I had to comb through the reviews of Asako Yuzuki's 'Butter' / 柚木 麻子『BUTTER』バター (published in Japanese in 2017) before I decided to read the book. This book has been excellently translated to English by Polly Barton and published in March 2024.
Through this book, the author tries to make a big comment on patriarchal Japan and all its misogyny. It's interesting enough with all the usual plot twists and characters, but it got a bit tedious in the middle with the descriptions about food and other characters. Do I really need to know all that? I didn't even feel like eating any of the dishes described within.
The author has loosely based 'Butter' on the real-life convicted killer Kanae Kijima. Dubbed as the 'Konkatsu Killer', she was accused and convicted in 2012 of killing three would-be husbands between 2007 and 2009, and is suspected to be behind four more deaths. Kanae Kijima has been on death row since 2019.
In an interview with The Japan Times in April 12, 2024, the author said that she wanted to highlight the misogyny and pressure on Japanese women to stay at home to cook.
For Yuzuki, the most interesting part of the scandal wasn’t the crimes — it was the aftermath.
“I was more interested in how the story was covered by the media than in the murders themselves,” Yuzuki says. “Of course, sympathy leaned toward the men who were killed and (there was) criticism of the woman who did it. But most of the criticism was directed toward Kijima’s lifestyle and her physical appearance rather than the actual murders. Her blog and the cooking school she’d attended were highly criticized on Japanese social media, with a heavy focus on questioning her consumption of fancy and expensive food.”
Manako Kaijii has refused to speak to the press until young and ambitious journalist Rika Machida asked her for her recipe for beef stew, the last meal eaten by one of her victims. The two women begin a series of correspondence and face-to-face meetings. Manako Kaijii only ever wants to talk about food.
Rika is the only woman in her hectic news office, writing for the Shūmei Weekly. She stays late and puts in long hours at work. She has a boyfriend, Makoto, but they don't seem to meet often. It sounded more like a friendship than romantic relationship.
Rika has a best friend in Reiko Sayama. She quit her high-flying job in advertising to become a stay-home wife in the hope of having children. We then see the paths of three women in this story, and how their paths cross, and how their choices and eventual decisions affect their lives. We also see the men in these women's lives, and how these men affect their women and relationships.
Manako Kaijii isn't the archetypal submissive Japanese woman. Each time she speaks, she makes a statement and puts across her opinions strongly. She also hates margarine and very much prefers butter, especially Echire butter.
“There are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine”; “There is nothing in this world so moronic, so pathetic, so meaningless as dieting"
At first, Rika simply explored Manako as an interview subject. Rika doesn't even cook at home, beyond ramen. She doesn't even know the difference between margarine or butter. Then she started to transform into Manako — she becomes increasingly fascinated by Manako's gourmet tastebuds and rich food, say, taroko (cod roe) with spaghetti and butter. Rika has dinner at Joël Robuchon at a table for one. She goes to the point of listening to Manako by eating buttery harigane noodles after sex with her boyfriend. In the six months she had spent with Manako, she put on weight, a fact which didn't go unnoticed by her mother and Makoto — she put on a full 10kg to 59kg now.
By and by, readers would realize that Manako is toxic. She doesn't have friends because all she wants to do is to control them, and control the narrative of the 'friendship'. She doesn't just use the men to get to her objectives. She's manipulative to everyone, to even to women supposedly her 'friends', and also to Reiko and Rika. As the story goes on, we got more involved in Reiko and Rika's lives.
I was completely befuddled as to why there's this entire segment about Reiko and Manako. Reiko actually met Manako too, and mustered her courage to leave her husband for a break. Reiko found Shiro Yokota, the man Manako was living with when she was arrested — the only 'victim' who didn't want Manako and is therefore, still alive. Reiko wanted to find out if this is the man manipulating Manako and could perhaps be the one who killed the dead men. Is this even necessary to tell the readers how toxic or 'charismatic' Manako is?
Rika made the professional mistake of confiding in Manako about her own personal life. As a result, she understood Manako and her motivations and train of thought. She found it when she went undercover at Le Salon de Miyuko. The women there told her that Manako had stormed out of a class that wanted to make a 5-kg turkey that would feed ten diners, or more.
'Whatever you did, however hard you tried, you couldn't have had ten friends over to your house. You had plenty of worshippers, but you could hardly have the men you'd met on the dating sites together in the same place. Your maximum guest count would have been a man you were dating and your sister, which is to say, two people. Or maybe even that would have been impossible — perhaps it would have been too risky to let someone you'd told all those lies meet a member of your family. Even if you were more serious about your cooking than any of the other students, you weren't blessed with a place where you could do it in the way you wanted to. Quite possibly, the same applied to every aspect of your life.
Rika shot a look at Kaijii. She looked as though she were smiling.
'Maybe, if you'd had enough ease and space in your life to believe in a "someday", then everything would have been different", then everything would have been different. Believing in a "someday" isn't a sign of weakness or stupidity, and it isn't an escape either. When you realised that you didn't have anywhere you could cook and serve a turkey, you felt like you couldn't breathe, like you had nowhere left to go. You felt hatred towards all those students who weren't even thinking about their futures, and wanted to leave the Balzac kitchen that very moment. When you realised that what you'd done meant you could no longer return to the one space where you felt safe, you grew sick and tired of everything. Am I right?'
At the end, Rika got Manako's story and permission to write the interviews into an article in the Shūmei Weekly. The edition featuring Manako's interview sold out, inciting a flurry of readers' reactions and high readership. BUT Rika got burnt by Manako. This woman, who bends the truths to suit her opinions, had somehow gotten 'engaged' to man while she is in prison. That man is a freelance editor, and apparently a douchebag in the industry. Manako and this new 'fiancé/husband' would write her biography together and publish it. Hahaha. Anyway, this dubious editor managed to write and publish an article that brought down Rika's career, accusing her of having a crush on Manako and writing untruths. The backlash to Rika was instantaneous and vicious.
Although Rika had written facts, but the way she had sourced for the information and that she had questionable methods, resulted in the editor asking her to go on a 7-day leave of absence from work duties. Ultimately, Rika had to resign from the news desk and shift over to writing for the company's women's magazine, writing about herself, and featuring interviews with other women whose lives were thrown into disarray by Manako Kaijii, including the accused's mother and sister.
Although Rika got swept up in the older woman's manipulative games, she isn't one of Manako's victims. Rika found her voice, her thoughts, came to terms with who and what she is. She broke up with Makoto, balanced her heart, forged a new career path that still allows her to write, and is warmly surrounded by real and firm friends. At least the ending is decent. I don't mind it.
As Rika nodded, it struck her that in the not-so-distant future, their little group would disband. Everyone was already beginning to return to their former routines. Shinoi needed to sell this apartment. They needed to move on. That seemed sad, but something new awaited all of them.
Rika wanted to keep her weight. She has surprisingly begun cooking more, and seems to have morphed into a decent home cook with her own original recipes. She also bought a new house that comes with a good-sized oven to fit a turkey, and also a new big-enough fridge. Rika went shopping with Yu, bought that turkey and roasted it. She had all her friends and her mother over at her new apartment to share in this beautiful turkey meal. She is not alone.
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