Writing styles in Like water for chocolate and Kitchen: portraying love

¶ … 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 melodious voice, singing as she cooked, had kindled his sexual feelings" (Esquivel 66). 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 finished reading I carefully refolded the letter. The smell of Eriko's favorite perfume tugged at my heart. This, too, will disappear after the letter is opened a few more times, I thought. That was hardest of all" (Yoshimoto 53). This is love at a very different angle. The greater the love, the greater the loss when it ends, and both of the main characters are now orphans after they have lost everyone in their families. They wonder if they should begin a relationship. The author writes, "But I wonder, as I look at his uneasy profile blazingly illuminated by the hellish fire, although we have always acted like brother and sister, aren't we really man and woman in the primordial sense, and don't we think of each other that way?" (Yoshimoto 66). Both writers can get great emotions out of their readers because they use powerful situations to show the great passion, love, and loss that people feel throughout their lives, and they portray characters that seem real and human.

In both of these books, the kitchen and cooking plays a central role, and it is how the main characters show some of their passions. In "Chocolate," Tita's passion for cooking started from the moment she was born, and it lasts throughout her life, the end of her life after her niece's wedding. Each chapter starts with a traditional family recipe, and Tita infuses them with her own passions, often leading to incredible reactions in the diners. Such as the reaction to the Quail with Rose Sauce that sent passion through Tita and Pedro and caused her sister to run away from the ranch naked.

"Kitchen," on the other hand, is much more refined, yet the main character finds comfort in food and cooking, and she makes up her mind about any home by the type of kitchen it contains. Yoshimoto writes, "I laughed. 'Could it be that you're satisfying hunger and lust at the same time?" (Yoshimoto 100). In the end, there is hope for these two orphans, and it seems that they may have some great meals together, too.

The final story, "Moonlight Shadow," tells the story of the narrator, who lost her boyfriend when she was only twenty. The author writes, "I lost Hitoshi at the age of twenty, and I suffered from it so much that I felt as if my own life had stopped" (Yoshimoto 111). Both of these books show that great love can last a lifetime, even if the person we love is no longer with us. They have different views of love, and "Water" is much more passionate and sensual in the portrayal of love. Love leads to loss in "Kitchen," which makes it much more difficult and emotional to read. The author's styles could not be more different. Yoshimoto writes in a very straightforward manner, and her characters are not especially intricate or detailed. Her theme is the emotional loss of love, and how people deal with it. Her style is to the point, but very emotional, show what the characters are feeling deep inside themselves.