Butter is based on the real-life 2012 case of the “Konkatsu Killer” Kanae Kijima, a con woman and talented home cook, who was convicted of poisoning three of her male lovers. The novel, however, is less fixated on the true crime aspects of the story, and instead focuses on the response Kajii, a woman described as “neither young nor beautiful”, provokes in the media.
Yuzuki will appear at the Melbourne and Sydney Writer’s Festivals.
“I wasn’t interested in the mechanical aspects of the crime and how it came about; what I wanted to tackle was how the Japanese media responded to the sensational nature of the story and how it ran with it,” Yuzuki says.
“The way the Japanese media behaves casts an intense shadow on how we as Japanese people are, and that’s the bit that I wanted to write about, how society views women who don’t conform to norms around beauty, appetite and ambition.”
In Butter, Kajii is one of those women. Her confidence proves fascinating to Rika (“There is nothing in this world so moronic, so pathetic, so meaningless as dieting,” she explains during one of their jailhouse meetings) while she is also shown to be the subject of ridicule, much like the real Konkatsu killer. “I bet Kajii eats an absolute ton! That’s why she’s that huge!” laughs the husband of Rika’s best friend, Reiko.
This ability to hold a mirror to Japanese society has proved to be a double-edged sword for Yuzuki. While the Tokyo-born author is not new to the literary world (she has been nominated for the prestigious Naoki Prize several times, including for Butter), her recent international success far outstrips the reception to her work domestically.
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“Butter wasn’t received overwhelmingly positively in Japan, so I’m really surprised that it’s been received quite well overseas,” Yuzuki says. “I never hear from my Japanese readers, but my email inbox is full of people from everywhere else in the world writing to me about the book.”
Quite well is an understatement.
Eight years after its publication in Japan, Butter is Yuzuki’s first work translated into English and promptly became a bestseller, selling more than 280,000 copies in the UK alone and was named Waterstones Book of the Year.
“I do find myself wondering if this has ever happened in the history of Japanese literature,” she says. “Where someone’s critical reception has been so different in Japan compared to the rest of the world.”
The success of Butter coincides with a surge of interest in female writers in Japan. For years, male authors such as Haruki Murakami and Keigo Higashino were the face of Japanese literature, but recently the spotlight has shifted, with Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman and Hiromi Kawakami’s Under The Eye of the Big Bird gaining global attention.
Yuzuki’s bestseller is just the latest fictional offering from Japan that writes about food as a means to explore women’s place in Japanese society and to subvert the very notion of “a woman’s place”.
“What’s interesting to me is that the Japanese females in these books are often in difficult positions, they’re oppressed, and that evokes a lot of sympathy in the West,” says Yuzuki.
“So when English people read this book, they are struck by the daily struggles of these characters, at the same time, people’s interest in Japan has grown, so you’re seeing this explosion outwards.”
As part of this explosion outwards, Yuzuki will soon travel to Australia for the Sydney and Melbourne writers’ festivals. Despite the obvious upsides of international recognition – festivals, prestigious awards, bumper pre-sales – Yuzuki, currently working on her next book, admits the experience of Butter looms large.
“Obviously, I care about how my work is received in my native country; it means a lot, and [after Butter] it feels like the pressure is even more intense,” she explains. “At the moment, the critical gap is so large that it’s giving me a lot to think about.”
Asako Yuzuki will appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival (May 8–11) and the Sydney Writers’ Festival (May 19–27).
AloJapan.com