Kitchen By Banana Yoshimoto : The Story Of The Kitchen Analysis

Ever since the beginning of time, love has played an enormous role among humans. Everyone feels a need to love and to be loved. Some attempt to fill this yearning with activities and possessions that will not satisfy – with activities in which they should not participate and possessions they should not own. In Andrew Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” the speaker encounters an emotion some would call love but fits better under the designation of lust for a woman. In contrast, the speaker of Robert Herrick’s poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” urges virgins to marry, to make a lasting commitment in which love plays a

From emancipation, leading all the way to the 20th century, African American women struggled to find better opportunities outside of their agricultural laborer and domestic servant roles. In Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960, author Rebecca Sharpless illustrates how African American women in the American South used domestic work, such as cooking, as a stepping stone from their old lives to the start of their new ones. Throughout the text, Sharpless is set out to focus on the way African American women used cooking to bridge slavery and them finding their own employment, explore how these women could function in a world of low wages, demanding work, and omnipresent racial strife, and refute stereotypes about these cooks. With the use of cookbooks, interviews, autobiographies, and letters from the women, Sharpless guides readers to examine the personal lives and cooking profession of these African American women and their ambition to support themselves and their families.

In this global era of evolving civilization, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the fascinating fact about love. Love is a feeling of intimacy, warmth, and attachment. Love is inevitable and it plays a vital role in human life as Janie uses her experience with the pear tree to compare each of her relationships, but it is not until Tea Cake that she finds “a bee to her bloom.” (106).

Throughout essay “In the Kitchen,” Henry Louis Gates Junior recalls a time when he and his friends and family constantly tried to straighten their African American “kinky” hair. They did this to try to fit in with white people. The writer is using his personal experience as an African American straightening his hair to show how black people felt about assimilating into white society. It was very difficult for blacks to fit in with white people but he remembers how this difficult time brought the black community together.

The kitchen’s purpose, for instance, is used as a symbol for warmth and security where the family gathers together, eats and talks about common issues. Furthermore this comfort is broken when the little girl “heard her mother closing cupboards and drawers, heard her father’s boots on the linoleum as he moved toward the back porch.” (57) This determines the disruption of shelter and the action of closing the cupboards and drawers suggests the need of protection.

From emancipation leading all the way to the 20th century, African American women struggled to find better opportunities outside of their agricultural laborer and domestic servant roles. In Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960, author Rebecca Sharpless illustrates how African American women in the American South used domestic work, such as cooking, as a stepping stone from their old lives to the start of their new ones. Throughout the text, Sharpless is set out to focus on the way African American women used cooking to bridge slavery and them finding their own employment, explore how these women could function in a world of low wages, demanding work, and omnipresent racial strife, and refute stereotypes about these cooks. With the use of cookbooks, interviews, autobiographies, and letters from the women, Sharpless guides readers to examine the personal lives and cooking profession of these African American women and their ambition to support themselves and their families.

Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen and Moonlight shadow are Japanese novellas in which the protagonist is followed during their grieving period. In order to accurately depict the nature of significant loss and its aftermath, the stories follow distinct structures to that of western literature. Yoshimoto intensifies unexpected losses in a young woman’s life with the non-linear structure and the deficit of foreshadowing. The structure supports the story’s themes of lack of control in life and the unexpectedness it withholds.

The story about the grandmother’s family and their deaths also generated some sympathy from me, but my feeling of sadness went away quickly. Although this family’s characters

“That Ray was not unhappy, he knew nothing of what was to come and so he did not suffer…he was happy in his lifetime, he loved his work, his domestic life, loved to garden…he did not suffer the loss of meaning that his survivor feels. Ray’s death was no tragedy but a completion” (Oates 241). This revelation was very powerful to me, as much as she is suffering depressed and having suicidal thoughts; she is able to start having moments of clarity. I saw this as a positive step in her healing. As she states “the widow must remember, her husband death did not happen to her but to her husband. I must stop dwelling upon the past, which can’t be altered” (Oates 228). She reminds herself that “you have your writing, your friends and your students” (Oates 264) and this gives me a sense of hope for her. I am eager to proceed with reading the last section of this book and knowing the outcome of this memoir; that I have enjoyed

Banana Yoshimoto effectively portrays various common themes and motifs in both “Helix” and “Newlywed”, in revealing the subconscious state of mind of the respective protagonists. Although the storylines are quite different, we get the feeling that many themes and strategies such as isolation, incredible poetic effect, and the recurring use of a helper figure used to develop the characters, are relatively interchangeable. These literary patterns allow for the protagonists to both escape the shallowness that plagues them, and bring to light the deeper meaning behind their

In the book Behind the Kitchen Door by Saru Jayaraman, the author exposes the restaurant industry and all of the mistreatment that restaurant workers face each and every day in the United States. She follows the lives of restaurant workers in nine different cities including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. She goes in depth on the unfair labor practices and poor conditions food workers face and how this directly affects them and their families. With her being an activist for food workers, she shares what she has done and what she continues to do to fight against the injustices within the food labor industry.

In life we as humans always have a safe haven that we retreat to when things go wrong. Whether it’s the restaurant down the street, taking a stroll in the park, or simply our bedroom. When retreat to this place because it helps us escape life for just a moment. It’s our time to rethink what is going on and come back to our senses a little stronger than before. In the book Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel the main character Tita used the kitchen as a place to escape life. Tita had such a deep connection to the kitchen that eventually her feelings and what she cooked became sync to one another. This adds a great twist to the story line of the book, and it is unpredictable to readers of just how great of an effect Tita’s emotions will

Soon, Mikage meets Yuichi Tanabe, a boy who used to know her grandmother fairly well prior to her death. Now that Mikage was living alone in her apartment, Yuichi suggests that she moves in with his mother Eriko and him. Although Yuichi and Mikage do not know each other personally, they shared a similar love for her grandmother that ultimately brought them together, as Yuichi admits, “‘You seem to think that I live on impulse, like Eriko, but inviting you was something I thought over very carefully. Your grandmother was always so concerned about you, and probably the person who can best understand how you feel in this world is me. I know that once you’re well again, really okay again, you’ll do what you want” (37). As the three get along very well, Mikage finds herself comfortable in the Tanabe household. Having Yuichi and Eriko as a support system helps Mikage overcome and recover from the multiple losses in her young life. Soon, she discovers that her love for cooking and food goes beyond a simple hobby, and uses it to establish a career and lifestyle. Her acceptance about her unavoidable fate drives her out of a state of grief and brings Mikage freedom from her state of misery.

Semiotics of the kitchen by Martha Rosler and Safe by Todd Haynes both revolves around the theme on Feminism. One is performing and the other acting, as to how women are depicted as weak or strong in character in different scenerios. In Martha Rosler’s six minutes video art, it represents a Martha Rosler, a women who performs using kitchen tools based in a kitchen setting. While, Safe by Todd Haynes is a two-hour plus film where it depicts a female character that slowly weakens in her mental and physical state as she have contracted a virus called “environmental illness” or rather multiple chemical sensitivity in the twentieth century. Her condition worsens as the film progresses.

This recommendation report is being written as requested by the CEO. Upon conducting investigation, we found that many problem areas that concern the CEO existed in Kitchen Best. The purpose of this report is to identify those major problem areas in Kitchen Best. Once the problems are discussed, recommendations will be provided to solve one problem, based on what is seen to be the problem needing urgent attention.