Yuichi also refers to Eriko as his mother rather than his father as does Eriko herself. Similarly, Eriko writes “I’m body and soul a woman” in her will. For example, Yuichi says “Eriko quit her job, gathered me up, and asked herself, ‘What do I want to do now?’ What she decided was ‘Become a woman.’” Eriko herself explicitly asserts her womanhood at several points in the story, for example, when she exclaims “it’s not easy being a woman” to Mikage while watering the plants. Yuichi even occasionally refers to a pre-transition Eriko by the pronoun “she” as well, to emphasize that this is Eriko’s dominant gender designation. Yuichi always describes Eriko as “she” when referring to a post-transition Eriko. All the characters refer to Eriko with feminine pronouns throughout Kitchen. Yoshimoto consistently emphasizes Eriko’s womanhood to show that womanhood is not limited to cisgender people but includes Eriko and, by extension, transgender women in general.

Yoshimoto thus questions cisgender bias by offering a positive representation of transgender womanhood and exposes patriarchal values as banal clichés. Yoshimoto emphasizes that Eriko is a woman through and through, highlighting her beauty, femininity, and empowerment throughout. Her backstory reveals that she was Yuichi’s biological father, but now lives as a woman and as Yuichi’s mother. Yuichi’s mother, Eriko Tanabe, is transgender.

Towards the end of the story, the protagonist, Mikage Sakurai, and her love interest, Yuichi Tanabe, poke fun at traditional notions of masculinity by showing that Yuichi’s desire to be “manly” when grieving his mother is damaging. Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, which was written in Japan in the 1980s, questions gender conventions in Yoshimoto’s time through the story’s central characters.

Kitchen book banana yoshimoto