KITCHEN By Banana Yoshimoto (Faber, $68) BANANA is not Ms Yoshimoto's real name. Her real name is Mahoko, but why she changed it only she can say. Perhaps it was in a fit of precocious artistic pique. When your reputation as a serious writer is secured - and deservedly secured - by the age of 24,you can call yourself what the hell you like.
Ms Yoshimoto never appears to have doubted that she would write. The literary gene came from her father, Takaaki Yoshimoto, a new-leftist thinker, poet, critic and one of Japan's most influential ideologists. Ms Yoshimoto started writing when she was 10.Kitchen, her first book, was finished in 1988. It sold two million copies in Japan and sent critics there into ecstasy, bandying about sobriquets like ''wunderkind'' and ''rising star''.
Translated into English only recently, Kitchen appears here with an earlier short story, Moonlight Shadow. It is a truncated, but remarkable debut, passionate in its simplicity and heart-wrenching in its honesty.
It is a book about women, but it is not a feminist book. Ms Yoshimoto, with all the assurance of an individual who has learned to differentiate belief from doctrine, states her equal rights case clearly and intelligently, without once resorting to the convenience and cliche of well-peddled dogma.
Kitchen is the baring of one young woman's soul as she struggles to find a voice in contemporary Japan. Mikage, 19, has just seen her grandmother, her last surviving relative, die. Mikage is alone until she meets an old friend, Yuichi, who invites her tostay with him and his mother.
Threads of surrealism weave their way into the story. Yuichi's mother is not his mother but his sex-change father. His mother is dead.