WORDS BY INÉS PARIS ARRANZ
Author Asako Yuzuki © Bungeishunju Ltd
There are novels that ask to be read quietly, almost cerebrally, and there are novels that insist on entering the body. Butter by Asako Yuzuki belongs emphatically to the latter. It is that rare book that activates more than sight and intellect; it awakens appetite. You read it in the conventional sense—eyes scanning lines, mind assembling narrative—but meanwhile, your senses are at work. The steam of noodle soup rises from the page. Butter melts slowly over crisp duck skin. A fragile French pastry flakes apart at the back of your throat. Even a Thanksgiving turkey, translated into a Japanese kitchen, feels immediate and tactile. The novel seduces through taste. Yet this sensory indulgence is not gratuitous. Beneath the lush descriptions lies a far more disquieting subject: loneliness and the fragile, often transactional ways human beings attempt to escape it.
Resisting easy placement within Western genre categories, Butter follows Rika, a journalist investigating the alleged crimes of Manako Kajii, a woman accused of seducing and murdering lonely businessmen through food, cooking for them, taking care of their needs, but also through the excess of both copious meals and Kajii’s own big body, which shows her own love for food. The structure resembles a crime narrative, but the novel’s real preoccupation is less the mechanics of murder than the architecture of desire. What does it mean to hunger not only for sustenance, but for validation, intimacy, recognition? And who is allowed to satisfy that hunger without shame?
It is tempting to describe the novel as being ‘about’ food, or misogyny, or media sensationalism. Yet narrowing it to a single theme would diminish its power. Food is the entry point, but appetite—especially female appetite—is the battleground. At its most provocative, in Butter Yuzuki asks a deceptively simple question: how are women permitted to enjoy life? More specifically, how are women permitted to enjoy food, to inhabit bodies that reflect that enjoyment, and to resist shrinking into acceptability? The novel makes clear that the expectations imposed on women are not merely restrictive but contradictory. As one character reflects:
She had to be cute, innocent, strong, obedient, hard-working and sexy. If this was all you watched, it stood to reason a real woman was going to seem difficult to handle and more trouble than she was worth.¹
This passage crystallises the impossible calculus of femininity. The required traits are mutually incompatible: innocence must coexist with sexual availability; obedience must harmonise with strength; effortlessness must conceal relentless labour. The accumulation becomes absurd, and deliberately so. The novel suggests that when femininity is constructed as a seamless performance of contradictions, any real woman, embodied, ageing, hungry, will inevitably appear excessive.
Repeatedly described as large, unfeminine, and excessive, Kajii’s body becomes the public’s fixation during her trial. The scandal lies not only in the alleged murders but in what observers perceive as an impossibility: how could a “fat” woman persuade multiple men to fall in love with her, to propose marriage, to trust her? The disbelief exposes an unspoken hierarchy of desirability in which thinness is equated with worth. Kajii’s supposed success destabilises that hierarchy. Her body challenges the myth that women must diminish themselves to be chosen.
Yet the novel’s critique does not stop at misogyny. It extends into the quiet crisis of male loneliness. The men Kajii targets are not caricatures of villainy; they are middle-aged, isolated, and emotionally underdeveloped. They rely on women for domestic stability, emotional regulation, and daily sustenance. Without a wife or girlfriend to cook and care for them, they unravel. The novel implies that society has conditioned men to outsource both nourishment and emotional labour to women, leaving them dangerously unequipped to care for themselves. In this sense, Kajii’s crimes, if they are crimes, occur within a system already structured by dependency. Butter, the novel’s central symbol, embodies this duality. On one level, it is an instrument of seduction and conformity. Kajii uses butter to produce the kind of rich, indulgent meals that signal domestic competence. Through cooking, she performs the archetype of the nurturing woman, even as she subverts it. But butter is also resistance. It is caloric, excessive, and unapologetic. To cook generously with butter is to reject austerity, to refuse the disciplined thinness demanded of women. It allows the body to expand, to occupy space without apology.
This tension reaches a disturbing climax in one of the novel’s most evocative metaphors:
Milk was originally blood. In that case, was the butter in the Babaji story actually a metaphor for all the carnage that took place under the cover of the jungle? What seemed pure, white and creamy had its origins in vivid, bloody red—was that not the essence of this whole case?²
Here, nourishment and violence collapse into one another. Milk, culturally coded as maternal and pure, originates in blood; butter, seemingly innocent and domestic, carries the trace of something visceral and raw. The metaphor reframes Kajii’s story: what appears soft and benign may conceal brutality; what is condemned as monstrous may arise from wounds inflicted long before. The transformation from blood to milk to butter mirrors the transformation of trauma into performance. Kajii’s cultivated domesticity masks deeper injuries: abuse, abandonment, and societal rejection. The metaphor suggests that purity itself is a narrative imposed after the fact, one that conceals the violence required to sustain it.
At the centre of the novel lies the relationship between Kajii and Rika, a dynamic that is as unsettling as it is compelling. Their interactions evolve into a distorted mentorship. Kajii instructs Rika in cooking, in savouring, in indulgence. She teaches her how to prepare butter rice, how to select ingredients, and how to taste deliberately. But beneath the surface lies manipulation. Kajii derives pleasure from controlling the terms of the relationship, from positioning herself as both suspect and guru. Food becomes her language of power.
Rika, initially sceptical and professionally detached, finds herself drawn into Kajii’s orbit. The act of cooking begins to alter her. Preparing rich dishes, allowing herself to eat without immediate self-reproach, she feels her body soften, expand. This expansion is not merely physical; it is existential. She begins to question the narrow script she has followed, a script of professional ambition, romantic passivity, and bodily discipline. Through Kajii, she confronts the possibility that her own restraint has been another form of self-erasure. Yet Kajii herself remains static. She is unable to evolve beyond the trauma and societal expectations that shaped her. If butter represents expansion, Kajii’s use of it is paradoxically constrained; it is deployed strategically. In contrast, Rika’s transformation hints at something more hopeful: the potential to inhabit appetite without weaponising it.
The novel offers an alternative to the toxic intimacy between Rika and Kajii in the friendship between Rika and Reiko. Their bond is built on confession and mutual recognition. In one particularly revealing exchange about dieting and weight, Reiko admits:
It feels like the Japanese desire to be thin is less about beauty and more… It’s like we’re all being controlled, so that when you come across a person who’s shaken off that control, you feel irritated. I’m sorry for telling you before that you should diet. Seeing you becoming softer, rounder, and more relaxed made me anxious.³
The insight here is profound. Thinness is framed as a social discipline. The irritation Reiko describes is the discomfort of witnessing someone else escape a system one has internalised. When Rika stops dieting, she threatens the shared illusion that self-denial is virtuous. The anxiety is about control. Eating, then, becomes a political act. Cooking can be nurturing, but it can also be coercive. Refusing to cook for a man may be a form of resistance; cooking abundantly for oneself may be an assertion of worth. The novel insists that appetite—culinary, sexual, emotional—cannot be disentangled from power.
And yet, for all its thematic richness, Butter is not without flaws. At times, the narrative leans toward over-explication. Certain conversations feel engineered to articulate the novel’s central ideas rather than to emerge organically from the characters. The reader is occasionally guided too insistently toward interpretation, as though the text mistrusts silence. Moments that might have resonated more powerfully through implication are instead spelt out. This didactic tendency can render sections of the novel slightly heavy, particularly when the narrator reiterates insights that are already evident.
Still, even this excess mirrors the novel’s broader preoccupation with abundance. Butter is not a restrained book; it is repetitive and insistent. It circles its themes the way a cook tastes a dish repeatedly, adjusting seasoning. If some passages feel overly rich, they remain consistent with the novel’s refusal of austerity. Ultimately, Butter challenges the moral frameworks through which we judge bodies, desires, and dependencies. It asks why female pleasure is so frequently pathologised, why expansion—of flesh, of appetite, of ambition—is treated as a threat. It exposes the fragility of a society that demands women be everything at once while condemning them for visible hunger.
To read Butter is to confront one’s own discomfort with excess. The novel invites us to consider what we have been taught to fear: weight gain, emotional need, communal intimacy. It asks whether occupying space must always be accompanied by an apology, suggesting that survival, like cooking, requires courage: the courage to taste fully, to nourish others without erasing oneself, and to refuse the thin, joyless scripts we have inherited.
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Inés Paris Arranz holds an MA in North American Studies (with a mention in Literature and Visual Culture) from the Franklin Institute and an MA in Education, and is currently pursuing an MA in Hispanic Literatures (Basque, Catalan, and Galician). She works as a bookseller and has published poetry in literary magazines and reviews. Her first poetry collection appeared in 2023. Deeply interested in contemporary literature and literary retellings, she is based in Madrid and loves knitting. She is a book reviewer forZimmer Magazine, an article writer and helps in any way she can with this great project.