The Kitchen Book

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I really like the story beats, the plausibly different way that The Life affects the three female protagonists, their determination to maintain their independence once they've experienced it, the astronomical costs of doing so. Mikage Sakurai has lost her dearly beloved grandmother whom she had been living with, and she feels lost, alone and vulnerable. She’s now an orphan as there are no other relatives. The tide has gone out and she doesn’t know when or whether it will return. She knows she has to find a new apartment to live in but hesitates. So when a casual acquaintance, Yuichi Tanabe, who used to work part-time in her grandmother’s favourite flower shop, invites her to stay with him and his mother, Eriko, she agrees, especially when she sees the enormous sofa, which would be her bed, in the living room and finally the kitchen. She was a particular lover of kitchens.

I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit,’ Eriko tells Mikage, ‘ It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn't up to me.’ Life will always be hard, but finding love and happiness must still go on and we must always get up and keep going. ‘ Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated - defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable.’ Two broken people together don’t make a whole necessarily and sometimes the narrative steers into overly sweet territory. Still the katsu don scene is *chefs kiss*, and would work perfectly in an anime. The story itself follows the paths takeb by Mikage and Yuichi (who suffers another tragedy of his own one which fits the trans-character dies first trope) and the choices they make, with food a common theme. This quote from the novel's setpiece highlight when Mikage takes a long taxi journey to 'rescue' Yuichi from an inn in an area where the only food served is variations on tofu, and ends up trying to scale the hotel balconiees to access his room while carrying a bowl of katsudon. In addition, there are innumerable turns of phrase that are unforgettable but I particularly liked:In Kitchen, a young Japanese woman named Mikage Sakurai struggles to overcome the death of her grandmother. She gradually grows close to one of her grandmother's friends, Yuichi, from a flower shop and ends up staying with him and his transgender mother, Eriko. During her stay, she develops affection for Yuichi and Eriko, almost becoming part of their family. However, she moves out after six months as she finds a new job as a culinary teacher's assistant. When she finds that Eriko was murdered, she tries to support Yuichi through the difficult time, and realises that Yuichi is probably in love with her. Reluctant to face her own feelings for him, she goes away to Izu for a work assignment, while Yuichi stays in a guest-house. However, after going to a restaurant to eat katsudon, she realises she wants to bring it to Yuichi. She goes to Yuichi’s guest-house and sneaks inside his room in the middle of the night to bring him katsudon. There Mikage tells him she doesn’t want to lose him and proposes to build a new life together. if a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I'm grateful for it. Ming Doyle's artwork here is fantastic in its entirety. The level of expression portrayed within Doyle's character's faces is not often seen and is instrumental in bringing emotions alive in this book.

When I finished this tale, I thought of love won and then lost, tragedy, pain, and suffering that I had just encountered but then beauty, hope and optimism are also there. What a marvellous mix. I'll never be able to be here again. As the minutes slide by, I move on. The flow of time is something I cannot stop. I haven't a choice. I go. One of the many things I love about goodreads is that a person is able to see what other “friends” think about a novel before committing oneself to reading it. I would have never read KITCHEN had I not seen that Mariel, Oriana, and Jason Pettus, three of my friends, all thought highly of this slim book. Mikage and Yuichi's lives are brought together by death. They are on the cusp of falling in love or living as strangers. It starts simple with one of the wives making rounds around the city to collect debts in her husband's place. She has no other source of income after all.

The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s the kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me. Ideally it should be well broken in. Lots of tea towels, dry and immaculate. White tile catching the light (ting! ting!). U osam nastavaka koncipiran "The Kitchen" objavljivan u sklopu "pmetne" DC-eve edicije "Vertigo" crtežom priziva neka prošla vremena. Njegove su ženske junakinje, Kath, Angie i Raven, fizički u mnogočemu nalik prekrasnoj Diani Lombard, priležnicama Dylana Doga ili Dijabolikovoj Evi. Za razliku od njih, trojka iz njujorškog Hell's Kitchena zaslužila je vlastiti strip. Jer su prekrasno opake i opako zle, one su prave "očajne kućanice", prepuštene same sebi nakon što njihovi muževi, vođe irske mafije, završe u zatvoru. Pritisnute neimaštinom, odlučuju, bez znanja i dopuštenja svojih supruga, preuzeti njihove poslove, a ono što je započelo kao kranja nužda pretvorit će se u utaživanje gladne potrebe za moći.