Butter by Asako Yuzuki

Posted by Ms K on February 21, 2025 in All | Leave a comment

I don’t know whether it is reading this book, or a recent trip to Europe in winter which demanded hearty food and too many croissants, but I’m currently eating more butter than can be good for me. And I am here for it (apparently it makes your skin glow – or greasy – depending on which way you look at it).

This book was everywhere I travelled and I suggest you get a copy and join the revolution. It’s inspired by the real case of the Japanese con-woman known as The Konkatsu Killer and is a powerful, delicious exploration into obsession, romance and the transformative pleasures of food. Trust me, you’ll be reconsidering how you eat your rice henceforth (think, big fat dollop of liquid gold and soy drizzled atop) and buying, like me, the best butter you can find stat.

Manako Kajii is a gourmet cook and devoted to food, but she sits in a Tokyo jail convicted of serially murdering lonely businessmen addicted to her and her home cooking. She represents everything many Japanese ridicule. She is larger, is unmarried and apparently innocent so everyone is utterly obsessed with her and her story (and the misogyny is in overdrive, ugh). Kajii refuses to speak with the press until journalist Rika Machida writes to her asking for her recipe for beef stew (a fave of now dead men) and Kajii, incensed, can’t resist responding to correct her that it was actually a Beef Bourguignon, not a peasant stew.

And so begins a series of intense cat and mouse meetings in jail and through letters sent to each other where every exchange revolves around food and its influence over people. Rika hopes that the gastronomic conversations will relax Kajii into telling more of her story but over time, Rika starts re-creating every recipe and re-enacting every eating instruction given to her by Kajii. Where one character ends and the other begins becomes dangerously blurry.

This is a clever fast paced page turner littered with incredible descriptions of food and tastes and smell, so that alone for me is a winner. And a classic line from Kajii: ‘there are two things I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine‘ sums her up entirely. I wholeheartedly support only the latter. Butter is life. Pass the bread please.

And that is my two cents worth.