Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder

by Asako Yuzuki

What the public found most alarming, even more than Kajii’s lack of beauty, was the fact that she was not thin. Women appeared to find this aspect of the case profoundly disturbing, while in men it elicited an extraordinary display of hatred and vitriol.

To make something yourself that you wanted to eat and eat it the way you wanted – was that the very essence of gratification? Until not long ago, she’d had no idea what it was that she wanted to eat, but since she’d begun using her kitchen, she was becoming able to picture, albeit vaguely, the objects of her desires.

It’s weird, isn’t it? Why is it that with nobody to watch over them, men can’t stop themselves from falling into disrepair? And that disrepair is then looked upon kindly and excused by the world, seen not as a failure of personal responsibility but something poignant and tragic.’

Choosing to kick up a stink until help was proffered him, instead of explicitly asking for it. Stubbornly refusing to change his way of living even a fraction. Insisting that family was the most important thing to him, while broadcasting to the world that his wife had left him to die.

‘There is nothing in this world so pathetic, so moronic, so meaningless as dieting.’

After a while, the concept of effort starts to become mixed up with things feeling difficult, and then you reach the point where the person seen as the most admirable is the one suffering the most.

She’d enjoyed doing that with him, but looking back at those times from the place where she now stood, they seemed to her like a single ray of sunlight, without any depth.