Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen was wonderful, so I was very happy to find this short story collection. I found five beautiful slice of life stories, told in lovely, simple, and lyrical prose.

House of Ghosts

My favourite story! It’s about finding your way in life and becoming the person you need to be.

There are so many details here that make your heart beat faster. What can a family restaurant or a bakery do for its regular customers? It’s never “just a restaurant” or just a bakery, right? It’s heartwarming.

“Being a cook meant any meal I made could end up being someone’s last.”

We meet a couple of ghosts and end up in the nicest and most touching ghost story I’ve ever read. There’s romance too, of the quirky (all this talk about “holes”, come on :D), cozy, shining kind.

“My soul spoke, and what it said was: We’ve been lonely for so long, and this was why. We were so lonely we couldn’t even know it.”

Mama!

Old and new traumas come together in harrowing way, yet the main character survives this. A small act of kindness can save you.

Not Warm at All

A tapestry of thinking deeply about things, childhood memories and family tragedies.

Tomo-chan’s Happiness

You’ve been through so much, Tomo-chan. And yet…

“...Tomo-chan was safely held. By the velvety glow of the night, the touch of the wind as it drifts softly past, the blinking of stars, the voices of insects and things like that.
Somewhere deep down, Tomo-chan knew this all along. And so she was never really alone.

Dead-End Memories

A young woman lives through betrayal and heartbreak. There is a beautiful friendship, understanding what one wants out of life, and the healing that comes from spending time away from familiar things.

“That time had been a gift from fortune, like a blanket gently laid over me by the heavens.”

The ending is gorgeous.

It would have been a pleasure to savour this book slowly. It was a pleasure to read it in one day. ( )

Took me a while to get through this one--I like the idea of short stories but because I need time between finishing one and starting the next it takes me forever to finish a collection of them. I still love my Banana Yoshimoto but I do prefer her novels and I think in some ways she was a gateway into Japanese literature for me who has since been ever so slightly surpassed by works from other authors I have read since and connected to a little bit more. Don't get me wrong; there were some beautiful moments here. I think the last story ("Dead-End Memories") may have been my favorite. ( )

This is a collection of short stories by Japanese writer, Yoshimoto. Apparently it was published in Japanese in 2003, and translated more recently. All of the stories are about young women dealing with relationships, grief, and finding their way in the world. The first story was probably my favorite, "House of Ghosts" tells of a young woman whose family owned a yoshoku restaurant, and who hopes to run the place herself one day. She meets a young man, Iwakura, who's family owns a bakery famous for its cake rolls. He is hoping to get away from the family business.

Iwakura lives in an apartment that is inhabited by the ghosts of an older couple who had lived there. The relationship between the narrator, Iwakura, and the ghost couple has a slow build, exploring issues of family and identity. ( )