How a Japanese book about a woman who murders her lovers became a global phenomenon

When Japanese author Asako Yuzuki answers my video call, she is walking through the backstreets of downtown Tokyo in the rain, en route to her apartment.

Along the way, she passes three separate FamilyMart shops – the ubiquitous Japanese convenience store that stocks popular snacks, including onigiri (rice balls), nikuman (steamed buns), fried chicken, and soba noodles.

Having spent a significant amount of time (and money) at FamilyMart on my last trip to Japan, I wonder aloud if Yuzuki might pop in for a snack on her way home? Maybe a steamed bun? Bento box to go? “No, I have food to make at home,” she explains.

Butter, a cult Japanese bestseller by Asako Yuzuki inspired by the real-life case of a serial killer convicted of poisoning three of her male lovers, is being hailed overseas for its exploration of misogyny, fatphobia and sexism in modern Japan. Credit: Jamie Brown

While Yuzuki doesn’t elaborate on what she intends to cook or what she likes to eat (“nothing comes to mind right now”), she’s happy to discuss the curious role stores like FamilyMart play in Japanese culture.

“They display advertisements aimed at young women for how to lose weight and get plastic surgery, and that is sitting side by side with all this delicious food,” she says, escaping the rain and entering her Tokyo apartment. “So you sort of wonder how that’s all meant to work together.”

The question of how it’s all meant to work together is at the heart of Yuzuki’s novel Butter, which unpacks the relationship between sexism, food culture and the impossible standards to which Japanese women are held.

First published in Japan in 2017, the English translation by Polly Barton was released last year to global acclaim.

The novel follows Tokyo-based journalist Rika, who lands an exclusive interview with Manako Kajii, a woman accused of killing three men by seducing them with her cooking.

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.

“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).