100 Books Like Kitchen

This contemporary, quirky tale centers around the life of Keiko, a young woman who has never done anything in a conventional way and has her mother very worried that her daughter will never find a man and settle down into a conventional life. No, Keiko’s ways of thinking are startling and odd in ways that are both amusing and somewhat horrifying, as she really does fall outside the realm of conventional thinking and socially rewarded behavior. The reader comes to love her as she grows into womanhood (and personhood) as a worker in a fast-paced convenience store, where she memorizes hundreds of products and practices behaving more “normally” by mimicking the actions and words of her co-workers. Then a man named Shiraha enters the picture, for a new twist.

This is another unconventional recommendation because it’s not only about grief. Maté is a medical doctor whose work focuses on the damage that unprocessed emotional trauma—including grief—does to the body and how to process emotions in a way that is less likely to lead to physical disease.

I think this book is a necessary complement to books about complicated grief because it provides an understanding of what happens when we do not allow ourselves to fully experience grief in a safe and supported manner, and provides insights into how to do so.  

I read this book after I had already sent my manuscript to my agent and was surprised that the plot involved the main character unexpectedly caring for a dog after losing a loved one, as my novel does. Told from the point of view of a writing professor whose best friend and mentor has taken his own life, it traces the protagonist’s slow psychological unraveling as she tries to come to terms with both her friend’s death and the place he had held in her life. Adopting his dog takes her out of her ordinary routine in concrete ways and also grounds her and requires her to take part in the details of a new kind of daily life, even if reluctantly. 

Part of what I love about this book is the many ways in which it’s experimental. It combines fiction, autofiction, and essay writing. It contains blank pages. There… show more.

Life is a journey that each of us only takes once. This book shows how to undertake that journey with warmth and wisdom.

Whilst we all take a unique path, there are lessons we can learn from others further up the escalator to the inevitable end; Morrie provides them. We are better off together, we live longer, fuller, richer lives. This book reminds us to connect with others and share the journey.

C.S. Lewis is best known for his Narnia books, but the book of his that sticks with me the most is this one, a first-person contemporaneous account of the famed fiction writer’s mourning for his wife. He began a journal shortly after she died and stopped when he reached the end of the notebook and then published it.

When I read it, I was dealing with intense grief that I felt no one around me understood, and reading Lewis’ journal/memoir made me feel like someone living in the same headspace had reached out his hand to me. One of the early statements in the book struck such a chord with me that I remember it to this day, more than 30 years later: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

This is a gorgeous coming-of-age novel about a young, poor fisherman named Shinji who falls head over heels in love with a new girl on the island of Utajima. Japan’s most famous writer, Mishima, sets his romance in post-WWII where the innocence of Shinji and Hatsue is as pure and passionate as can be. The wind, the waves, the sea, the kiss that tastes of salt—all of nature intertwine with human life. The problem: Hatsue is actually the long-gone daughter of a major family who wants her to marry someone of equal social standing. With its humorous episodes, close descriptive imagery, and a plot that displays Mishima’s unabashed devotion to old-style traditions and customs, this little novel is one of my all-time favorites. 

Whether a fan of anime and video games, or an admirer of ancient Noh drama and Kabuki dances, one can’t really know the heart of Japan without reading Lafcadio Hearn’s translations of ghostly tales, all contained in this amazing volume. There are demons and goblins that exist way-y-y beyond the average Westerner’s mind. There are legends that send chills up and down the spine, creatures without faces, a man who marries the love of his life only to lose her after just five years because she is really the soul of a tree… Enjoy these stories of the bewitched and karmically affected characters.

Looking for a well-curated, wide variety of Japanese short stories written by nearly all the famous modernist novelists revered in Japan? This collection contains everything from Kawabata’s "The Izu Dancer" to Satomi Ton’s marvelously deep story called "Blowfish", wherein the hero—a famously talented Kabuki actor succumbs to the kind of brain-fogging, body-busting death that only blowfish poison can deliver. The author manages to get inside the head of his character, uncovering what transitioning into death feels like, with humor sprinkled here and there, and an emotional recollection/revelation about his own actor-father dying in a theater fire. 

I read Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland in 2015—a time when my life wasn't tainted by grief. Even then, I found myself mesmerized by the novel's depiction of the grieving process as a long-lasting curse that spreads its tentacles into all aspects of our lives.

Gauri, the protagonist of Lahiri's novel, loses her Naxalite husband to political violence. Although Gauri gains a second chance at happiness, her pain consumes her, and she constantly reinvents herself to escape its clutches, albeit at her family’s emotional expense.

In retrospect, I was impressed by the author's accurate portrayal of grief as a sort of spiritual and emotional gridlock. In addition, I believe The Lowland provides a moving meditation on the intergenerational effect of unresolved trauma.

Even though Adichie’s father did not die from COVID, it happened during the pandemic when the world shut down. To this, I could relate all too well.

I spent the pandemic, and months afterward, grieving my father’s death, and I found comfort reading the stories of other daughters whose dads have died.