¶ … Water for Chocolate" by Laura Esquivel, and "Kitchen" by Banana Yoshimoto. Specifically it will discuss how the writing styles of the two novels compare in portraying the theme of love. Love and passion are central to these two novels, but so is food and food often communicates the passion the characters are feeling. The books also talk about loss, often the loss of a love, another aspect of passionate and loving relationships. In "Like Water for Chocolate," the main character Tita is the youngest daughter of Mama Elena. Mama Elena will not allow her to marry, because she is the youngest daughter, and she is the one that must care for Mama Elena until she dies. Tita is in love with Pedro, a neighbor boy who loves her too. However, when he asks for Tita's hand, Mama Elena says no, and offers him Tita's sister, Rosaura, instead. Pedro agrees to marry Rosaura, only because it will mean he will be close to Tita. Pedro lives in Mama Elena's house after the marriage. The book is laid out differently than many other novels. It is divided into twelve chapters, and each chapter represents a month of the year. Each chapter starts out with a recipe, and shows the reader how to complete the recipe throughout the chapter. Tita is the ranch's cook, and her emotions and passion are transferred into the recipes, affecting the other members of the family, and allowing her and Pedro to communicate. Esquivel writes, "With that meal it seemed they had discovered a new system of communication, in which Tita was the transmitter, Pedro the receiver, and poor Gertrudis the medium, the conducting body through which the singular sexual message was passed" (Esquivel 54). Pedro and Tita never give up their love for each other, and they eventually get to consummate their passion. They die together, and look forward to a life together in Heaven.

Esquivel makes cooking sensuous and very appealing. She writes, "The sound of the pans bumping against each other, the smell of the almonds browning in the griddle, the sound of Tita's...

The passion of cooking is used throughout the book to translate into the passion between Tita and Pedro, and it adds color and vitality to the book. Her writing style is passionate and very vivid, and her style is the most appealing when she is writing about love and passion. She makes the pages sizzle without using strong sexual references. For example, she writes, "Plumes of phosphorescent colors were ascending to the sky like delicate Bengal lights" (Esquivel 158). This is the first time Pedro and Tita make love, and their passion is easy to see when the author expresses it so fully.
There is a real difference in this story between passion and love. Tita loves John, but she is passionate about Pedro, and there is a huge difference between the two. That is why magical things happen when they are together. It almost seems as if the love between John and Tita is more "real," because it is difficult to maintain the passion, sometimes.

"Kitchen," on the other hand, is really two novels contained in one. It talks about love, but its central theme is loss, often the loss of a great love. The first story, "Kitchen" opens with the death of the narrator's grandmother, and her feelings of loss that come over her. She finds herself living with a strange new family that she may be falling in love with Yuichi, the young man that invited her to live with them. The author writes, "The conversation we just had was like a glimpse of stars through a chink in a cloudy sky -- perhaps, over time, talks like this would lead to love" (Yoshimoto 30). This author's style is very different from the style of Esquivel. Esquivel's writing is lyrical and passionate, while Yoshimoto's writing is far less dramatic, and so her ideas of love are less dramatic, as well.

The narrator suffers another loss when Yuichi's "mother" is murdered. She sees that throughout life, people disappear one after the other. The author writes, "When I…