How the English Language Failed Banana Yoshimoto, Author of 'Kitchen'

Literary stars can have a precipitous rise in Japan, and few rose as fast as Banana Yoshimoto. The moment she started writing professionally in 1987, she rose to prominence. Her debut novel “Kitchen” won the Kaien Newcomers’ Literary Prize in 1987 and became a peerless bestseller, running an epic 60 printings in Japan. 

And while described by some critics in Japan as “light” and “frivolous,” “Kitchen“ tells a powerful story written in an intensely beautiful style. The narrator is Mikage, who grows up with her grandmother after losing her parents at a young age. At the beginning of the novel, she is working as a culinary teacher’s assistant. Her grandmother has just passed away, and a childhood friend, Yuichi, reintroduces himself. Yuichi’s mother, Eriko, a transgender woman with a glamorous appearance and personality, is eager to take Mikage into their home and family. 

What ‘Kitchen’ Is About

“Kitchen” is a story about the persistence of loss and memory, and about finding one’s path through the world. It also weaves in romance and plenty of food. In retrospect, it offers insight into the ennui of 1980s Japan and what it means to live in a ruthlessly rich society on the border of dissolution.

Ultimately, Yoshimoto’s “Kitchen” was something of a flash in a pan. While critics regard “Kitchen” as an important work of Japanese literature, it didn’t maintain the relevance of modernist classics like Soseki or the firepower of contemporary hits like the novels of Haruki Murakami. Yoshimoto’s follow-up novels never approached her debut’s peak, and although several translators brought them to readers outside Japan, none resounded abroad like “Kitchen” did at home.

Where the Translation Falls Short

“Kitchen” clearly resonated with many English-language readers and continues to do so. Still, the English edition falls short of the heights it achieved in Japanese. The issue lies in the problem of translation.

“Unfortunately, the endearing characters and amusing scenes in Ms. Yoshimoto’s work do not compensate for frequent bouts of sentimentality,” wrote Elizabeth Hanson in the New York Times’ 1993 review. “The English text feels choppy — this may be due to the author’s style rather than the translation.”

It’s a pretty panning review for such an enormously successful work. I found “Kitchen” — at least in Japanese — to be much better than the New York Times’ estimation. When you look closer, many of the faults come from the translation.

[T]he world of translation and the American market may not have been fully ready for “Kitchen” 30 years ago. Unlike today, where Japanese female authors are regularly published to great acclaim.

Throughout the book, Mikage fundamentally struggles with expectations and societal pressure: what pressures to defy, and what pleasures to succumb to. Mikage must balance her desire for both independence and stability, two paths that, for a young woman in a society resistant to female empowerment, can feel irreconcilable. But despite the loss of her family and her constantly dissipating relationship with Yuichi, she eventually draws strength to face down humanity’s greatest enemy: death.

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“I will hit rock bottom again and again,” Mikage thinks. “Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I won’t let my spirit be destroyed.”

But this quote represents both the novel’s greatest strength and its greatest flaw. Its beautiful writing style gives the Japanese text much of its power. Yoshimoto’s descriptions are fluid and constantly moving, almost melodramatic in their radiance. However, this proves a serious challenge for translation, as ‘radiant’ prose can come off extremely offputting in English. 

In the quote above, the original Japanese sounds much more casual. 負けはしない (literally, “I won’t [do such a thing] as lose”) becomes “I won’t let my spirit be destroyed.” Mikage is no doubt poetic — in fact, she’s wonderfully attuned to the beauty of the natural world throughout the novel — but she’s also casual and observant, speaking about the real world rather than in the more metaphorical language of the English version. Mikage’s poetry isn’t overbearing in the Japanese but reflective, and making her more dramatic in English feels like a crucial mistake.

‘Kitchen’ is a story about the persistence of loss and memory, and about finding one’s path through the world, with some romance and lots of delicious food along the way.

Challenges in Translation Style

Translator Meagan Backus also tends not to break up long Japanese sentences, which more liberal translations would dissect. In fact, cleaving to Japanese sentence structure leads to awkward constructions throughout the entire novel: “Until only recently, the light that bathed the now-empty apartment had contained the smells of our life there” is stiff and complicated; “I don’t care for the loaded sentimentality of those words or for the feeling of limitation they impose” sounds like a robot speaking, which Mikage is anything but.

A better translation of “Kitchen” would have firstly been more natural all around. Let the characters speak more naturally, sound more human and have less verbose clutter around Mikage’s voice. “Kitchen” already works in English, but I can’t help but to think what its reception would have been like with a translation that matched the vivid beauty of the original.

Would a different translation put “Kitchen” on the level of something like Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood”? Not necessarily. Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin are among the most inventive Japanese translators. Their daring approach to capturing Murakami’s voice plays a large part in his success in English.

The current boom in translated Japanese literature — where authors like Yu Miri and Yoko Ogawa have received nominations for and even won major international literary prizes — comes hand-in-hand with an era of excellent translation. Motoyuki Shibata, an English-to-Japanese literary translator and founder of MONKEY literary magazine, says that the pool of translation talent is as good as it has ever been.

“New writers are being as well taken care of as Haruki Murakami,” Shibata says. “Young translators are very attuned to the music of language. To exaggerate a little, translators used to decode what was written in the text. Now, younger translators listen to the Japanese prose and try to reproduce that sense of music in their translations.”

“Banana Yoshimoto was published with great fanfare 25 years ago, and she was popular for a while, but I think many readers were sort of disappointed with what was offered,” Shibata adds. In this sense, the world of translation and the American market may not have been fully ready for “Kitchen” 30 years ago. Unlike today, when publishers regularly bring Japanese female authors to international audiences with great acclaim.

Banana Yoshimoto has and deserves much praise — but the translation of “Kitchen” simply failed to express the full power of her writing. The English version is, of course, still worth a read. But possibly because of that same translation, Yoshimoto is an international literary icon that nearly was.

You can purchase “Kitchen” by Banana Yoshimoto on Amazon.

Originally published in February 2021, and updated in April 2026 for accuracy.