Kitchen

Kitchen

  • Submitted By: kreesto
  • Date Submitted: 11/11/2008 12:29 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 743
  • Page: 3
  • Views: 611

Banana Yoshimoto
The Banana Mania exploded all around the world during the early 1990s, the phenomenon was oddly rose by a Japanese writer, Mahoko “Banana” Yoshimoto. The way name just suddenly barged into the literary world, shocked everyone. The sudden craze of the Banana Mania was due to Yoshimoto’s uniquely “out of the box” writing styles. Outrageous themes like death, sexual ambiguity, love, tragedy were often found in her works. Despite showcasing similar uncanny themes in her novels, the way her stories always seemed to have an offbeat kind of delightfulness were major factors that attracted both older and younger readers but unfortunately that was also the reason that brought criticisms to her works as derivative and saccharine. I love Yoshimoto’s “Kitchen”, and I can only agree with one of the critics’ view points. I don’t think Yoshimoto’s works are derivative but I do think that they are saccharine.
Yoshimoto’s stories are not derivative. Being said unoriginal must be one of the harshest criticisms a writer may receive from critics. It is true that Yoshimoto uses a certain pattern of writing styles in her writings. In “Kitchen” some writing styles often shown in Yoshimoto’s novels would be the followings: she doesn’t like playing games with readers’ minds, she would use a simple yet straight forward way to show them what she wants to say, for example on page 44 she used one paragraph to deliver a shocking message “Eriko died late in the autumn”. The power of her one simple line shocked the readers and it was probably the same feeling Mikage had when she heard the tragic news from her friend. Another writing style that was often used by Yoshimoto would be her way of answering questions of her thoughts. On pg 59, Yoshimoto said, “Those women lived their lives happily. They had been taught, probably by caring parents… But therefore they could never know real joy. Which is better? Who can say?” Without letting readers to think she then quickly...

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