[In the following excerpt, Hornby contends that Yoshimoto blends prosaic and extraordinary elements in Kitchen, yet the desired effect of this fusion is unapparent in translation.]

Kitchen comes to us almost bent double with the weight of its success in its native country. Banana Yoshimoto's slim volume, which consists of the title novella and "Moonlight Shadow," a matching short story, has sold "millions" of copies in Japan, and won two prestigious literary prizes. Works like this always appear strangely attractive in translation, promising as they do the contradictory virtues of accessibility and exoticism.

The book is certainly exotic. Indeed, anyone who has been deterred by the self-conscious eccentricity of some recent Japanese writing (particularly the work of Haruki Murakami) might find themselves dispirited by the novella's dramatis personae alone: one of the central characters, Yuichi, lives with a mother who was formerly his father.

Yoshimoto's writing is much more understated than this isolated example of narrative flamboyance suggests. Her stories possess a clarity and simplicity that can seem lightweight. The reliance on mood and a kind of ingenuous directness means that the author is perilously dependent on her translator. "The endless sea was shrouded in darkness. I could see the shadowy forms of gigantic, rugged crags against which the waves were crashing. While watching them I felt a strange, sweet sadness", we read at the climax of the title novella. By this stage in the story there is little else going on apart from the quality of the writing, and yet, with its safe, limited and predictable combinations of noun and adjective, this is irredeemably ordinary.

Both Kitchen and "Moonlight Shadow", each narrated by young women, are about loss. In the longer story, Mikage, the female narrator, moves into the house of Yuichi and his mother/father after the death of her grandmother; in the second, the girl has lost a boyfriend in a car crash, and is granted a vision of her beloved by a mysterious lady on a bridge. There are other thematic ties. The interest in transsexuality is given further expression in "Moonlight Shadow" (the dead boy's brother, who lost his girlfriend in the same accident, has taken to wearing her clothes around town); more importantly, both tales attempt to fuse the mystical and the mundane.

It is here, presumably, that Yoshimoto has scored in Japan. Kitchen (the title refers to Mikage's favourite room) attempts to locate a heartbroken, breathy longing where the rest of us find only a kettle and a dirty oven. In the final pages of the story—which for British readers may have unhappy echoes of the television advertisement for Milk Tray—Mikage makes a death-defying climb to bring her beloved Yuichi an unusually good deep-fried pork and rice dish.

One can imagine the langorous, puzzled sorrow that Yoshimoto intended to conjure up ("Moonlight Shadow", shorter and more intense than Kitchen, achieves genuine poignancy), but in the end, the translation only succeeds in summarizing, rather than capturing, a mood.