SOURCE: "Adrift in the New Japan," in Book World—The Washington Post, January 10, 1993, p. 8.

A journalist, Brown was the 1990–91 recipient of the Gannett fellowship in Asian Studies. In the following review, he provides a thematic analysis of Kitchen.

In an interview, the architect Arata Isozaki once remarked that Tokyo's massive sprawl rendered the ideas of "center" and landmarks superfluous. One could easily set down in any of its several urban areas and not know (or care) that, in most major cities, geographical meaning was supposed to radiate from a singular locus. While initially discomfiting, for Isozaki, the effects of such decentralization are strangely appealing, when one gets used to them.

This psychological state of living without defining landmarks, of decentralization and dislocation, is also at the heart of Kitchen, [a novella and a short story] that represent the first English translation of Banana Yoshimoto, a young and extraordinarily...