Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder

by Asako Yuzuki

‘It’s the tigers who are to blame! They tried to eat Babaji first, remember? I think the moral is that you shouldn’t let your vanity make you so competitive that you’re driven to self-destruction.’

Rika had never considered that kind of life for herself, but she could see the power such women bestowed upon their families. Every night, those women would clean out the toxins that had built up in their partners’ bodies and souls over the course of the day – toxins that, if left untouched for too long, would eat a person away.

Their backgrounds may have been worlds apart, but Reiko and Rika shared the experience of holding, throughout their girlhoods, a sense of unease towards the kind of family that the rest of the world idealised.

I only want to spend my time with people who know the real thing when they see it. People who truly understand the value of the real thing are few and far between.

In this industry, a casual utterance, a misjudged confidence, could cost you your life. Ensuring that your true feelings were well masked, inspecting each and every one of your actions and keeping yourself in check became a matter of habit.

From early childhood, everyone had had it drummed into them that if a woman wasn’t slim, she wasn’t worth bothering with. The decision not to lose weight and remain plus-sized was one that demanded considerable resolve.

In principle, all women should give themselves permission to demand good treatment, but the world made doing so profoundly difficult.

This was all it took, she thought, to experience a sense of satisfaction of a kind she’d not had before. To make something yourself that you wanted to eat and eat it the way you wanted – was that the very essence of gratification?

Her actions had been misconstrued, she saw now. Feeling as if whatever she said would only deepen the misunderstanding, she felt incapable of speaking at all.

It was up to the individual how they comported themselves, and in this world, where the quality of the story was everything, it would have been seen as crass to find fault with and lambast such methods. The women in question weren’t open about what they were doing, and nobody could prove that it was going on.

We’ve come to use the word “evolution” as though it were a resolutely positive thing, but all it means is that the species best-adapted for a particular environment survive, and the others die out.

Instilling desire in someone was a lot of fun, regardless of whether that person was male or female.

It’s not that the species that manage to survive the process of natural selection form the minority – it’s that those who are wiped out form the majority. Extinction is a crucial phenomenon.

It’s plenty if people can enjoy things a good amount, and be satisfied with their life overall. Enjoying a cigarette after a meal is okay, and putting on a little weight isn’t anything to merit fussing about.

When women surpass men, their chance for romance slips away from them. Men and women alike need to understand that they can’t find happiness without each other.

Rika was starting to believe that women who were expected to accompany men in their pursuit of self-satisfaction had the right to make demands of their own.

She was tired of living her life thinking constantly about how she appeared to others, checking her answers against everyone else’s.

‘Rubbish! It’s easy. Ignore all that nonsense about making an effort and so forth. All you need to do is to eat as much of whatever it is you most desire at any given moment. Listen carefully to your heart and your body. Never eat anything you don’t want to. When you take the decision to live that way, both your mind and your body will commence their transformation.’

Maybe, if she weren’t receiving so much criticism from the people around her, she would be fine with the way she looked.

Japanese women are required to be self-denying, hard-working and ascetic, and in the same breath, to be feminine, soft and caring towards men. Everyone finds that an impossible balance to strike, and they struggle desperately as a result.

Yet as besotted as Kajii’s victims had been, they’d kept making derogatory remarks about her to others. Rika found it hard to comprehend falling head over heels with a person while also looking down on them.

It feels like these days our value is determined by how much effort we make on a daily basis. That matters even more than our results. 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.

Refusing to look after yourself because there’s nobody around to care about you is a form of violence towards somebody. To my eyes, you’re not living a reckless sort of life, but if you truly don’t care what becomes of you, then that’s really sad.

Women avoided that futile struggle if they possibly could. Wasn’t that why they subtly informed one another of their respective positions and personalities? They created an invisible system of order so as to avoid hurting one another. Silently, rules came into being. This is your territory and I’ll take care not to encroach on it – in return, don’t threaten my freedom. By gently asserting themselves in this way, they protected their place.

yours. One day, out of the blue, they just became too much. The faces of people who thought nothing of making endless demands, of being constantly given things. The way they sat at the table simply waiting to be served, not lifting a finger. Their certainty that they would be taken care of, without even having to try.

‘Cooking is enjoyable, but the moment it becomes a duty, it grows boring. The same is true of sex, and fashion, and beauty. When you’re forced to do something, it becomes a chore, and the pleasure disappears.’

People are unpredictable, and they don’t do as you want them to, and they keep on changing. You’re someone who can’t take pleasure in anything that transcends your understanding. You can’t feel safe if something’s unpredictable.

What stood out the most were the impassioned comments about how, as a woman in an industry where you had to engage with the public, failing to regulate her weight and put on make-up was lazy and showed a lack of effort.

When it came to appearance, the world’s standards were so harsh that, unless you built thick walls like she had done, unless you continued to affirm yourself with a great tenacity of spirit, it became difficult to lead your life with a sense of pride.

The standards were getting higher, and assessments harsher. The only way to be free of it – however scary and anxiety-inducing it was, however you much you kept on looking back to check whether or not people were laughing at you – was to learn to accept yourself.