Kitchen: From The Perspective Of Feminist Criticism

Banana Yoshimoto won the 6th Kaien Newcomer Writers Prize in November 1987, the Umitsubame First Novel Prize, and then the 16th Izumi Kyoka Literary Prize in January 1988 for Kitchen. Previous study has mainly focused on the style and content of this novel, and Kitchen was seen as a novel with the simplicity of fairy tale, and a novel created by the intricate combination of literary and everyday expression. However, there was little study from the perspective of feminist criticism.This study focuses on the feminist consciousness in Kitchen, and tries to reinterpret the novel from the perspective of feminist criticism. Before there was feminist criticism, female writers and female readers were marginalized, and were supposed to serve men. And as Mizuta Noriko points out, female characters created by female writers may not all be new female images.This study focuses on the male and female characters, especially the gender consciousness expressed by them. The thesis is divided into three parts: introduction, discussion and conclusion. The discussion part is composed of six chapters: Kitchen and its literary criticism, the female characters in Kitchen, the male characters in Kitchen, Eriko, the transgender, the absense of the father, the voice of female characters. The thesis studies the way of thinking and the behavior of the charactres, based on their social life and interpersonal relationship. The study comes to the conclusion that the main characters are not confined by the worldly gender consiousness, and they support each other and grow together. The novel affirms the rights of self-approving and choice, and proposes the idea of gender equality and the hamonious conexistence of both gender.