Kitchen

by Banana Yoshimoto

The place I like best in this world is the kitchen. No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me.

Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time. I’ve always lived with that knowledge rooted in my being:

In high spirits, we sang that part again, together, at the top of our lungs: “A LIGHTHOUSE IN THE DISTANCE—TO THE TWO OF US IN THE NIGHT THE SPINNING LIGHT LOOKS LIKE SUNSHINE THROUGH THE BRANCHES OF TREES.”

Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won’t let my spirit be destroyed.

There are people who choose to live their lives in filth; this is hard for me to understand. People who purposely do abhorrent things, just for the attention it draws to them, until they themselves are trapped. I cannot understand it, and no matter how much they suffer I cannot feel pity for them.

Truly great people emit a light that warms the hearts of those around them. When that light has been put out, a heavy shadow of despair descends.

To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn’t like it, but it made it easier to go on.

Because my biggest flaw is lack of precision, it didn’t occur to me that dishes turn out badly or well in proportion to one’s attention to detail. For example, if I put something in the oven before it had come to temperature, or if I got the steam going before I had everything chopped, that sort of triviality (or so I thought) was precisely reflected in the color and shape of the final product.

There was only one way to learn: I tried making anything and everything, and I tried to do it right.

No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive. That is what makes the life I have now possible.

“It was all your imagination. And imagination is sometimes worse than reality.”

In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions, much of one’s life history is etched in the senses.

I realized that the world did not exist for my benefit. It followed that the ratio of pleasant and unpleasant things around me would not change. It wasn’t up to me. It was clear that the best thing to do was to adopt a sort of muddled cheerfulness.

The gods are assholes!

“Things are just things, they can’t bring back the dead. It just makes me feel better.”

fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung. To skip out on even one scene would have meant never making it to the top, although it would have been by far the easier choice.

“Parting and death are both terribly painful. But to keep nursing the memory of a love so great you can’t believe you’ll ever love again is a useless drain on a woman’s energies.”