Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

curated by Eloise, Ilise, Madeline & Feruzakhon

Welcome to our digital edition of In the Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. This is a quiet, intimate story that centers on Mikage Sakurai, a young woman drifting through grief, change, and the search for belonging. After losing her beloved grandmother, Mikage finds comfort in the unexpected warmth of the Tanabe family and discovers that the kitchen, which is a space of nourishment, memory, and daily ritual, can become a sanctuary when everything else feels unsteady. It is where she feels the safest. The story blends everyday tenderness with Yoshimoto’s signature dreamlike calm, exploring how people heal and go through grief in small, imperfect, beautiful ways.

We designed this Tumblr as a companion for readers: part research guide, part visual archive, part map of the emotional and cultural world Yoshimoto builds. Here, you’ll find biography, historical context, publication history, and customized apparatuses that reveal the layers behind this deceptively simple story.

For my apparatus, I selected images from Carrie Mae Weems’ Kitchen Table Series (1990). These photographs explore themes of domesticity, solitude, grief, and intimacy that deeply resonate with the emotional landscape of Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. The series examines the kitchen not only as a physical setting, but as a stage for transformation. A space where relationships, identity, healing, and heartbreak quietly unfold. By placing Weems’ images alongside Yoshimoto’s novel, we can see how both artists use everyday domestic spaces to illuminate complex inner lives.

Carrie Mae Weems’ iconic photography series: The Kitchen Table Series (1990)

Kitchen Table Series explores the kitchen as a site of intimacy, loneliness, self-invention, conflict, comfort, and quiet transformation: all central emotional currents in Kitchen.

1. Untitled (Man and Mirror)

2. Untitled (Eating Lobster)

3. Untitled (Man reading Newspaper)

4. Untitled (Woman and Phone)

5. Untitled (Woman with Friends)

6. Untitled (Woman with Friends)

7. Untitled (Woman Brushing Hair)

8. Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Makeup)

9. Untitled (Woman with Daughter)

10. Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Children)

11. Untitled (Woman Feeding Bird)

12. Untitled (Nude)

13. Untitled (Woman Standing Alone)

Weems captures the complexity of womanhood, identity-building, and the emotional labor that happens inside domestic spaces. Like Mikage, the woman creates and reinvents herself within the intimacy of the kitchen. Moments of connection, joy, pain, and belonging fill both Weems’ photographs and Yoshimoto’s story. These are the small, glowing moments that keep characters moving forward and also grounded.

By: Eloise Beaulieu

By: Madeline Doctor

By: Madeline Doctor

By Ilise Litwin