Reimagining an Ideal Mother: Kitchen
Yoshimoto Banana's11 Kitchen (Kicchin), published in 1988, follows the development of an orphan, Mikage, a college student. The story starts with a scene in which Mikage loses her grandmother, with whom she had lived since the death of her parents. The loneliness of Mikage is emphasized in a scene in which she sleeps in the kitchen and listens to the sound of the refrigerator with a blanket wrapped around her:
Three days after the funeral I was still in a daze. Steeped in a sadness so great I could barely cry, shuffling softly in gentle drowsiness, I pulled my futon into the deathly silent, gleaming kitchen. Wrapped in a blanket, like Linus, I slept. The hum of the refrigerator kept me from thinking of my loneliness. (4- 5)12
Interestingly, the motifs of the refrigerator and the blanket suggest images of a mother. A refrigerator stuffed with food and its humming sound recall the inside of the womb.13 A blanket is a symbol of warm maternal feeling. Yoshimoto thus erases the biological existence of a mother from the presence of the heroine, and instead creates
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Yūichi, an acquaintance of Mikage's grandmother, invites her to live with him and his "mother" named Eriko. Eriko, the owner of a gay bar, is a beautiful "mother," a man who became a woman after the death of his wife. When she first meets Eriko, Mikage is stunned by Eriko's sophistication and beauty: "Hair that rustled like silk to her shoulders; the deep sparkle of her long, narrow eyes; well-rounded lips, a nose with a high, straight bridge--the whole of her gave off a marvelous light that seemed to vibrate with life force" (17). Mikage thinks that she does not "look human" (17). Eriko plays the same role as such artificial motifs as the refrigerator and blanket: she is not a traditional domestic mother, nor is she biologically a mother, she has a nurturing quality in that she provides Mikage with comfort and a feeling of being at