Literary Tropes and Familial Incest in Banana Yoshimotos Kitchen

1
Literary Tropes and Familial Incest in Banana
Yoshimotos Kitchen

• the transmission and transfiguration of Noh and
  post-nuclear
• family structures
• Presenter Michele Gibney,
• University of San Francisco

2
Thesis

• In contrast to her detractors, Banana Yoshimoto
  utilizes elements of traditional and modern
  literary culture in the novel Kitchen. The
  tropes that she employs include poetical allusion
  and Noh dramatic forms. She is also drawing upon
  a lineage of post-World War II female authors who
  wrote about the dynamic (re)definition of family
  structure.

3
Critics of Banana

• She focuses on the international and cosmopolitan
  to the detriment of Japanese cultural references
• Inclusion of American pop-cultural icons
• Wrapped in a blanket, like Linus, I slept. (5)
• The scene reminded me of the Jungle Cruise at
  Disneyland. Thinking, what a fake looking green,
  I turned around (96)
• Saccharine and overly upbeat

4
Traditional vs. Modern

• traditional sensibilities underlie those hip
  attitudes, and this duality drives much of her
  work.
• Nicole Gaouette

5
Poetical Allusion Ono no Komachi

• My dreams were always about Hitoshi. After my
  painful, fitful sleep, whether or not I have been
  able to see him, on awakening I would know it had
  been only a dreamin reality I would never be
  with him againI would feel abandoned in the
  chill and silence of dawn. It was so forlorn and
  cold, I wished I could be back in the dream.
• (Yoshimoto, 112)

• Thinking about him, I slept, only to have
  him Appear before me Had
  I known it was a dream
  I should never have wakened.
• Ono no Komachi
• (Keene, 78)

6
Traditional vs. Modern

• In Noh plays, ghosts appear. And sometimes a
  characters personality changes entirely. Just
  by putting on a mask they suddenly become a
  demon. I think that what I write is very close
  to that tradition.
• Banana Yoshimoto

7
Moonlight Shadow and Noh

• Shite - Satsumi
• Waki - Urara
• Seed - origin
• Poetry plot impetus
• Absentee heroes Hitoshi
• Ghost - closure
• Life to Death vs. Death to Life
• Moralistic conclusion

8
Shite and waki

• Shite main performer, doer
• Satsumi
• Waki the witness, the enabler of the shite
• Urara

9
Seed - origin

• A Noh play begins from a seedusually from
  suitable traditional sources. In general this
  means a poem or a group of poems.
• Terasaki, 29
• Moonlight Shadow is a song by Mike Oldfield.
• Four AM in the morningCarried away by a
  moonlight shadowI watched your vision
  formingCarried away by a moonlight shadowStars
  move slowly in the silvery nightFar away on the
  other side"Will you come to talk to me this
  night?"But she couldn't find how to push
  through

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Absentee heroes - Hitoshi

• Terasaki calls them
• absentee heroes without physical presence,
  they exist mainly in the memories or fantasies of
  the protagonist, are represented as desire or a
  void in the womens psyche. (12)
• his presence is powerfully evoked through a set
  of verbal constructs. (37)

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Poetry plot impetus

• There was an electric charge between our hearts
  and its conduit was the sound of the bellI could
  hear it even when he wasnt there. (110)
• Element of sound
• Gift of a bell
• Present in every encounter
• Informs plot thru memory and absence

12
Ghost

• Introduced
• Takes center stage
• Relegates living to background
• The ghost as the other is (dis)placed outside
  the strongly conventional system of social norm.
  (Terasaki, 13)
• Social stigma/socially marginal
• However

13
Critics of Banana

• She focuses on the international and cosmopolitan
  to the detriment of Japanese cultural references
• Inclusion of American pop-cultural icons
• Wrapped in a blanket, like Linus, I slept. (5)
• The scene reminded me of the Jungle Cruise at
  Disneyland. Thinking, what a fake looking green,
  I turned around (96)
• Saccharine and overly upbeat

14
Saccharine and overly upbeat

• Marginalized ghost
• More emphasis on the living
• Comparison with Osama Dazai
• glorify suffering, negativism, and death.
• encouraged by Yoshimotos novels, and find in
  them an optimism and brightness absent in their
  own lives.
• Ann Sherif.

15
Life to Death vs. Death to Life

• Death appears not an end but as a starting
  point the starting point of the transferal of
  the story, that is, of its survival, of its
  capacity to go on, to subsist, by means of the
  repeated passage it effects from death to life,
  and which effect the narrative.
• Shoshana Feldman. Terasaki, 20

16
Moralistic conclusion

• Parting and death are both terribly painful.
  But to keep nursing the memory of a love so great
  you cant believe youll ever love again is a
  useless drain on a womans energiesSo I think
  its for the best that we were able to say a
  proper, final good-bye today. (148)

17
Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow

• (Re)definition of family structures

18
Post-World War II Women Writers

• Kono Taeko (1926-)
• Oba Minako (1930-)
• Sono Ayako (1931-)
• Ariyoshi Sawako (1931-1984)
• Takahashi Takako (1932-)
• Kurahashi Yumiko (1935-)
• Tomioka Taeko (1935-)
• Masuda Mizuko (1948-)
• Yoshimoto Banana (1964-)

19
Philosophy of post-nuclear female authors

• Rejection of social norms/challenge of social
  conventions
• Marriage
• Motherhood
• Explore marginalized sexualities
• Androgyny
• Incest
• Homosexuality
• De-phallicize the male/patriarchy

20
De-phallicize the male and reject patriarchy

• Kitchen
• No father figures
• Yuji ? Eriko
• Reassertion of patriarchal society
• Stabbed to death by a knife (phallic)

21
Exploration of marginalized sexualities

• Androgyny
• One is struck by the absence of explicit sexual
  contrastlike the absence of sex itselffrom
  Kitchen. Mikage and Yuichi, like the so-called
  boy-girl pairs in all of Yoshimoto Bananas
  works, retain unarguable signs of maleness and
  femaleness only in the gender of their names.
  (Treat, 291)

22
Exploration of marginalized sexualities

• Incest
• quasi-sibling, quasi-sexual relationship which
  always teeters on the incestuous. (Treat, 290)
• the task of measuring the distance and space
  between two persons. The incest motif indicates,
  on the metaphysical level, a desire to shorten
  the distance and space in other words, a desire
  for the purest and the closest relationship of
  love. (Muta, 151)

23
Exploration of marginalized sexualities

• Incest
• although we have always acted as brother and
  sister, arent we really man and woman in the
  primordial sense, and dont we think of each
  other that way? (Kitchen, 66)
• were all brothers and sisters when were in
  trouble, arent we? I care about you so much, I
  just want to crawl into the same bed with you.
  (Moonlight Shadow, 143)

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Exploration of marginalized sexualities

• Incest
• Kitchen
• Yuichi Why is it everything I eat when Im with
  you is so delicious?
• Mikage Could it be that youre satisfying
  hunger and lust at the same time? (100)
• Bloodied hand with all the joy of a nursing
  mother (Treat, 287)
• Moonlight Shadows
• Satsumi I always enjoyed what I ate when I was
  with him. How wonderful that is, I thought.
  (142)
• Ill do Hitoshi
• Bell sound ? Hiiragis laughter

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Conclusion

• Transmission and Transfiguration
• Poetical allusion
• Noh
• Themes of Japanese women writers in the
  post-World War II era
• Past, Present and Future
• Past - abandoned
• Present - hopeful
• Future - incestuous