A book with a cover as inviting as butter – rich yellow and beautifully designed – how could I resist?

We always choose butter but not margarine to cook.

Asking a woman who loves to cook for a recipe is to strike them in their weakest, most unprotected spot.

I baked cakes using this recipe from my auntie. It's a French 'four quarter' pound cake, made with equal parts egg, flour, butter, and granulated sugar (150 grams each).

A journalist (Rika Machida), interviews a food-loving serial killer (Manako Kajii), but the focus is on recipes, not crimes, blurring the lines between them.

This book is really well-written, but it is quite lengthy. If you have the time to dedicate to a long read, I highly recommend it.asian-literature crime fiction ...more158 s6 comments Meike1,713 3,680

English: Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder
Female Japanese writers have lately been killing it on the international literary market, and rightly so: I love the brutal, disturbing, evocative feminist social commentary of authors Sayaka Murata or Mieko Kawakami. Asako Yuzuki has delivered a huge bestseller with "Butter", but beware: While Murata sends blood-related lovers to a remote hut where they eat each other to make a point, the super-subversive gesture in Yuzuki's novel is that a woman puts lots of butter on rice. Yes: This is a book that will offend no one, disturb no one, and confuse no one. It's a very tame, very easy to understand novel, which doesn't mean that it isn't fun to read - readers just have to be aware that this is entertainment literature.

Our protagonist Rika is a 30-something magazine employee who wants to interview a woman who is accused of murdering three men after first having seduced them with her delicious cooking. Rika manages to meet Kajii and falls under her spell; she gets manipulated by the deeply disturbed woman and starts eating, you know, lots of butter. Topics that arise are misogyny (especially in the workplace and relating to female body images), pleasure, and, most importantly: loneliness. The men Kajii seduced were lonely, Rika's male friends and colleagues grapple with alienation, and so do, to a degree, the women we meet, from Rika who mainly lives for her thankless job, her friend Reiko who tries to conform to the traditional image of a wife, and Kajii who declares to idealize traditional female roles, but turns out to be unable to build any real relationships that go beyond the strict rules of convention.

For what it is, the novel is too long, and the culinary delights (a stand-in for pleasure in life or sometimes, more directly, sex) and their descriptions take lots of space, which will certainly appeal to the foodies out there (personally though, I love Japanese food, and I found many of the butter orgies to be culinary crimes - who drowns their tasty ramen and rice in butter? Yikes.). And of course, the whole butter metaphor is undercomplex, and so is the book. The final scene is basically Bridget Jones's Diary-level feminist commentary.

For a 400-page-book, this reads extremely fast, which also has to do with the stellar translation done by the wonderful Ursula Gräfe. Still, this novel is not an example of why Japanese female literature is currently so highly regarded in international literary circles, it's just too tame, on-the-nose, and simplistic - but nonetheless, pretty fun to read.2022-read japan121 s8 comments Hannah Greendale (Hello, Bookworm)691 3,782

"She recalled that milk came from blood. The same must then be true of butter. She licked the blood on the scab again. It tasted of metal and sweat."*

Hear me out... Butter is Julie & Julia if Julia Child were a serial killer and Julie's feelings for the skilled cook transgressed beyond admiration, with a pinch of murder and a generous serving of feminism.

What I thought this book would be: A startling thriller in which a female serial killer whips up delicious gourmet meals and serves them to her unsuspecting victims while a journalist writing about the mounting murders starts piecing clues together to crack the case and find the killer.

What this book actually is: Something else entirely . . .

Butter is based on a true story and opens with serial killer Manako Kajii (also known in real life as the Konkatsu Killer) already in prison, where she refuses to speak to any interviewers, especially women. Journalist Rika Machida is keen to interview Kajii and manages to connect with the imprisoned woman by exploiting her interest in food (i.e., asking for a recipe).

According to the media, the most surprising thing about Kajii's case was not how she used dating sites and exquisite food to lure would-be husbands before (allegedly) murdering them, it was that Kajii was "was neither young nor beautiful"* and was considered overweight. The media questioned: Why would a man, no matter how lonely he was, find her desirable?

Gaining weight and observing how society treats women who have gained weight is central to Rika's journey toward self-acceptance (note: this could be triggering for some readers). Meanwhile, her interactions with Kajii center on exploring food and discussing feminism.

The story follows journalist Rika (not Kajii) as she learns to cook and gains weight, wrestles with being comfortable in her new body, navigates patriarchal views of women's roles and bodies, researches Kajii's history, strives for autonomy, and ultimately discovers how she wishes to exist as a woman.

At its heart, this is a story about hunger: for food, for connection, for sensuality, for friendship, for knowledge, for independence, and for acceptance. It's also a story of opposites with Kajii and Rika holding diametric opinions toward women and feminism.

There's little in the way of violence or gore in this book. Instead, it offers an abundance of sumptuous descriptions of food: textures, aromas, flavors, sensations, etc.

I think a more apt title for the book would have been, Butter: A Novel of Food and Feminism. It may not be as catchy or have sold as many copies, but it more accurately represents what this book offers.

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Many thanks to Ecco for sending me an advanced reading copy. Butter publishes April 16, 2024.

*Note: Quotes taken from an advanced reading copy and are subject to change by the final printing.

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This book sounds wild! About a woman who lures lonely businessmen with her gourmet cooking then murders them and the journalist intent on cracking the case. And it's BASED ON A TRUE STORY?
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