Reading Banana Yoshimoto

I first read her books back during the pandemic. I think we all had more time to read back then. Lately I've been writing on my Isekai story and watching House of the Dragon so I needed a little palate cleanser. I had bought a copy of Kitchen two years ago and never got around to reading it. Which is fun because this is like, the main Banana Yoshimoto book folks start with. I started with Hard Boiled/Hard Luck and was hooked but after finding a copy of Kitchen. I think the reason I didn't want to start it was the way it was described on the cover. For some insane reason I thought it was going to be a boring family story about a girl and her mom living their lives through receptive domestic tasks in the kitchen. Well, that was thankfully not the case. And I do have to point out that I am reading English translations of these books because as much as I can follow extremely basic Japanese speech I absolutely can not read it outside a few phonetic bits of kanji. So right off the bat I…