A Guided Tour of the Kitchen: Seven Japanese Domestic Tales

Beginning with an account of the kitchen by the novelist Yoshimoto Banana, this author journeys through a series of Japanese domestic tales, as articulated in various sites of popular culture: homeware advertising, political campaigns, garbage disposal practices, architectural magazines, and pornographic comics. The kitchen operates in this paper as far more than a functional site in the home. It is a multifaceted concept which shows the nexus of the flow of energy between body politics, the state, and its key organ, the family. Official discourses of gender, family, motherhood, education, and employment flow through this unbound space of the kitchen. Here the kitchen is far more than architecture, it is a concept which defies material limits to become a space of domestic fantasies, both homely and unhomely, of the family and the nation-state.