Butter Book Review: Keeps You Hungry Yet Satiated
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
“Why the hell is she messing my head with Rika and Reiko?!”
Three pages into the book “Butter” by Asako Yuzuki, and my tiny silly brain started complaining about the author using two very similar names for its primary characters, confusing me almost immediately. I instantly abandoned reading the book and started doing something else.
After a few hours, I thought about trying again, and not let the 3-year-old me with attention issues win, telling myself ‘Rika is the journalist, Reiko, the one who ends with o, is the one who is married, Rika is the loner (although she does have a boyfriend), Reiko has a more rounded life.’ Also, no, I don’t think Reiko has a more rounded life simply because she has a husband, it’s just a cheap mind trick for me to remember who is who. In-fact, my copy of ‘Butter’ confused Rika for Reiko at Page 360, a printing error I am not going to hold against the publishers and editors. If anything, I was totally thrilled to be vindicated.
Okay, let’s talk plot. “Butter” follows primary protagonist Rika, a journalist in her early 30s, working for a popular weekly Magazine in Tokyo, and trying to land herself an exclusive interview with Manako Kajii, a convicted serial-killer. Author Asao Yuzuki takes inspiration from the real-life case of Kanae Kijima, known as the Konkatsu Killer, sentenced to death in 2017 by Japan’s Supreme Court for poisoning three men to their deaths and defrauding several others.
Asako Yuzuki’s ‘Butter’, excellently translated by Polly Barton (I never felt things were lost in translation), is of course heavily fictionalized. Its primary focus is on Reiko’s increasing obsession with Manako Kajii, a gourmet food blogger who loved to cook, accused of killing three of her lovers, even though the evidence against her is largely circumstantial. The case attracts a lot of media attention, a lot of the focus being on the fact that Manako Kajii is nothing like the ‘femme fatale’ archetype. Manako is dubbed ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’ by most, her appearance at odds with Japan’s strict beauty standards that expects women to be slim, and petite.
Could a woman like Manako, lacking conventional physical charm, manage to lure several men into spending truckloads of money on her, mostly to satisfy her love for gourmet food, and premium butter, simply by cooking them elaborate home-cooked dishes? It’s an anomaly that perhaps infuriates, disgusts, or simply confuses people that have fixed idea about beauty, love, and attraction.
I’m glad I quickly got over my first three-page problem with Reiko-Rika, because after that, it was hard to put down ‘Butter’, even though I did take my sweet time to read the novel, unwilling to finish it too soon. You know, when you’re served a delicious meal and you want to savour all its flavours slowly and not regret devouring it like a hungry, homeless person?
Reading ‘Butter’ felt like that, even though there were a few elements that didn’t sit right with me. But I was wholeheartedly open to letting author Asako Yuzuki cook this tale however she wanted to. Well, okay, maybe not 100% wholeheartedly, because the climactic chapters gave me a scare: that things might end on an unnecessarily tragic tone. And even though that wasn’t necessarily the case, there’s more hope than tragedy in the end.
“There are two things I simply cannot tolerate: Feminists and Margarine,” Manako tells Reiko in their very first meet in prison. It made me think about how if not for feminism, Manako would’ve been burnt as a witch without trial. The thing is, Manako agrees to meet Reiko in prison after several failed request, eventually relenting when Reiko uses some advice from her best-friend Rika – if you must draw an elusive person who loves to cook, ask them for a recipe.
When Manako finally agrees to meet Rika, the killer upfront declares she won’t talk about her case at all but only wants to talk about food. Thus begins a sordid saga of Reiko meeting Manako multiple times in prison, forging a twisted bond, all in the hopes of a life-changing exclusive interview at the end of the tunnel. Reiko soon spirals into the world of Manako Kaiji and it all starts the latter’s recommendation of a gourmet butter brand and a simple rice recipe to go with it.
The story is interestingly set in the curious times of a butter shortage in Japan, and the opening chapter highlights this shortage when Reiko heads to meet her friend Rika for a meal. Reiko texts Rika if she needs something, a rhetorical courtesy that she hoped would be answered with a ‘no’, but instead she is requested to buy some butter, if she can find any. So right from the very beginning of the novel, ‘Butter’ becomes a powerful symbolic food, representative of desire, temptation, excesses, and a hunger for something sinful.
Reiko, who starts off an underweight, workaholic journalist who’s never stepped into her kitchen or bothered to buy butter, almost never indulging herself when it comes to food. But soon she starts to cook, putting on a surprising amount of weight, which draws instant criticism from almost everybody around. And what prompts the change? Her prison meetings with Manako Kajii, which begin to go beyond the professional exchanges between a journalist and her subject. And there’s a constant suspense over whether the woman will relent and give Reiko a career-changing exclusive.
‘Butter’ is a book dominated by women, the lead trio of Rika Machida, the primary protagonist, Manako Kajii, her subject, and Reiko Sayama, Rika’s best-friend. The men are incidental, kinda like Manako’s victims, be it Rika’s workaholic boyfriend Makoto, or Yoshinori Shinoi, a senior journalist who often gives Rika tip-offs about stories he isn’t interested in covering himself. There’s a strong sense pervading the novel that despite having close friends and partners, almost all these characters are lonely, repressed, held back by the strict conventions of the Japanese society. So entangled are they in their work lives and societal ‘goals’ that no one realizes how starved they are for human connection.
Manako Kajii is the only person who, to Rika, seems to have truly lived life to the fullest, now paying the price for her excessive gluttony and sexual appetites. Is she a modern-day witch on trial, or a manipulative murderer who did kill the men who desired her? Butter keeps the real truth open-ended, even as the law takes its own decisive course through punitive action against Manako.
If I really had to complain about something, it’s Rika’s questionable journalistic credibility, but only regarding the serial killing case. she gets far too deeply involved with Manako to be objective in her perspective. But of course, it’s precisely Rika’s twisted bond with Manako that spurs the story in Butter, leading to a chain reaction of events, and her unhealthy obsession with the murder-accused becomes a source of worry for other characters too. Asako Yuzuki illustrates how people can get swept away by larger-than-life personalities, and sometimes, it more personal or psychological, than the other person’s ‘influence’.
From cooking Manako’s favorite dishes, visiting her hometown, interviewing her family, friends, trying to get into an exclusive culinary school which might’ve triggered Manako’s murderous instincts, Rika as a journalist covers all possible bases to prepare the ground for her exclusive. Reiko, her ‘perfect’ best-friend, emerges as a dominant force in the second-half of ‘Butter’, revealing herself to be just as ambitious as Rika, and a lot more manipulative and pushy than she lets on.
Just a bar of ‘Butter’ for representational purposes. You know how some people say that in friendships and love, three can be a crowd? It’s comically strange yet understandable how Reiko becomes envious of Rika’s growing empathy for Manako. So, she embarks on a personal mission to prove to Rika that Manako is a cold-blooded murderer, not a victimized gourmet princess body-shamed by cynics. The contrasting natures of the bonds between these three women is the best part of ‘Butter’.
However, the most dominant theme of these Japanese novel, is the way patriarchal and traditional expectations dictate people’s lives, overburdening them with self-censorship. ‘Butter’ takes a long winded, philosophically complex route to serving its ultimate lesson: that putting yourself before others isn’t something to be ashamed of. How does a journalist attempting to land herself an exclusive become a journey towards ‘self-love’? Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out, which eventually celebrates food, friendships, and bond forged through either shared trauma or mutual interests. The celebration is slow, quiet, fulfilling and maybe sometimes challenging.
The final chapters of ‘Butter’ are absolutely engrossing, making it hard to put the book down. There’s drama, tension, suspense, hastily made dangerous decisions, and lots of gourmet cooking. I won’t be lying if I said I was constantly hungry while reading the book, but luckily I’ve never held back from consuming a dollop of butter with my food.
Rating: 5 stars on 5!
Rating: 5 stars on 5!
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