Book Review: Butter

[osprey_archer]

Recently littlerhymes reviewed Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, “a novel of food and murder,” to quote the cover. “Food AND murder?” I said. “Two of my favorite things in one book?” AND the book was translated by Polly Barton, who translated Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, which absolutely clinched the deal.

This book is fantastic. It is a novel of food and murder, but also about the impossible demands of femininity, fat-shaming, the extent to which it is possible to be responsible for another person, the difficulty of truly embracing your own desires (starting with the surprisingly difficult task of figuring out what you even want), the brutal hours demanded by Japanese companies, the meaning of friendship, and also what the heck is UP with Manako Kajii.

Manako Kajii is in prison, convicted of murdering three men. The evidence is entirely circumstantial: she was dating all three men, having met them through a website for people looking for marriage, except instead of marrying them she got them to give her loads of cash in exchange for gourmet meals and, one presumes, sex. Unfortunately for her, three of her boyfriends died in quick succession, and although there’s no evidence she pushed one off the railway platform or snuck the other that lethal overdose of sleeping pills, people are so mad about her lifestyle that she’s convicted of the murders anyway.

They’re especially mad because Kajii managed all this while being (by Japanese standards) FAT. The siren who lured three men to their deaths is not even pretty. This terrifies everyone: men because they shudder over the humiliation of potentially being murdered by a girl who is not even a perfect 10, and women because this only strengthens their belief that what men really want is not an equal partner but a mommy-wife who feeds them, cleans up after them, and coos over their boring rants about work.

Although the book may sound like a murder mystery from the summary, it’s notably uninteresting in actual evidence about Kajii’s supposed killings. The details I mentioned above we learn almost incidentally, and our heroine Rika, a magazine reporter working on a profile of Kajii, makes no attempt to follow them up. Her interest is in the mystery of Kajii herself: what makes her tick?

In trying to figure out Kajii, Rika reads Kajii’s food blog (a lush wonderland of luxury brands and fancy restaurants), interviews Kajii, begins to learn to cook herself, falls in love with food and flavor and maybe also a little bit with Kajii, or at least what Kajii represents to her, which is the willingness to embrace one’s own desires, whether that means eating what one wants to eat or (in Kajii’s case) giving up on “employment” to be supported as essentially the mistress of a variety of rich old men.

The problem, as Rika repeatedly discovers, is that like Kajii’s old men, what Rika sees in Kajii is what she’s projecting onto Kajii. They saw her as a sweet traditional girl who just wants to please men; Rika sees her as an avatar of chasing your own desires, even if those desires are socially disruptive. Kajii herself is both those things, as well as an outspoken misogynist who longs for a daughter, a daddy’s girl who never went back to her hometown after she left at eighteen, a walking contradiction who revels in manipulation but also, perhaps, longs for the connection that has thus far eluded her.

Or maybe not. Maybe Rika is projecting that longing for connection onto a basically heartless sociopath. Yuzuki maintains all these tensions, juggling all these different facets of Kajii without ever simplifying her to one single Kajii.

This is a very Kajii-centric review, because it was Kajii who most blew me away, but I also loved Rika and her friendship with Reiko, both for their own sake and because they allow Yuzuki to develop her themes about societal expectations about femininity in so many directions that the theme becomes almost fractal. Here is a writer who has a lot to say and is saying all of it at the same time in a way that’s so engrossing that I barely resisted the desire to take a sick day just to keep reading.

And she does it all AND includes some great food descriptions, too. I was so carried away by her enthusiasm that I actually tried Kajii’s recipe for rice with butter. It didn’t have the same transformative effect on me that it had on Rika, but maybe if I used the very fancy butter that Kajii recommended…

Comments

[littlerhymes]

I think Kajii does long for connection, though she's too proud to admit it, because that would disrupt her narrative that she's figured it out and has followed her own desires without regard for societal norms. She does want the cooking class to be her friends... she wants Rika to be friends with her, on Kajii's terms of course... I found it a bit poignant and sad that her cooking blog is not actually particularly good!

The food descriptions were so good. It made me examine my butter choices.

[osprey_archer]

Part of the Tragedy of Kajii (which is also the Tragedy of Everyone Who Comes in Contact with Kajii) is that I think she would genuinely prefer to be seen as a sociopath than as someone who longs for connection. (Although obviously she would prefer to be seen as neither of those things, but instead as someone who has indeed figured it out and found fulfilling connection that the rest of us can only dream of.) At least no one feels sorry for a sociopath!

I did feel so bad for her about the cooking class though. She's trying to make friends and then ruins it with her own temper tantrum. And the realization that so many of the things she said about food that Rika really vibed with were not Kajii originals, but things she learned in cooking class...

I definitely came out of the book questioning my butter choices.

[msilverstar]

My library has it, doesn't sound like my usual fare but I want to read it!

[osprey_archer]

I hope you enjoy it! It's a little out of my usual wheelhouse too but I really liked it.

[troisoiseaux]

I've been meaning to read this! I'll have to bump it up on the TBR.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I think this is a book that you'll really like. TBH I had to pause while I was writing this post to think if I had heard about this book from you as well as littlerhymes.

[genarti]

Ooooh, this sounds FASCINATING.

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, it was a fantastic and thought-provoking read! And just super engrossing to read too, which doesn't always come alongside thought-provoking.

[landingtree]

Adding this to library list!

[osprey_archer]

Yessss, the good word is spreading!

[phantomtomato]

I’ve seen this in stores a few times and ignored it, but as someone with strong opinions about butter for eating, your review makes me think I should add it to the list!

[osprey_archer]

It's a really good read! Amazing butter descriptions. I hope you enjoy it.

[threeplusfire]

This was such a strange, interesting book. The food writing is so lush, especially in contrast to the ascetic spareness of so much of what is happening.

Have you ever read Natsuo Kirino? She's got a few books translated to English that I really loved for their hyper specific depictions of the lives of Japanese women. *Grotesque* and *Out* are both billed as crime novels but I was truly captivated by the way women in those stories interacted.

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, one of the things that is really fascinating about the book is that even though Kajii is for many ways bad for Rika, Rika's relationship with her also really allows Rika to open up her life to pleasure when she's really been living a pretty spartan existence.

I haven't read Natsuo Kirino, but after reading Butter I was thinking I should read more Japanese literature in translation (and feeling sad that none of Yuzuki's other works have been translated), so maybe I'll give her a try! It looks like the library has both of the books you mentioned. Which would you recommend first?

[threeplusfire]

I think Out is her most famous work, and I really love the story in that one the best!

[osprey_archer]

That was is at my local library! I can pick it up whenever I choose!

[asakiyume]

That sounds super! Polly Barton is a great translator; I've enjoyed other things she's translated.

Do you-the-reader (or you-the-particular-reader; I get that it could vary from reader to reader) feel like you're able to have an idea of Kajii that isn't mediated by Rika? I feel like maybe you sort of do, because you bring up whether the longing for connection that Rika senses is just Rika's own projection.

Wondering if you could say more about what aspects of Kajii in particular blew you away? (This doesn't come from doubt on my part, just curious to know what aspects really spoke to you.)

[osprey_archer]

I don't think you fully get a sense what Kajii is like unmediated by Rika (beyond the sense that she surely behaves very differently with her sugar daddies), but as Rika gets to know Kajii better she stops projecting quite so much, and also we see different characters projecting completely different things onto Kajii, which allows us to kind of triangulate not just what Kajii's like but what people's perceptions about Kajii tell us about society on a wider scale.

I think what is so impressive about Kajii (on an artistic level) is that many of the things we learn about her come from deeply biased sources, and she herself contains so many different contradictory elements, and yet you do get the sense of a coherent character underneath it all. Rika never fully understands it and neither does the reader but you do feel that it's there.

Also, if you have a book where one character becomes obsessed by another, to a certain extent you have to make the reader also obsessed or else the book doesn't work, and in this case I totally shared Rika's obsession. Is she maybe going to weird lengths to research this article? Maybe! But it's to understand Kajii better and I'm 100% on board with trying to understand Kajii better.

[asakiyume]

Thank you! This is excellent.

Also, if you have a book where one character becomes obsessed by another, to a certain extent you have to make the reader also obsessed or else the book doesn't work ---Nodding: this is really sharp and yet I don't think I ever articulated it for myself--thank you!