Butter

by Asako Yuzuki

Kajii had given herself that permission. Ignoring other people’s yardsticks, she had decided that she was enough as a woman. To be treated well, to be adored, to be showered with presents and affection, and to eschew that which she disliked, including work and group socialising – she went on demanding these things as though they were perfectly within her rights, and as a result, she had carved out for herself an environment she found comfortable, in which she could live apart from the world. It was this accomplishment, more than the close to 100 million yen she had managed to extract from various men, that seemed to Rika deserving of admiration. In principle, all women should give themselves permission to demand good treatment, but the world made doing so profoundly difficult.

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.’

‘Don’t you think that’s a disease of the contemporary age? It feels like these days our value is determined by how much effort we make from day to day. 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. I think that’s the reason people are so vicious towards Manako Kajii. She refuses to live that life, refuses to suffer.’

‘I always thought that I’d be imposing on you if I did something like this, but I think that, on reflection, that’s exactly what’s been lacking. I’ve started to realise that nothing ever happens if you don’t impose on people.’

Eating was fundamentally an individual and egoistic compulsion, Rika was starting to realise. A gourmand was ultimately a seeker of the truth. You could wrap up their mission in all kinds of fancy language, but they were simply confronting their desires day in and day out. As you learned to cook, you became increasingly able to shut out the outside world and create a fortress within your own spirit. You hunted down your prey, using fire and blades to fashion them into the form you desired. Reading Kajii’s blog posts, she’d been struck by her intense stoicism. It took a deathly earnestness to remain faithful to her desires at all times.

‘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.’

‘The kind of wife that the men on those sites are looking for is, at base, a woman with no sense of life about her. Their ideal partner would be a kind of ghost.’

Seeing Reiko so full of beans was immensely heartening.

I would love to know if this was also a food-related metaphor in the original Japanese version

Kajii was more man than she was woman.