In the following review, Carter offers a brief introduction to Kitchen.

This small volume contains two stories, Kitchen, a novella of about 100 pages and "Moonlight Shadows," a short story of 40. The latter won a prize upon its original publication in 1986, and the former won a magazine prize in 1987 before book publication in 1988. Kitchen has been wildly popular in Japan, selling millions of copies in some 57 printings.

Why is this author popular and why are these tales printed together? Yoshimoto is a young author (b. 1964) with an ear for young people's issues, conflicts, and yearnings. She also writes in a jazzy and often surprising style. The two stories work well as different ways of talking about love, both romantic and familial.

Kitchen begins: "The place I like best in this world is the kitchen." Our narrator, one Mikage Sakurai, is a young woman, an orphan. Symbolically, she is...