Home is where the kitchen is: Rinco’s Restaurant (2009) and Little Forest (2014, 2018)1

Abstract

The kitchen has become a prominent trope in East Asian cinema, the narratives of which revolve around the homecoming of female protagonists: Rinco’s Restaurant (2009) and Little Forest (2014, 2018). In part due to the fact that the films are adaptations of different media – novel and manga, respectively – and in part motivated by their narrative and style – the female protagonist’s loss of voice in Rinco’s Restaurant and the less frequent recourse to the verbal to express taste in these works – the audience is challenged to imagine the taste of, and pleasure in consuming, food, conveyed through only a limited set of sensorial modes. I focus on the transformative aspect of divergent modes of media storytelling in these films and their original source texts, and further argue that the kitchen becomes a ‘choric’ space for female protagonists where the relationship between mother and daughter is reconfigured in order to reinvent themselves.