Kitchen Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 49 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Kitchen.

Kitchen Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 49 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Kitchen.
This section contains 527 words
(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Kitchen Study Guide

In the following review, Hanson offers a mixed assessment of Kitchen.

A Japanese maxim warns that "A gentleman does not go near a kitchen." Traditionally a cramped, dingy place—even in an otherwise wellappointed home—the old-fashioned kitchen revealed the low status of the women who spent much of their time there. Yet today, though still small by American standards and still largely the domain of women, kitchens are the showcases of Japanese consumer affluence.

Banana Yoshimoto's first novel evokes this modern opulence even in its title, which uses the trendy English loan-word kitchin rather than the Japanese term, daidokoro. Ms. Yoshimoto was all of 24 years old when Kitchen was published in Japan in 1988; with its kooky young woman protagonist, Mikage Sakurai, the novel—a best-seller that is now in its 57th printing—clearly has spoken to the author's contemporaries.

"The place I...

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This section contains 527 words
(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Kitchen Study Guide
Copyrights
Gale
Kitchen from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.