A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
Butter
Asako Yuzuki
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.
Butter
“My arms, my breasts, and my bottom are packed to bursting with all my favourite food. My body is made up entirely from steaks from the New York Grill, sukiyaki from Imahan, and the Gargantuan Chaliapin Steak Pie from the Imperial Hotel.”
The Hobbit
“My armour is like tenfold shields, my teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail a thunderbolt, my wings a hurricane, and my breath death!”
I’m going straight to Hell but iT IS THE SAME SCENE I SWEAR. Or at any rate it’s what popped into my head the first time I read that. In the end I read it twice, because I dragged my feet so much on this read that it took me two months and one restart to get to the end of the book and I’m not sure why. I suppose it has to do with the density of the prose and the measured pace of the beginning, combined with the fact that the chapters are all really long by my standards, but after a certain point it takes off like a rabbit and I am so glad I didn’t let the ADHD defeat me.
“Hell” might also be an apt description of the life and times of Rika Machida, age 33, overworked and underweight, and neatly isolated from any sort of community. She works for a publication company called Shūmeisha, specifically within the department in charge of the Shūmei Weekly magazine, and is tasked with gathering story leads and research that she then turns over to the all-male editorial desk. Her hectic work schedule doesn’t allow her much time for food-related dalliances anyway, but she also carries a decades-long guilt over the death of her father, who died alone after the teenaged Rika canceled a planned visit with him. As a result – and because her so-called “abandonment” of him got twisted up with the macaroni gratin she was supposed to cook for him on the day he died – Rika is unable to cook for herself, to the point that she never uses her kitchen and doesn’t even have a rice cooker (horror), and largely makes do with quick meals from the convenience store. She has no friends aside from Reiko Sayama, her college bestie, and a professional association with Yoshinori Shinoi, a prominent news editor who provides her with story tips under the table. She is technically dating Makoto Fujimura, who works in another department of Shūmeisha, but they rarely see each other and haven’t been intimate in at least a month; and, though she is still close to her mother, her mother has work of her own and is also busy with the needs of Rika’s demanding, abusive grandfather.
This is the current state of affairs when Rika is finally granted a meeting with Manako Kajii, popularly known as Kajimana, who was convicted for the murders of three ex-boyfriends. Her actual guilt is unknown and frankly irrelevant, but her case became a sensation because of her weight, which, though not unhealthy or extreme, qualifies as morbid obesity under Japanese cultural norms (for women). She has spent the last two years in the Tokyo Detention House and has refused all meetings and interviews, but gives in to Rika’s campaign for one reason: at Reiko’s suggestion, Rika recently requested the recipe for the beef stew (actually a boeuf bourgignon) Kajii cooked for one of her alleged victims. As Kajii insists that she will not speak of her case, Rika instead attempts to get close to her through her love of food, but gets more than she bargained for when Kajii demands that she buy a package of high-quality butter (despite a nationwide butter shortage) and eat it with rice and soy sauce. Initially unimpressed, Rika buys a rice cooker for the sake of fulfilling Kajii’s strange mission and cooks the rice as stipulated, and unexpectedly discovers a previously unheard-of joy in the consumption of this dish.
There follows a full descent into foodie madness as Rika takes on increasingly complicated missions assigned by Kajii, including a pre-dawn, post-coital visit to a mediocre ramen joint; a wildly expensive night at Joël Robuchon, a Michelin-starred French restaurant; and even an overnight trip to Kajii’s hometown in Niigata, where Rika visits with Kajii’s mother and younger sister. In addition to the side quests – themselves undertaken in pursuit of the main quest, which is an exclusive interview with Kajii – Rika becomes obsessed with Kajii’s old blog, which extensively documents the meals Kajii cooked and served to her three deceased exes, and begins to follow the recipes she finds therein. Kajii is sometimes friendly(ish) and sometimes violently hostile, particularly when presented with a point of view that does not perfectly agree with her strictly conservative views on the proper relationship between men and women, but she has a magnetism that draws Rika further into her world. At the same time, however, Rika realizes that Kajii is lonely and craves inclusion among her peers, but that her charisma is ineffective in a group setting, making her off-putting rather than compelling. Kajii’s demands also have the unintentional effect of creating stronger bonds between Rika and her own small network, particularly Shinoi, who becomes involved with Rika’s food journey through sheer happenstance; and she grows closer to her younger coworkers, Kitamura and Yū. On the other end of the relationship spectrum, her dissatisfying relationship with Makoto comes to an abrupt end, but that’s not a bad thing.
Meanwhile, an increasingly agitated Reiko manages to meet Kajii without Rika’s knowledge, and, though her intention is to pry Rika out of Kajii’s orbit, she ends up getting sucked in herself. Though she pursued a conventional marriage after witnessing her parents’ open marriage and is fully invested in becoming a stay-at-home mom, Reiko currently feels trapped by her own standards and is frustrated with her childlessness, a topic her husband has been avoiding for fear she will leave him if he proves infertile. After inviting herself along on the Niigata trip, Reiko returns to her childhood home and steals her aging dog, Melanie, then disguises herself as a battered runaway wife and visits Shirō Yokota, a sour-tempered 52-year-old who came within a hair’s breadth of being Kajii’s probable fourth victim. Yokota offered Reiko shelter following some online correspondence but balks when she arrives on his doorstep with Melanie and muscles her way in, practically demanding that he let her stay for three days. Having been studying Kajii’s case on the sly, Reiko believes Yokota helped commit the murders for which Kajii was convicted, and now plans to prove his guilt – and Kajii’s – by revealing him as a pedophile. This proves more difficult than anticipated, as Yokota is unreceptive to Reiko’s housewifely activities, and her plans go completely off the rails when she finds herself waiting on him hand and foot, ostensibly to trick him into assaulting her (given her relatively childlike appearance) but really to gain his approval and admiration.
Back in Tokyo, Rika learns that Reiko has gone missing and confronts Kajii, who is coy but eventually yields a single cryptic clue to Reiko’s whereabouts. With Kitamura in tow, Rika finds Reiko cooking a cream stew in Yokota’s house and takes her home – not to the house she shares with her husband, but to an empty apartment owned by Shinoi, who readily agrees to let Rika and Reiko use it for a while. Rika also asks Kitamura and Yū to check in on Reiko from time to time, and, with Shinoi visiting regularly as well, the formerly lonely apartment takes on the air of a summer camp. (Kitamura benefits greatly from this: Shinoi starts giving him hot tips that enhance his career.) As Reiko slowly recovers and begins to salvage her relationship with her husband, Rika finally interviews Kajii and produces a six-stage article that becomes a runaway bestseller. Of course that isn’t the end of things: shortly after Rika’s publication, Kajii marries a rival journalist, who then publishes an article trashing Rika and her obsession with Kajii. In the wake of the scandal, Rika gets sort of canceled, but she rebounds with some unexpected help from Makoto, who – with the hidden pressures of a romantic relationship removed – is able to show up for her as a friend. With any lingering ties to Kajii now completely cut, Rika buys a new apartment, which she intends to serve as a hub for her friends, and hosts an American-style turkey dinner as a sort of tribute to the one meal Kajii was never able to cook. She also has a new direction for her next article: having recognized her relationship with Kajii for what it was, Rika now plans to give a space to the women – herself and Reiko included – whose lives were harmed by Kajii in some way, even if indirectly. As for Kajii herself, her upcoming autobiography got critically panned in advance of publication and isn’t expected to sell well, so you can’t say there isn’t at least some measure of karma involved.
I gotta be honest. With all due affection and respect for my girl Rika, this is what my head pictures started looking like after a while.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, because this book is a foodie’s fever dream. Cream stew has never looked appealing to me, but then I went and cooked a pot of it because this fuck ass book told me to. I also don’t care for tarako or for roe in general, or spaghetti either for that matter, but Kajii’s tarako spaghetti has now been sampled (with butter, naturally) and it is delicious. It’s amazing what happens when the spaghetti isn’t grossly overcooked, the way it frequently is in restaurants. This book is actually going to get me to bake a quatre quarts, which is literally just a fancy word for a lemon pound cake. Reading late at night was a mistake because those very aggressive food descriptions had me rolling with agony yUzUkI-sAn PlZzZzZzZz some of us are reading this after midnight ;o; It was either very fortunate or very unfortunate that I happened to read the first chapter on the eve of an early-morning car appointment, because my ass would’ve been in the kitchen making rice with butter and soy sauce at two in the fucking morning. I was particularly perturbed by the garlic-butter rice served at the teppanyaki and cooked in the meat juices from the grill, in that I was once again reading at maybe one or two in the morning and did not have the time to step into the kitchen and try it. I can’t say I’ve had any especially erotic perceptions of my food recently, but I can live with that.
Anyway. I loved this book. Even if it took me a while to get into it (and through it), this was the best book I finished in March, and I really think it could go all the way in my personal 2026 bracket. Kajii is hard to take, particularly as she spends so much time gaslighting Rika, and I am currently not clear on whether her betrayal was meticulously planned or entirely opportunistic, or maybe a little bit of both; but I love that Rika takes away a different message entirely than the one Kajii intended. I love that she salvages the best of their toxic relationship – that is, unlearning the ingrained expectations placed upon women’s bodies, her eventual decision to maintain a normal weight rather than trying to burn it off for the sake of an arbitrary and unhealthy standard of beauty, her pursuit of her own best interests, even her break-up with Makoto when the relationship no longer meets either of their emotional needs – and I am so glad she has a little community to back her up. I love her relationships with Shinoi and Reiko and even Kitamura, and I especially love Yū’s ferocious loyalty: even when Kajii is no longer a threat, Yū reacts with fury to her upcoming autobiography and compares it to a Harlequin romance, I mean, ouch. Rika herself is a compelling and rootable protagonist, and I hope she thrives. Certainly she seems to be living her best life as of the end of the book. Her relationship with Kajii, the toxicity and the compulsion and the desire for validation, followed by the sense of freedom at the end, were almost uncomfortably on point; but it was also nice to see that Kajii’s charms were nonexistent in an uncontrolled environment in which she did not have the space to focus solely on one person.
As far as the ending goes, I will admit there was a part of me that was hoping Rika and Reiko would end up together, particularly with the emphasis on Rika’s androgyny, her pride in it, Reiko’s identification of her as a princely figure, their tightening relationship, the ennui of their respective romances. I say that with the full knowledge that I would hate Reiko in real life. As a detached reader, I feel for her, but my relationship with her as a character went up and down. I loved her, and I didn’t. I hated her, and I didn’t. I don’t wish ill on her and I hope she finds happiness, but she would be too much if I ever met her because she is stubborn, aggressive, and uncompromisingly absolute in her views, and, well, there should only be one of us like that in any given room. I do not care for her habit of bulldozing people who break rules she personally considers important – her parents, for instance – and her so-called debate skills are questionable when her style of “debate” is merely explaining to the other person why they’re wrong, and aggressively attacking them when they don’t comply. This was understandable when she was a teenager and getting blindsided with her parents’ open marriage. It was not understandable when she was 33 and backing Rika into a verbal corner composed entirely of “So if you think [x] then you must think [y], huh? Huh?” arguments.
On the other hand, I like Reiko’s growth as she sets out to rescue Rika (from excessive weight gain – Reiko has some unlearning to do too) but ends up on a journey of self-discovery instead. I am glad that she had the self-awareness to realize when her “investigation” of Yokota turned into a desperate desire for validation. I like that she finally reaches out to her parents, whom she purposely estranged after rejecting their lifestyle; and I like that she has Rika solidly in her corner, even if I did not always like their relationship. Even if she would be too much for me personally, I love that Rika sees her as she is and isn’t bothered by her the way others are. Reiko’s own husband admits that Reiko’s former coworkers don’t seem to like her much, owing to the intensity of her personality, but Rika loves her even more because of it, and that is entirely how it should be.
With all of that said, the book’s greatest strength – aside from the mouth-watering food-related soliloquys – was its unpredictability, because I never knew where it was going or even what was going to happen within the next few paragraphs. Maybe I just read the wrong books, but I don’t know the last time I encountered such a genuinely unpredictable book. The slowness of the beginning isn’t necessarily a detriment, though I did have my doubts about its purpose as I watched Rika running around collecting all the plot coupons and seemingly losing sight of the bigger picture. But she never really does; for all of Kajii’s smoke and mirrors, Rika’s ultimate goal is always that interview, and she is unswervingly faithful to that objective. You could justifiably accuse her of jumping through hoops, yet it also serves her own personal ends. It’s a delicate balancing act: Kajii holds certain advantages, but Rika’s own wants and needs are never obliterated. We learn through mimicry, and if it does seem a bit too much in the beginning like Rika is merely copying everything Kajii does, she eventually finds her way to her own style. At the very end she spontaneously dreams up a kitchen sink version of kamo seiro using leftover turkey instead of duck, and I love it, and I will be trying it next Thanksgiving. (Actually, why wait? I have a bag of turkey in the freezer.)
In conclusion: if you’re struggling with the book but intrigued by the premise, keep going. It isn’t slow forever, and that slowness is done with purpose. Maybe don’t read it late at night or even just if you haven’t eaten for a couple of hours, but it is an absorbing read and it starts to go faster once it really gets rolling. I would also advise against spoilers (such as my entire review, lol). I went into this with no idea of what to expect, and my experience was far richer and more satisfying because of it. Yuzuki-san got me good with this book, and I am now looking forward to Hooked.
