SOURCE: "Ninjo," in London Review of Books, Vol. 15, No. 2, January 28, 1993, p. 20.

An English novelist, biographer, and critic, Fitzgerald is the author of several novels, including The Golden Child (1977), Offshore (1979), and Innocence (1986). She is known for combining a humanistic approach and a compressed, witty narrative style in her fiction to reveal the strength and nobility of her characters as they cope with life in contemporary society. In the following review, she contends that the pieces included in Kitchen emphasize the theme of coping with loss.

Banana Yoshimoto contributes a respectful preface to her book [Kitchen], dedicating it to her publisher, and thanking the manager of the restaurant where she supported herself while she was writing it and the professors who voted her a prize—'it made me so very happy.' This dutifulness sounds traditional. Traditional, too, when you get to the novellas themselves, are the violent emotions restrained...