💥 Read this must-read post from Culture | The Guardian 📖
📂 **Category**: Fiction in translation,Books,Culture,Fiction
📌 **What You’ll Learn**:
TNext time Japanese novelist Asako Yuzuki comes to the UK, she’d like to bake some traditional Japanese cakes for Paul Hollywood on The Great British Bake Off, she says when we meet via video call. It’s evening in Tokyo, where she lives with her partner and eight-year-old son. “I’ve showered and I’m ready for bed,” she explained through translator Bethan Jones. She thinks the Bake Off judges will be particularly impressed by the maruburu cakes from Nagasaki. “Kazuo Ishiguro is also from Nagasaki, and British people love Ishiguro, so they must love these cakes,” she continues. “They go well with tea.”
As anyone who has read Yuzuki’s international bestseller “Butter” knows, Yuzuki is all about food. Based on the real-life 2009 “Konkatsu Killer” case (Konkatsu Meaning Searching for Marriage), in which 35-year-old Kanae Kijima is convicted of poisoning three men, Pater traces the relationship between journalist Rika Machida and Manako Kaji, a serial killer and gourmet chef, through a series of interviews in a Tokyo detention center. Yuzuki even enrolled in the high-end cooking school in Tokyo that Kijima attended as research. The result is an irresistible mixture of social satire and feminist provocation, peppered with descriptions of buttered rice and soy sauce.
Although the 44-year-old has written more than 20 novels in Japanese, her publishers smartly decided that her 2017 novel Butter was ready for the English-speaking market, where there was a growing appetite for translated novels by Japanese women writers. The works of Sayaka Murata (Shop Woman), Mieko Kawakami (Breasts and Eggs), and Hiromi Kawakami (Strange Weather in Tokyo) signaled that female authors had replaced Haruki Murakami for a new generation of foreign readers. These stories of isolated young women also fit with English literary fiction’s vogue for novels dealing with female interiority and friendship. Butter has sold over 300,000 copies in the UK alone and was voted Waterstones Book of the Year 2024. For a while, you couldn’t take public transport without seeing its distinctive yellow and red cover.
It’s no wonder that Yuzuki’s previous novel, Hooked – published in Japan in 2015 under the title Nairu pāchi no joshikai (The Nile Perch Women’s Club) – has now been translated into English, once again by author Polly Barton. A similarly unsettling story about female power dynamics, the loneliness of 21st-century urban life, sexism, and the temptations of social media, Hooked is set to be one of the hottest publications of 2026.
But if I expected to meet a writer whose life was transformed by huge sales and international success, I was wrong. It seems strangely appropriate to talk to Yuzuki without makeup, in pajamas and glasses, as these two novels reveal the pressures on Japanese women to always present a perfect face to the world. The anger simmering beneath the surface of these elegant books is not feigned: Yuzuki was angry when she wrote them a decade ago, a “young and unformed” writer in her thirties, and she is even angrier today. “I don’t think I could write a book like Butter or Hooked now, even if I wanted to,” she says. “If Butters had received this kind of response eight years ago, my writing might have taken a different direction than it did,” she says. “It really made me think about the direction my life has taken.”
Far from being popular in Japan, the novels have been criticized as overtly feminist. “Japan is a misogynistic society, and if you write about hostility between women, people take the opportunity to write that women are scary or that you can’t trust women,” she says. “When I wrote Butter and Hook, I was writing what I wanted to write. But since then society has gotten worse, and writing about women being superior to each other will only reinforce negative views of women.” So, instead of offbeat, dark satire, she turned to sugary “vitamin novels,” as she calls them, which are more palatable to Japanese readers. “Nowadays, the characters I write about are kind and gentle with each other. They have weaknesses, but they help each other and things go well, which is what I felt I needed to write for Japanese society.” But 10 years later, she wishes she had been able to continue writing novels like Hooked.
The idea for Hooked came after Yuzuki discovered that someone she was following on Instagram lived in her neighborhood. “I started to feel a little guilty because I had this glimpse into their lives on social media,” she admits. Hooked develops into an obsessive stalking story in which Eriko, a lonely office worker in her early 30s, befriends Shoko, a popular “housewife blogger” who lives nearby.
The novel is also inspired by a trend in goshikai – “girls’ parties” – where restaurants and hotels cater to young women with disposable income. “It was partly a reaction to a male-centric society,” says Yuzuki. Flaunting your female friendships — selfies of girls’ nights out and spa breaks — on social media has become another lifestyle necessity for a successful young woman living in Tokyo. “How hypothetically women were wanted!” Yuzuki writes. “Attractiveness, chastity, youth, calm demeanor, prestigious job, a range of hobbies, attractive smile, elegance, likable aura, consideration for others…and then of course popularity with other women.”
Despite being “just as pretty as any doll,” and with a smart job at Japan’s largest trading company, poor Eriko doesn’t have a single friend. People don’t like her. Yuzuki wanted to challenge expectations of female friendship, “in a sense perhaps more than I did about romantic relationships,” she says. “I was trying to write about how to overcome the way we idealize friendships so we can grow, because this ideal female friendship is just a fantasy.”
Along with the cult novels “The Vegetarian” by Nobel Prize-winning Korean writer Han Kang, Murata’s “Shop Woman,” and Butter and the Hook, women appear as commodities, subject to impossible standards, consumed and disposed of beyond their expiration date. Overeating, or refusing to eat, is their only means of control or rebellion in contemporary patriarchal Seoul and Tokyo. The obsession with food in butter subverts society’s obsession with thinness. Yuzuki was less concerned with the “Konkatsu Killer” case than with the media response to it, particularly the misogyny and fat-shaming directed at a woman who was seen as too old, fat, and ugly to seduce men. Like Rika, who gains weight as her craving for butter increases, Eriko begins to binge on junk food and her clean appearance begins to crumble.
“If you walk in Tokyo, there are ads everywhere for weight loss, for plastic surgery,” Yuzuki says. “The situation is probably worse now than it was 20 years ago.” “Women struggle to control their weight, but there’s this society of convenience where you can go to the store and get delicious food 24 hours a day. They’re surrounded by this temptation but they’re under pressure at the same time.”
Yuzuki has always been fascinated by food. She grew up on a diet of Western children’s classics — Pippi Longstocking, Anne of Green Gables, the Ramona series and later boarding school stories — and was particularly fascinated by what the characters ate. “They had things like pie and apple jam, which I had never had in Japan,” she says. “When I looked it up, it gave me an idea of the era and also a sense of place.”
An only child, she was raised as a “traditional Japanese girl” and attended a girls’ school in Tokyo. She says she was not a particularly good student. Her father was a “salary worker” (office worker) and her mother worked in the garment industry. In her third year of middle school, she contracted mycoplasma pneumonia and fell into a coma for a month, followed by two months in the intensive care unit. When she woke up, the first thing she wanted to read was Banana Yoshimoto’s 1988 novel The Kitchen. She was drawn to its delicious descriptions of katsudon. “I was in a coma for a long time, so I was hungry,” she said in an interview with a Japanese bookstore in 2011. She spent the rest of her time in the hospital reading Japanese novels. Her literary tastes changed again when she majored in French literature at the University of Tokyo.
She had always wanted to be a writer, but it seemed an impossible ambition at the time. “This is something I really want people to know,” she says. “In Japan there is hardly any writer who can make a living by writing books.” She feels a strong sense of solidarity with her novelist friends Murata, Kawakami and Kikuko Tsumura. “We are of the generation that when we started looking for work, it was very difficult to find jobs,” she says. “We felt unwelcome in the Japanese workforce.” Frustration with sexism in the workplace (there have been recent protests against rules forcing women to wear high heels and banning glasses) unites their imaginations.
Besides writing regular columns for magazines, Yuzuki held a range of jobs, including working for a confectionery manufacturing company. “I didn’t do well at any of them,” she says. “Until my first book was translated into English, I wouldn’t say I was doing well as a writer either.”
She did not meet Barton until after Butter was published in English, but they worked closely on translating Hooked. “The combination of writer and translator can really make a book,” she says. “Polly is a feminist. She really thinks about the books she feels need to be translated at this moment, and they’re very popular. Some people will read a book just because she translated it.”
The success of Japanese fiction abroad finally changed the publishing landscape at home. Her friend Akira Otani became the first Japanese author to win the Dagger Prize for translated crime fiction last year, for her novel The Night of Baba Yaga (Yuzuki was also shortlisted for Butter). “She is a rare Japanese writer who identifies as a sexual minority,” Yuzuki says of Otani. “For a long time she wanted to write stories about characters in the LGBTQ community who are not necessarily good people. But due to the severe discrimination against sexual minorities in Japan, she did not feel able to do so. The same goes for me in a society where misogyny and femicide are rampant.”
Although she describes herself as “very far from the ideal Japanese woman,” she must focus her writing on raising her son and running a household. She loves writing in cafes. Some days you’ll write 10 pages, other days nothing at all. Although this may not have changed her daily life, the response to Pater’s novel in the UK made her reconsider her future as a novelist. “I want to write about women who make irreparable mistakes,” she says, leaning intently at her screen. “I want to write about women who seem like they’re best friends but they cheat on each other and the relationship falls apart.” “I would enjoy writing this kind of book. So I’m very grateful to readers in the UK who have given me the courage to do so.”
🔥 **What’s your take?**
Share your thoughts in the comments below!
#️⃣ **#Asako #Yuzuki #ideal #Japanese #woman #Imagination #translation**
🕒 **Posted on**: 1772270041
🌟 **Want more?** Click here for more info! 🌟
