Book review : Butter

I picked up Asako Yuzuki’s Butter expecting a quiet Japanese novel with cozy vibes. What I did not expect was to feelpersistently unsettled — and weirdly hungry — for 400 pages.

The novel is inspired by a real Japanese criminal case. Manako Kajii, a cooking instructor, is accused of seducing and murdering a series of men. She is unrepentant, and absolutely obsessed with butter — the quality of it, the provenance of it, the way it melts, the way it coats. Journalist Rika seeks an interview with her, and what follows is less a professional exchange and more a slow, creeping psychological siege of the journalist by the prisoner herself.

“She was tired of living her life thinking constantly about how she appeared to others, checking her answers against everyone else’s.”

Here is where it gets crunchy. The feminism in this book is ambiguous at its best. It is present, but extremely uncomfortable in its execution. Kajii weaponises it. She does not use her gender as a wound; she uses it as a blade. And the “favours” she extracts from Rika in exchange for the interview — increasingly becomes invasive had me genuinely disturbed. This is not feminism as liberation but rather as manipulation, and Yuzuki is brave enough to not clean it up for you.

The butter obsession is almost hallucinatory — by the third chapter I was reading about beurre blanc at midnight and genuinely looking up photos of the dishes and recipes available online. In the story, the positive aspect tucked inside all that coercion is the one thing that quietly undoes you: Rika learns to cook, almost against her own will. In a world which chases hustle and fast life, that small, unhurried act of feeding oneself felt like the only thing anyone in this story chose entirely for themselves.

Butter is not a comfortable read. It is not meant to be. It is rich, heavy, and leaves a residue — much like, well, butter.

Head to the comments and tell me — did Kajii unsettle you too, or did you find yourself rooting for her?
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