Recent Reading: Butter

Book #6 from the "Women in Translation" rec list was Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton. This novel is about a journalist seeking to score an exclusive interview with convicted 3-time murderer Manako Kajii. Kajii is in prison for killing three of her lovers, all older, well-off, lonely men, and with her retrial coming up soon, journalist Rika Machida thinks it's the perfect time for another focus feature on the famous murderess. However, the more time she spends with Kajii, the more she wonders if maybe Kajii is the only one seeing the situation clearly.

 

This book has been billed in some places as a crime thriller or murder mystery, but it's not really, so if you go into it expecting that, I fear you'll be disappointed. The core of the book isn't really whether Kajii killed her lovers or not. What this book really was is to interrogate societal attitudes in Japan, which it does through a lot of introspection on the part of Rika. 

 

Butter tackles fatphobia - Rika notices how much of the disproportionate vitriol leveled at Kajii concerns her weight. The idea that a fat woman could command the level of desire expressed by her victims repulses society, even more so as Kajii considers herself attractive and desirable, and thinks losing weight is a waste of her time. When Rika starts putting on weight too, she suddenly sees other sides to her peers, friends, and even her boyfriend that surprise her.

 

Butter attacks sexism - Over the course of the novel, Rika hones her criticisms of a sexist society that demands utter subservience and perfection from women, while coddling men who refuse to take care of themselves unless a woman is doing it for them. Kajii herself subscribes to this view—declaring in one fit of rage with Rika that she hates feminists—and yet despite having striven most of her life for this domestic ideal, she sits lonely and despised in a prison cell, convicted of killing the very men she claims she was so happy to care for. 

 

But to me, most of all, Butter is about loneliness. Loneliness haunts every character in this book, from Kajii sharing in a moment of vulnerability that she's never had a female friend; to Rika, utterly convinced she'll die alone in an empty apartment like her father someday; to Reiko, Rika's best friend, languishing in an increasingly distant marriage; to Shinoi, one of Rika's sources, who feels unable to reconnect with his estranged daughter or otherwise fill the holes in his life left by her departure along with his ex-wife. Butter shows the extremes to which loneliness can drive a person, and the way it can twist a life up into something ugly and unrecognizable. 

 

Throughout the novel, Rika is seeking connection, whether with Reiko, whom she struggles to connect with as much now that Reiko has left her job to be a cheerful full-time housewife; or with her casual boyfriend from work, whose greatest attribute to Rika is his willingness to leave her alone and not bother her when she doesn't want him around; or even with Kajii herself, who Rika finds herself increasingly desperate to understand. 

 

I really enjoyed the ending of this book, where Rika comes to understand the intention required to build and maintain community, and with several characters moving away from the nuclear family-centric concept of not being alone. Particularly touching was Rika's purchase of a three-bedroom apartment near the end of the novel—to make sure she has room for friends who need a place to stay. It's really touching and rewarding to see these characters come together, touched by Rika's presence in their lives in ways even she didn't fully realize, and going on to touch each other's lives in ways Rika could never have predicted.

 

In many ways, the novel invites you to sympathize with or even pity Kajii, and through Rika's shifting attitudes towards her it does a great job of showing how someone like Kajii could manipulate as many people as she did. Watching Rika be drawn into Kajii's orbit can almost convince the reader at times that Kajii's onto something with her perspective! But the final portrait is of someone so warped by loneliness and feelings of rejection that she had to divorce herself from reality to make life livable, and was willing to hurt people to keep up her fantasy.

 

Butter leaves a lot of things open-ended, which suited me just fine. It felt real, and at its heart, like I said, the book isn't about either condemning or absolving Kajii. It's a lot more about Rika's journey, and the changing attitudes of the cast of characters towards basic assumptions of Japanese society, like the place of women, or the responsibilities of men, or the role of a romantic partner in your life. 

 

I was not as impressed with the translation this time around as I have been with some of the earlier books. Butter retains a lot of the stilted, excessively formal language I'm used to seeing in anime subtitles. The characters often speak in a way no Anglophone speaks, which makes their conversations sound unnatural to the ear, even if I see what they're getting at. I think this could have used another pass to make the language flow better. However, I also think there were some tough aspects of the prose translation, since the book is packed with extremely detailed descriptions of food and the experience of eating.

 

On the whole, a great dive into the psyche of these characters as a reflection of a broader society, and, for me, a satisfying ending! I can see why this book took off in Japan when it first released.