Asako Yuzuki was inspired by the sensational real-life case of the ‘Konkatsu Killer’ when she wrote up this study of a suspected killer, of the possible motive behind the killings—if killings they were—and of several things that ail Japanese society in modern times, spreading disaffection and maybe violence, too. Manako Kajii is in a Tokyo prison, awaiting the retrial of a serial murder case where she is the prime and only suspect. She had been seen last with all three of the dead men, and had been their regular companion for a brief while before their sudden deaths.
Rika Machida is a journalist who feels she could scoop out a new angle to the case and asks to be assigned to meet Kajii. Who, being the focused object of as much fat-shaming (she is a curvaceous woman, “over 70 kgs” in a land where slenderness is much prized) as she is for the murders she has purportedly committed, does not want to meet any member of the media. When eventually Rika gets to meet Kajii for a series of regular sessions, she is pulled into a whirlpool, into the world Kajii used to live in, a world of luxe goods and luxe food.
Kajii was a very good cook, it was one of the ways she lured men into relationships, and when she realises the journalist has a near-nil interest in food and the making of food, she makes it conditional that Rika start to cook and eat the food Kajii herself likes and recommends, if they have to continue their meetings. Rika slowly gets into and gives the reader a look into the psyche of the murderer, and in the process, starts to cook and relish her food, starts to put on makeup, starts to gain weight (akin to an unpardonable offence in Japan), starts to wonder if there were other reasons for the deaths of the men. Rika’s world is populated primarily by her colleagues, her longtime BFF Reiko who is stuck in a less-than-happy marriage, and the man who routinely gives her tip-offs to scoops, the journalist Shinoi.
Everybody in this novel is tightly wound up, far from being relaxed, yet it reveals a Japanese way of being resilient too. By the end, the reader watches Riko come to terms with several facts including her weight gain, Kajii turning viciously on the journalist in a bid to salvage something of her own life, Reiko make a renewed attempt to get her marriage afloat again. What the reader does not get to see though, is a closure to the murder case.
Butter is a meditation on chauvinism, on friendship, on relationships, sexism, restricting mores, the position of women in Japanese society; it is also an ode to butter. The condiment is a link between the “beauty of a full-bodied woman” and “real French cuisine that uses oodles of butter”. The taste of butter in fact, infuses everything and everyone in the novel.
Rika imagines Kajii saying, “what is wrong about coating barren, flavourless reality in oodles of melted butter and seasoning it with condiments and spices?” Kajii, in sharp contrast to Rika, is no feminist. “If you scrimp on butter, your food will taste inferior,” she pronounces, going on to say, “and if you scrimp on femininity and a wish to serve your partner, then your relationships will grow impoverished.” Her role model is Holly Golightly, and she views her status as a professional mistress as her career.
Even as she manipulates her victims, male and female alike, rather like a female Hannibal Lecter, Kajii tries to remain true to the one thing that counts: herself. The reflections on the status of Japanese women are many and mostly unsettling, with lines like these: “The (home maker) wives would every night clean out the toxins that had built up in their partner’s bodies and soul over the course of the day, that if left untouched for too long, would eat a person away. If a woman isn’t slim, she is not worth bothering with.
” Japanese women are required to be self-denying, hard-working and ascetic, and in the same breath, to be feminine, soft and caring towards men. Just as the reader looks for irony, at one point, the author (unwittingly?) herself describes Kajii as looking like a giant blancmange. The translation is efficient though at times, awkward lines like “tensing her skin against the biting wind; she entreated herself”; “Choice (a brand of biscuits) are my favourite”; “her coat grew dusted in snow”; “I didn’t take your words on board” appear.
This thriller is a bestseller in Japan. It doesn’t take rocket science to deduce the central theme is to accept oneself as one is. One has to wonder though, if it will make a dent in the hardened subcutaneous layer of Japanese society in general.
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