One of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, Toby Litt, author of Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself and Ghost Story brings us a monthly selection on cult literature.

This month features: Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Published by: Faber and Faber
ISBN: 0571171044
Price: £5.99

'WHY do I LOVE EVERYTHING THAT HAS TO DO WITH KITCHENS SO MUCH? It's strange. Perhaps because to me a kitchen represents some distant longing engraved on my soul.'

This is the dialectic of Banana Yoshimoto's world: the vague specificities of 'a kitchen', the specific vaguenesses of 'my soul'. Between the two, there is a constant oscillation - the making of a meal can initiate a communion of souls, the turmoil within a soul can be expressed by scouring a sink.

Kitchen is a book about youth, death and food. It is the story of Mikage Sakurai, a young woman who has lost her whole family, and Yuichi, who loses his father who is also - following a sex-change and the death of his biological mother - his mother. They are 'orphans alone in the dark', trying to find ways of using their youth to cope with the deaths that have afflicted them.

Banana Yoshimoto wrote Kitchen and its companion story 'Moonlight Shadow' in her very early twenties. 'I supported myself by working as a waitress the whole time I was writing this novel,' she says, in the 'Afterword'. 'I want to express my gratitude, first, to the manager of the restaurant, Mr. Tokuji Kakinuma, for kindly turning a blind eye when I neglected my duties to write at work...'

One of the main ways in which Mikage brings herself back to life, from the exile of her grief, is through food.

'That summer I had taught myself to cook.

'The sensation that my brain cells were multiplying was exhilarating. I bought three books on cooking - fundamentals, theory, and practice - and went through them one by one. On the bus, in bed, on the sofa, I read the one on theory, memorizing calorific content, temperatures, and raw ingredients. Every spare minute I cooked. Those three books grew tattered with use, and even now I always have them near at hand. Like the picture books I loved when I was little, I know the illustrations on each page by heart.'

This is a good sample of Yoshimoto's prose - at least as she has been translated by Megan Backus. It has a very light touch, yet is at any moment able to zip from almost-cliche to real, delicate emotion:

'The room was so unearthly quiet, I lost all sense of time being divided into seconds. I felt that I was the only person alive and moving in a world brought to a stop.

'Houses always feel like that after someone has died.'

Writing like this is very often called cinematic, and Kitchen has been the subject of a fairly successful film adaptation. (The film was colder than the book, more preoccupied with presenting its events in a clinical style.) It is also reminiscent, in its food obsession, of Tampopo and Eat Drink Man Woman.

Kitchen is unmistakably the work of a very young, very acute writer: nothing is too ambitious, nothing is overemphasized; the main characters drift vaguely along, scenes gently follow one another. Yet, by the end, the story has built up an epic emotional momentum.

'The endless sea was shrouded in darkness. I could see the shadowy forms of gigantic, rugged crags against which the waves were crashing. While watching them, I felt a strange, sweet sadness. In the biting air I told myself, there will be so much pleasure, so much suffering.'