“Butter” Asako Yuzuki – what a bizarre, at the same time rejecting and fascinating, annoying and addictive novel! Before I explain these contradictions a bit, I try to understand how it happened that I reached for it, and what’s more – I pass the report from this eccentric reading experience?
First of all, the title of this novel is great, essential and tasty, immediately draws attention. Secondly, the expressive “butter” cover with a cow in the lead role (adaptation of the Japanese cover). Thirdly, I was convinced that I was picking up a full -blooded crime story/thriller.
Serial murderer, cheater, cook
I have already mentioned that the starting point for the Japanese writer is a real story. Kanae Kijima, because this is the name of the “inspirational” fraudster and talented “home cook”, convicted of poisoning three lovers and suspected of murdering four more in 2007-2009. Kijima was sentenced to death for her death and has been in the so -called Death cell in Tokyo. As you can easily guess, in Japan it is a known and repeatedly described matter – enough to mention the books that Yuziki herself uses (e.g. “devil. One hundred days of the Kanae Kijimy trial” or “Bad wives. Stories of Yasuko Watanabe and Kanae Kijimy”). In Poland, on the other hand, practically no one has heard about the history of Kijima, and in the Polish -language internet it is difficult to find any references about it (not counting the latest ones, on the occasion of “butter”). As for Wikipedia – Kijima has passed only in Japanese and Korean versions.
Does this mean that this is an non -excessive story to foreign languages and other cultures? The international success of “butter” should be a sufficient answer here, but the right one is: and yes. The key is what Asako Yuzuki does with the history of the Japanese serial murderer. First of all, he uses it for his purposes, and these are different. Robert Małecki, the author of the bestseller detective stories and one of the cover blurbs, strongly argues that it is a suspenseful intrigue. And you can agree with him if we add that the main source of this tension is not at all the fate of the murderer (in the novel: Manako Kajii), but Riki, a journalist dreaming about an interview with a popular cook-morale. Further visits to the Tokyo prison, creating between Rika and Kajia “Bond”, and above all conversations about cooking, restaurants, recipes, tastes and flavors – and we have something in front of our eyes like a new, very Japanese variant of “sheep silence”. Or rather: “Silence of cows”.
“There are two things that I do not tolerate: feminism and margarine”
The title of the novel does not lie: “butter” is indeed a hymn praise in honor of butter, the only and unique. I would exaggerate if I said that it was a 520-page apotheosis of butter and in general animal fats, but I would exaggerate only a little. In recent months, a lot has been written with butter prices, the “butter” memes were fought, butter with gold bars (I refer to). Well, in Japan described by Asako Yuzuki it is similar, only much worse. I.e. more expensive. Immediately butter has become a luxury and regulated commodity. One of the first tasks in the novel before Riko is to buy butter cubes for her friend. It’s easy to say. “Pale fluorescent lamps were glowing in the dairy products. The lower shelves were empty, and the information was hung on the tape:” Due to the lack of products, we sell one cube of butter per person. “This is the third supermarket in which Rika met the same.” The heroine buys a margarine box. Mistake. Even more – a crime! But we will understand that only with time. For now, we can think that well, these are not the same products, but not the end of the world yet, right?
“However, there are two things that I do not tolerate: feminism and margarine” – these words Manako Kajii stamped on the cover initially I had a publishing clickbait. Indeed, they could use quotation marks, but I will also agree that they reflect the nature of the novel murderer and the subject of the book well. Yuzuki devotes large fragments of “butter” not only hatred of margarine, but to even greater extent hatred towards feminism and more broadly – towards women. And we are talking primarily about women’s hatred of other women. Oh, a paradox, since we are just holding a novel about a serial men of men. But not the first and not the last fool served to us (cold) by Yuzuki.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to write about these fools without revealing the really important details of the story (and not, they were not at all these single sentences about the real murderer sitting in the Tokyo death cell), so I will stop at the fact that the writer in “butter” looks carefully daughters’ relations with mothers and fathers and play more couples of opposites: love and loneliness, sisterhood and Mizoginia, sexism and feminism, friendship and competition, the capital and province, and finally: discipline and lack of moderation, diet and voraciousness, weight loss and weight gain.
Japanese porn food
And I warn you: if you plan to lose a few or – as in my case – a dozen or so extra kilos, then “butter” is the worst possible reading at the beginning of the diet. Yuzuki’s novel is also a manifesto Body Positivepraise of self -acceptance and moderation, but understood not in a terrorist way, but moderation entitled “Exactly as much as you think is right.” And the poisonous, though addictive “lessons” of Kajia given by the Rice prison glass can also have a destructive effect on readers.
“Butter” makes you interrupt night reading and go to the kitchen to prepare a few toast with butter. “Butter” causes you to start thinking about my friend’s father with great tenderness, who eats a minimum cube of butter every day and can eat it like other apple people. “Butter” are dozens of pages with retail descriptions of Japanese cuisine specialties, preparing specific dishes and an orgy of flavors during consumption. “Butter” are whole paragraphs densely packed with sentences such as: “a crunchy sheet of seaweed bite, until the warm rice still escaped the acid Umiteboshi with a delicate Bonito aftertaste”; “The room was filled with the smell of toasted butter and fragile skin, a little deeper and more aromatic than the commonly known smell of chicken”; “Fat lamb ribs made them wet, shiny lips all the way.” Real culinary porn with great and fat (butter, of course) food in the final. I do not reveal what dish it is, so there are no spoilers. And yes, vegans would like, and dietitians should forbid “butter”.
Glory, however, to the translator, Annie Wołcyrz, for numerous (especially culinary) footnotes, without which the reader of a non-Jappertist would be lost quickly without news. In fact, I regret the lack of a comprehensive mestern by Wołcyrz, thanks to which we could find out how much “Japanese” this novel is. And this is not only about the most important culinary contexts or sexual differences, but also For the specificity of Japanese prisons or the Japanese media market (e.g. Riko as a reporter in a tabloid is still working on new topics, but this does not mean that she sees her name in print; no, she only provides materials to “older editors”, so according to our standards more as someone like a researcher).
I saw the comments of readers who have read “butter” behind them, and complained about the thicket of references and peculiarities difficult to understand for someone not interested in Japan or – more broadly – the Far East. With this “difficult to understand” I would not charge, but decent deputies by a Japanese would not hurt. The more that in “butter” we have deputies written by a Japanese writer, author of historical and moral novels, but the educational values from our “foreign” perspective in him. Ichiriki Yamamoto reports, among others That he has already entered the eighth decade of his life and is still eating toast for breakfasts. Congratulations. And thank you for help in fully understanding “butter”.
Butter magnetism
At the end I left the warning and let everyone who did not survive until this moment, because they have already run to read “butter”. Attentive readers noticed that at the beginning I mentioned that this is a fascinating and addictive novel, but also rejecting and annoying. I finally explain. First of all, in my opinion, “butter” is solidly talked and without great losses, decent editors could cut here from 100-150 pages (and even more). Secondly, the novel is suspenseful, but not all the time – guilty, among others Saying, long, regularly boring the main character (let’s agree: this is not an exciting figure!), And for someone less voracious also all these culinary revolutions, recipes and consumption (I just liked me). Thirdly, there is no shortage of banal insights, truisms and coelhisms in “butter”, and the closer to the end, the more they are. Yes, “butter” was actually a manifesto and morality from the beginning, but there are moments that it is doing indigestible.
At the same time, there is some strength in “butter”, some mysterious (animal? Butter?) Magnetism, which means that not only – as in the case of many other Japanese novels – I did not want to reject Asako Yuziki, but I could not break away from her. This is not a masterpiece that will make me make a passport of a Japanese prose lover tomorrow (it’s not now), but it is definitely a novel that you want to think about and talk a lot (Yuzuki infects talk?), And this in the case Literature – especially one with which we have some reservations – really a lot!
Asako Yuzuki, butter, trans. Anna Wołcyrz, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 2025.
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
