FINISHED READING - Butter by Asako Yuzuki

 

Manako Kajii is obsessed with food, writing a blog in which she describes her culinary adventures. She has a particular fetish for high quality butter. But Kajii is also a serial killer, having been convicted of a number of killings of her aged and supposed boyfriends. All of them, apparently lonely, who became obsessed with her via her cooking. But all is not so cut and dried, because its unclear how she killed, other than by feeding them extremely rich fatty foods. Did she have help? The implications of murder all seem too circumstantial otherwise.

Rika Machida is a journalist, the only woman in the news office of the paper she works for, she is ambitious. A good writer who needs to find a story through which she can make her name. She settles on Kajii, and arouses her interest in being interviewed by asking her for the recipe for beef stew. Gradually Rika gets drawn into a whole world of culinary misadventures of her own, through which she becomes intricately entangled in Kajii's life and manipulated by her  She starts to question whether Kajii might actually be innocent. Has she simply been found guilty of being an independent ambitious woman, who refused to play the games according to the rules allotted to women in Japanese society? As she becomes drawn into a dependent relationship with Kajii, she becomes increasingly untethered from her own life, her friends, and what she ultimately wants from it. Until Kajii betrays her, and her perceptions of her and of herself pivot radically.

Butter is an intriguing read. Its an extensive exploration of Rika and how she learns to be more true to her self. She does so through trying to understand who Kajji is, a woman who openly says she hates women and whatever they stand for. It has some sublime writing on the process of cooking and the feelings aroused by the eating of truly luscious food. Its a longish book whose focus and tone can shift quite unevenly. The first half of the book is focused on the growing entanglement of Rika with Kajii and with food, in the second half it becomes more like a detective novel and a psychological study of evolving clarity. I never felt I knew quite where it was going, which held my attention for sure. It wasn't til the end I realised that it was primarily about self realisation, mostly of Rika,, that she needed to come to a different and stronger understanding of who she was. As a conclusion this felt a bit half powered.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8