When I read Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen I thought, this is it. This is how you’re supposed to write about death and loss. You write it with the kind of honesty that rips your heart open. No lies about how much it hurts, how you don’t care about what you eat, how you look, about anyone else around you, your thoughts solely on the person you lost forever. You walk around with the full knowledge of a gaping hole in your chest, and you revel in the pain.
But you try. You try to pick yourself up. You fight the daily battle against the dark veil that threatens to cover your eyes. And at the end of the story, with perseverance and a lot of hope, you’ve accepted that you have to move on. That moving on doesn’t mean you no longer remember.
My novella Majesty tries to tell this story. My editor Layla summarized it best in less than 140 characters: it’s a ghost story about friendships that endure. Friendships that survive death. Bonds that come out from mourning. Only death lasts forever, but some friendships come very close.
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Majesty is available with other StrangeLit stories in the Darkest Dreams bundle. Get it here.
