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Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto Essay

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Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

The path of life is not easy. It is scattered with struggles and hurdles which we must overcome. A rose plant is a good metaphor of life; the flower is soft with a pleasant fragrance but the thorns are prickly and hurt us. Likewise, life has good things like laughter, happiness, hope but it also has some things that hurt us, obstruct us.
In Banana Yoshimoto’s novella Kitchen, Mikage Sakurai faces quandaries in her life which hinder her. However, she fights them back with hope and determination. She is aided by the Tanabe’s who help her to fight her dilemmas and struggles. Each character displays a sense of optimism, a hope for survival and the determination to fight back. In a greater sense, this …show more content…

She says that maybe she had been hoping for a bed on which she could think calmly about her past and future. She had found that bed in the Tanabe’s apartment, close to the kitchen. There is symbolism here; the kitchen is a symbol of comfort and peace for Mikage. Here, Mikage is giving the reader a message that everyone has some symbol in their lives

Mikage comes to accept the fact that the past is irreversible and there is nothing we can do to change it. “The reality of the fact………only one thing to do—” on pg 22, Mikage is trying to convince herself that her past cannot be changed. She breaks off the sentence by saying “only one thing to do—” but it can be seen that she is thinking about her future than her past which is a sign that she is becoming more optimistic about her life. Here Mikage is telling the reader that no one’s past is reversible. Nothing can change what has already happened. Instead, we must concentrate on the present, the reality. In Mikage’s case, this is very optimistic because she had not had a very happy past and she is trying to forget it and think about her present situation. She is giving the reader, an indirect, useful quote. Eriko Tanabe too has faced struggles in her life. After her sex change, she earned through her nightclub which she bought from the spare money left after her plastic surgery. However, life was a constant struggle for her. It can be

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