Part 1, Kitchen Summary

Two different, yet similarly themed titles comprise Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto's debut literary effort. The first, the titular Kitchen, is the tale of Mikage Sakurai, a girl who, having recently lost her grandmother and having no other living relatives, moves in with the Tanabe family; Yuichi and his transsexual 'mother'. The second story chronicles the suffering of a young woman, Satsuki, after her lover is killed in a car accident.

Three days after the funeral, Mikage is still trying to come to terms with loss of her grandmother. She is listless, inconsolable and has moved her futon into the kitchen, the one place she is able to find peace; the hum of the refrigerator, she says, keeps her from thinking about her loneliness. The kitchen, she confesses in the opening line of the book, is the place in the world she likes...