BUTTER - ASAKO YUZUKI (trans. POLLY BARTON)

My mom, who reads more current fiction than me, recommended this book to me when I came back from Japan. I kept the crime novel written by a Japanese woman theme going and gave her back OUT. This one couldn’t really be further than that pretty hard-edged noir-y novel I read a year or so ago. While this book is about a murderer, the crime element is mostly played down and the stuff about how impossible it is to be a woman in Japan is played up. The novel has a structure similar to Silence of the Lambs, but instead of a young FBI agent, a young reporter, Rika, goes to interview an infamous and charismatic murderer, Kajii (tho, whether or not she actually can be blamed for the deaths she’s accused of is more in play in this novel than it was with the late, great Dr. Lecter) and gets seduced by what the killer is saying. Kajii is obsessed with food and living for pleasure and is accused of using her cooking and hospitality to lure sad old salaraymen into her life and then killing them. Rika scars down her sad meals as quickly as possible and doesn’t know how to cook. In order to get Kajii to open up to her, Rika lets Kajii guide her into the world of food, eating the dishes that Kajii recommends and reporting back to her in their jail visits. As this goes on, Rika also begins to look into Kajii’s background and also starts to question her own relationship with food and pleasure and caring for others. The novel is largely about the expectations of Japanese women to live for others in their lives, cooking, cleaning, hosting and staying thin. When Rika becomes interested in cooking for her own pleasure and gains weight, she gets pushback from every corner. I’m not a woman, but I have lived in Japan and I will say that the expectations of patriarchy did seem particularly high there, and there is an element of self-denial that was preserved but seemed to fall more on women (and as an Amerikan this was very alien, we certainly don’t have that particular issue, we have the opposite problem) and I found this exploration in the book really interesting. Also, the food descriptions are amazing, and really did make me miss Japanese food dearly. My main complaint with this book is that there is too much going on. There are dozens of sub-plots and most of them don’t really go anywhere, like Rika’s boyfriend’s obsession with a girl-group that keeps getting brought up. Additionally, part of the book is a mystery that is trying to figure out what Kajii’s past was like and whether or not she actually killed these men, and another part is about Rika’s personal journey, the Kajii stuff sort of fizzles out, but it makes you wonder why we spent so much time on it then. But overall, I really like the book, it was a fun nighttime read. The finale of the book involves Rika cooking a whole turkey, thanksgiving style, for all her friends. Turkey isn’t something that people eat in Japan and most people don’t even have an oven at home, yet Thanksgiving is such a part of the Amerikan pop culture that they consume they’re familiar with the concept. When I taught in Japan, I did have a co-teacher ask me if everyone really ate turkey for thanksgiving, and I told him, yeah, that’s basically true, it’s pretty much a requirement, even though we don’t really eat turkey, and especially don’t bake a whole turkey, the rest of the year since it is a) a lot of work, and, b) not really that good. I asked him if he’d ever had turkey and he looked at me sort of shocked and said, “no, of course not, that’s like a zoo animal.”