentment through the motif of nurture brought by cooking in the kitchen, especially in the Tanabe’s kitchen.

By biological logic, we human beings will face death sooner or later in our life and death has its very own ways to approach us - a sudden deadly strike, a critical sickness, a tragic accident, a prolonged endurance of brutal treatment, or just an aging biological end. To deal with the prospect of death come different passive or active reactions; some may be scared and anxious to see death, some try to run away from it, and some by their own choice make death come faster. But Viktor Frankl, through his work Man’s Search for Meaning, and Bryan Doyle; in his essay “His Last Game” show us choices to confront the death, bring it to our deepest feelings, meaningful satisfaction. To me, the spirit of the prisoners at deadly concentration camps, Frankl’s Logotherapy theory of “. . . striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.” (99), as well as the calmness of Doyle’s brother on his last ride, like an awaken bell, remind us of how precious life is, how we should find the significance in every act of living, determine to live a meaningful life at any circumstances; hence, when death comes, we can accept it without anxiety nor regrets.

The loss of hope is one of the most substantial factors contributing to the loss of self. Hope is what keeps someone going in life. How can one remain himself without a purpose in life? Luckily, in A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines, the protagonist regains hope in himself after losing it due to a pessimistic viewpoint. The drastic shift in Grant’s outlook on life reveals that hope is needed for success.

Death is among the greatest mysteries of the human existence, one of the issues being that neither science, religion, or philosophy have definitive explanations on it. Although Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet explore death and dying, the former advocates for people to be more optimistic in these circumstances than the latter. Station Eleven’s characters focus their thoughts on living and improving their situation to achieve their goals while Hamlet's characters concentrate on dying and how to end the misery of life, as they are hopeless to change their fate. The ability to make decisions result in opposite outcomes for the characters in each text as Station Eleven’s characters have free will and are rewarded for using it, whereas Hamlet’s characters are punished for seeking to control their future. The development of each character’s life is due to their respective text favouring or punishing free will. The consequences of exercising free will in Station Eleven yield positive results because humans can control their own destiny in a world of death, while in Hamlet, contrarily, humans are controlled by fate and have to endure the consequences of attempting to defeat it.

Following the loss of a loved person, a person usually begins a period where they grieve over the loss of that person. While grieving, a person usually has a hard time accepting that a beloved person is truly gone. A personal activity is usually apparent during this time, and while this activity is usually connected to the person that they have lose, it helps a person deal with the tragedy that has fallen upon them. This idea is apparent in the stories Kitchen and “Moonlight Shadow”, both of which written by Banana Yoshimoto. Throughout both Kitchen and “Moonlight Shadow”, it is clear that grief is the stage when an individual is in denial over a beloved persons, and while there are a number of different ways in order to cope with the grief, the only way to overcome grief for good is by accepting the fact that the individual who passed away is gone.

Everyone experiences loss at some point, and in Truly, Madly, Deeply and “Moonlight Shadows”, both characters cope with their grieving similarly despite living on opposite sides of the Earth. These similarities show that although every person has their own personal way of grieving, the processes between everyone are very similar. Truly, Madly, Deeply, directed by Anthony Minghella captures the grieving of a woman who recently lost her boyfriend due to an unexpected throat disease that killed him quickly. On the other hand, “Moonlight Shadow”, authored by Banana Yoshimoto, follows a young woman who loses her boyfriend due to a car crash. The characters in Truly, Madly, Deeply and “Moonlight Shadow” cope with their losses through depression,

Within all these theoretical standpoints, the theme and process of coming to terms with death and relationship could be regarded as the essence of an existential quest; one

Just a couple week or before, I was hovering around the streets of Kathmandu and was gyrating around a top of my house with a heavy brain box. Every of those 24 hours of my days used to be spent on finding the meaning of life, death and the reason I am here on this planet. After those rigorous searches inside the book ‘Nirwad, ‘The Alchemist’, and inside my own heart, I finally got the answer.