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Oct. 29th, 2025 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsThe other Polly Barton-translated book I read recently was Asako Yuzuki's Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder, which I ended up suggesting for my book club on account of intriguing DW posts from several of you.
Butter focuses Rika Machida, a magazine journalist, on the cusp of becoming the first woman in her company to break the glass ceiling and join Big Editorial, who decides that her next big feature is going to be an insider interview with the infamous prisoner Manako Kajii. Kajii is accused of murdering several men that she met on dating sites after seducing them with a fatal combination of sex, personal attention, and French cooking; in the eyes of the public, however, her greatest crime is that she somehow managed all this femme fatale-ing while being Kind Of Fat.
After a tip from her best friend Reiko -- a housewife who quit her own promising career in hopes of starting a family -- Rika, despite having no previous interest in cooking or domesticity, writes to Kajii about getting her recipe for beef stew. This opens the door for a connection that gets very psychologically weird very fast; Kajii, behind bars, tests Rika with various little living-by-proxy challenges -- eat some good butter! go to the best French restaurant in town! eat late night ramen! after having sex! and tell me all about it -- and Rika, fascinated despite herself, allows herself to be manipulated. For the interview, of course. And also because it turns out good butter is really good, and that eating and making rich food for herself instead of working to keep herself boyishly thin (the prince of her all-girl's school! One of the Boys at work!) is changing her relationship to her body, and her gender, and to the way that people perceive her in the world and she perceives them.
This is more or less what I'd understood to be the plot of the book -- a sort of Silence of the Lambs situation, if the crime that Clarice was trying to solve by talking with Hannibal was societal misogyny -- but in fact it's only about half of the story, and societal misogyny is only one of the big crimes under consideration. The other one is loneliness, and so the rest of the book has to do with Rika's other relationships, and the domino-effect changes that Rika's Kajiimania has on the other people in her life. The most significant is with Reiko, which is extremely fraught with lesbian tension that is more-or-less textual but weirdly unfulfilled -- I think because one of the big problems that Asako Yuzuki is interested in talking about is Male And Female Loneliness and how to grow old alone happily, and if Rika hooks up with Reiko then she simply would not be doing that. But there's also Rika's mother, and her boyfriend, and the older mentor that she has secret intermittent just-lads-together meet-ups with in bars to get hot journalistic tips; all of these relationships are important, and usually ended up in places I didn't expect and that were more interesting than I would have guessed.
Not everything landed for me about this book, but this was one thing it did pretty consistently that I appreciated -- Rika would think about something, and I would go, 'well, that was didactic, you just said your theme out loud,' and then the book and Rika as protagonist would revisit it and have a more complicated and potentially contradictory thought about it, and then we'd go back to it again, and it usually ended up being more interesting than I would have thought the first time around. It's a long book, possibly too long, but it's equally possible I think that it does need that space to hold contradictions in.
It was however quite funny to read this shortly after Taiwan Travelogue -- another book I have not written up and should probably do so soon -- and also shortly after What Did You Eat Yesterday and also seeing a lot of gifsets for She Loves To Cook and She Loves To Eat ... fellas, is it gay to be really into food? signs point to yes!
Butter focuses Rika Machida, a magazine journalist, on the cusp of becoming the first woman in her company to break the glass ceiling and join Big Editorial, who decides that her next big feature is going to be an insider interview with the infamous prisoner Manako Kajii. Kajii is accused of murdering several men that she met on dating sites after seducing them with a fatal combination of sex, personal attention, and French cooking; in the eyes of the public, however, her greatest crime is that she somehow managed all this femme fatale-ing while being Kind Of Fat.
After a tip from her best friend Reiko -- a housewife who quit her own promising career in hopes of starting a family -- Rika, despite having no previous interest in cooking or domesticity, writes to Kajii about getting her recipe for beef stew. This opens the door for a connection that gets very psychologically weird very fast; Kajii, behind bars, tests Rika with various little living-by-proxy challenges -- eat some good butter! go to the best French restaurant in town! eat late night ramen! after having sex! and tell me all about it -- and Rika, fascinated despite herself, allows herself to be manipulated. For the interview, of course. And also because it turns out good butter is really good, and that eating and making rich food for herself instead of working to keep herself boyishly thin (the prince of her all-girl's school! One of the Boys at work!) is changing her relationship to her body, and her gender, and to the way that people perceive her in the world and she perceives them.
This is more or less what I'd understood to be the plot of the book -- a sort of Silence of the Lambs situation, if the crime that Clarice was trying to solve by talking with Hannibal was societal misogyny -- but in fact it's only about half of the story, and societal misogyny is only one of the big crimes under consideration. The other one is loneliness, and so the rest of the book has to do with Rika's other relationships, and the domino-effect changes that Rika's Kajiimania has on the other people in her life. The most significant is with Reiko, which is extremely fraught with lesbian tension that is more-or-less textual but weirdly unfulfilled -- I think because one of the big problems that Asako Yuzuki is interested in talking about is Male And Female Loneliness and how to grow old alone happily, and if Rika hooks up with Reiko then she simply would not be doing that. But there's also Rika's mother, and her boyfriend, and the older mentor that she has secret intermittent just-lads-together meet-ups with in bars to get hot journalistic tips; all of these relationships are important, and usually ended up in places I didn't expect and that were more interesting than I would have guessed.
Not everything landed for me about this book, but this was one thing it did pretty consistently that I appreciated -- Rika would think about something, and I would go, 'well, that was didactic, you just said your theme out loud,' and then the book and Rika as protagonist would revisit it and have a more complicated and potentially contradictory thought about it, and then we'd go back to it again, and it usually ended up being more interesting than I would have thought the first time around. It's a long book, possibly too long, but it's equally possible I think that it does need that space to hold contradictions in.
It was however quite funny to read this shortly after Taiwan Travelogue -- another book I have not written up and should probably do so soon -- and also shortly after What Did You Eat Yesterday and also seeing a lot of gifsets for She Loves To Cook and She Loves To Eat ... fellas, is it gay to be really into food? signs point to yes!
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Date: 2025-10-30 03:55 am (UTC)And I have to go back and add a Polly Barton tag to my own post.
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Date: 2025-10-31 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-31 05:25 pm (UTC)... But I was also thinking of it because she has Rika's same problem of not cooking, too busy, and I was thinking maybe this would be enticing enough to make her try. Just simple things like the butter rice or the tarako pasta! (... which is as far in Rika's cooking experiments as I've gotten)
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Date: 2025-10-31 06:01 pm (UTC)If she does the butter rice, tell her to splurge for the GOOD butter. I tried it with normal butter and it was fine, but for something so simple I think the ingredients need to be the best possible. Although I also probably just eat way more butter than Rika and so have not been primed by deprivation to experience a butter epiphany.
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Date: 2025-10-30 10:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-31 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-30 01:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-30 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-31 04:44 am (UTC)...The most significant is with Reiko, which is extremely fraught with lesbian tension that is more-or-less textual but weirdly unfulfilled -- I think because one of the big problems that Asako Yuzuki is interested in talking about is Male And Female Loneliness and how to grow old alone happily, and if Rika hooks up with Reiko then she simply would not be doing that.
Yes this was a big part of what I found unsatisfying as well. As the book progressed I kept going "okay so I totally get that the Big Theme is how compulsory heterosexuality/strict gender roles are oppressive and causing lots of unhappiness...but also if Rika and Reiko got together it would literally solve almost all their problems!".
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Date: 2025-10-31 05:16 pm (UTC)I loved Rika's obsession with Kajii, and how despite its destructive aspects it also helped Rika find a path toward building a life that makes her happy, with space (mental/emotional/physical) for the people that she loves in it...but also those destructive aspects sometimes WERE very destructive, and the two things didn't cancel each other out, they were just two coexisting aspects of the same experience.
Also Rika and Reiko's not-quite-romantic road trip to Kajii's hometown. The way Reiko shows up on the train!!!
I like to think that Rika and Reiko might get together eventually, but possibly they both need some time to recover from their various Kajii-related bad decisions first. Reiko's spoiler choice especially. Reiko WHY.
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Date: 2025-11-09 05:46 pm (UTC)