Kitchen
This week the girls get stuck into Banana Yoshimoto's classic "Kitchen", discussing, among other things:
- Are we reading the author or the translator?
- How the abnormal becomes normal once it's your everyday life
- Is Chloe as goodlookin as Eriko? (spoiler: She really isn't)
- Anger over misgendering and how it's pretty cool it's an automatic response now
- The life within inanimate objects in a home
- Loss and how it manifests for different people
- Soulmates Vs Settling
- Normals (aggresively normal people in your life) vs AbNormals (the opposite. Obvs)
- Mammy & Daddy Murphy being couple goals
Did the girls go on tangents you ask? Well if the following count as tangents given they had NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT WE WERE TALKING ABOUT:
- Hanger. Seriously.
- Coco pops v s granola bars and the foodiest Easter Eggs we've ever done (Except for Katie's. Because she's the worst)
- The Grammys and whether prizes are something to get excited over
- What the Queen of England's treehouse probably looks like
- The faces Chloe pulls when she's dancing
- A listening party for the highlight of the new BTS album - Dis-Ease
Catch the full episode
More on Kitchen:
With the publication of Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, the literary world realized that Yoshimoto was a young writer of enduring talent whose work has quickly earned a place among the best of contemporary Japanese literature. Kitchen is an enchantingly original book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. Mikage, the heroine, is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend Yoichi and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father) Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart.
In a whimsical style that recalls the early Marguerite Duras, Kitchen and its companion story, Moonlight Shadow, are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a very special writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul.
For more on Banana Yoshimoto, visit