The next time Japanese novelist Asako Yuzuki comes to the UK, she would like to bake some traditional Japanese muffins for Paul Hollywood on The Great British Bake Off, she says when we meet over video call. It is evening in Tokyo, where she lives with her partner and eight-year-old son. “I’ve had my bath and am ready for bed,” she explains, via translator Bethan Jones, apologising for being in her pyjamas. She thinks the Bake Off judge would be particularly impressed by “marubouro” muffins, from Nagasaki. “Kazuo Ishiguro also comes from Nagasaki and British people love Ishiguro, so they are bound to love these muffins,” she continues. “They go very well with tea.”
As anyone who has read Yuzuki’s international bestseller Butter will know, Yuzuki is all about food. Based on the 2009 real-life “Konkatsu Killer” case (konkatsu means marriage hunting), in which 35-year-old Kanae Kijima was convicted of poisoning three men, Butter follows the relationship between journalist Rika Machida and Manako Kajii, a serial killer and gourmet cook, through a succession of interviews in Tokyo Detention Centre. Yuzuki even signed up for the high-class cookery school in Tokyo that Kijima attended as research. The result is an irresistible mix of social satire and feminist thriller, dripping with descriptions of buttery rice and soy sauce.
Although the 44-year-old author has written more than 20 novels in Japanese, her publishers savvily decided her 2017 novel Butter was ripe for an anglophone market, where there was a growing appetite for translated fiction by female Japanese writers. Hits from Sayaka Murata (Convenience Store Woman), Mieko Kawakami (Breasts and Eggs) and Hiromi Kawakami (Strange Weather in Tokyo) suggested female authors had replaced Haruki Murakami for a new generation of foreign readers. These stories of alienated young women also chimed with English literary fiction’s vogue for novels of female interiority and friendship. Butter sold more than 300,000 copies in the UK alone and was voted Waterstones Book of the Year in 2024. For a while, you couldn’t go on public transport without spotting its distinctive yellow and red cover.
No wonder Yuzuki’s earlier novel Hooked – published in Japan in 2015 with the title Nairu pāchi no joshikai (Nile Perch Women’s Club) – has now been translated into English, again by writer Polly Barton. A similarly unsettling story of female power dynamics, the loneliness of 21st-century urban life, sexism and the seductions of social media, Hooked is set to be one of the hottest publications of 2026.
But if I was expecting to meet a writer whose life has been transformed by huge sales and global success, I was wrong. It seems strangely fitting to be talking to Yuzuki without makeup, in her pyjamas and glasses, as these two novels expose the pressures on Japanese women to always present a perfect face to the world. The rage simmering beneath the surface of these stylish page-turners is not confected: Yuzuki was angry when she wrote them a decade ago, “a young and unformed” writer in her 30s, and she is angrier today. “I don’t think I could write a book like Butter or Hooked now, even if I wanted to,” she says. “If Butter had received that kind of response eight years ago, my writing would probably have taken a different direction to the one that it has,” she says. “It’s really made me think about the direction that my life has taken.”
Far from being popular in Japan, the novels were criticised as overtly feminist. “Japan is a misogynist society and if you write about enmity between women, people take the opportunity to write that women are scary or that you can’t trust women,” she says. “When I wrote Butter and Hooked, I was writing what I wanted to write. But since then society has got worse, and writing about women outsmarting each other is just going to reinforce the negative views of women.” So instead of offbeat, dark satires she switched to sugary “vitamin novels”, as she calls them, more palatable to a Japanese readership. “Nowadays, the characters I write about are kind and nice to each other. They have weaknesses, but they help each other and things go well, which is what I felt I needed to write for Japanese society.” But 10 years on, she wishes she had been able to carry on writing novels like Hooked.
The idea for Hooked came after Yuzuki discovered that someone she was following on Instagram lived in her neighbourhood. “I started to feel a bit guilty about the fact that I was having this glimpse into their life on social media,” she admits. Hooked developed into a story of stalkerish obsession in which Eriko, a lonely office worker in her early 30s, befriends Shoko, a popular “housewife blogger” who lives nearby.
The novel was also inspired by the trend for Joshikai – “girl parties” – with restaurants and hotels catering for young women with disposable incomes. “It was partly a reaction to a male-centric society,” Yuzuki says. Flaunting your female friendships – selfies of girls’ nights out and spa breaks – on social media has become yet one more lifestyle essential for a successful young woman living in Tokyo. “How much was required from women as a default!” Yuzuki writes. “Attractiveness, chastity, youth, a calm disposition, a prestigious job, a range of hobbies, a winning smile, stylishness, a likeable aura, consideration of others … and then of course, popularity with other women.”
Despite being “as flawlessly beautiful as any doll”, with a smart job at Japan’s biggest trading company, poor Eriko doesn’t have a single friend. People just don’t like her. Yuzuki wanted to challenge the expectations of female friendship, “in a sense maybe more than I had towards romantic relationships”, she says. “I was trying to write about how we must overcome the way that we idealise friendships in order that we can grow, because this ideal female friendship is a fantasy.”
Along with cult novels The Vegetarian by Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang and Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, Butter and Hooked show women as commodities, subject to impossible standards, consumed and discarded after their sell-by date. Eating too much, or refusing to eat, is their only means of control or rebellion in patriarchal contemporary Seoul and Tokyo. The obsession with food in Butter slickly subverts society’s obsession with slimness. Yuzuki was not so interested in the “Konkatsu Killer” case as she was in the media response to it, in particular the misogyny and fat-shaming directed at a woman who was perceived as too old, fat and ugly to be able to seduce men. Like Rika, who puts on weight as her yearning for butter grows, Eriko starts bingeing on takeaways and her immaculate appearance begins to unravel.
“If you walk through Tokyo there are advertisements everywhere for weight loss, for plastic surgery. It’s probably worse now than it was 20 years ago,” Yuzuki says. “Women are struggling to control their weight, but there’s this society of convenience where you can go to a store and get tasty food 24 hours a day. They’re surrounded by this temptation but under pressure at the same time.”
Yuzuki has always been fascinated by food. She grew up on a diet of western children’s classics – Pippi Longstocking, Anne of Green Gables, the Ramona series and later boarding school stories – and was especially intrigued by what the characters ate. “They would have things like pie and apple preserve, things that I had never had in Japan,” she says. “When I looked them up it gave me an idea of the era and also a sense of the place.”
An only child, she was brought up as “a traditional Japanese girl” and attended an all-girls school in Tokyo. She wasn’t a particularly good student, she says. Her father was a “salaryman” (office worker) and her mother worked in the clothing industry. In her third year of junior high school she contracted mycoplasma pneumonia and was in a coma for a month, followed by two months in the ICU. When she woke up, the first thing she wanted to read was Banana Yoshimoto’s 1988 novel Kitchen. She was drawn to its delicious descriptions of katsudon. “I was in a coma for so long, so I was hungry,” she said in an interview with a Japanese bookshop in 2011. She spent the rest of her time in hospital reading Japanese fiction. Her literary tastes changed again when she majored in French literature at university in Tokyo.
She always wanted to be a writer but it seemed an impossible ambition at that time. “This is something I really want people to know,” she says. “In Japan there are hardly any writers who can make a living from writing books.” And she feels a strong sense of solidarity with her novelist friends Murata, Kawakami and Kikuko Tsumura. “We are of the generation that when we started looking for work, it was very hard to find jobs,” she says. “We felt that we weren’t welcome in the Japanese workforce.” Frustration at workplace sexism (there have been recent protests against rules forcing women to wear heels and banning glasses) unites their fiction.
Along with writing regular columns in magazines, Yuzuki did a range of jobs, including working for a confectionary manufacturer. “I didn’t do very well in any of them,” she says. “And until my first book was translated into English, I wouldn’t have said I was doing very well as a writer, either.”
She didn’t meet Barton until after Butter was published in English, but they worked more closely for the translation of Hooked. “The combination of writer and translator can really make a book,” she says. “Polly is a feminist. She really thinks about what books she feels need to be translated at this moment, and she’s very popular. Some people will read a book just because she’s translated it.”
The success of Japanese fiction abroad is finally changing the publishing scene at home. Her friend Akira Otani became the first Japanese author to win the Dagger award for crime fiction in translation last year, for The Night of Baba Yaga (Yuzuki was also shortlisted for Butter). “She’s a rare Japanese writer who identifies as a sexual minority,” Yuzuki says of Otani. “For a long time she wanted to write stories about LGBTQ characters who are not necessarily good people. But because sexual minorities are discriminated against so much in Japan, she hasn’t felt able to do that. It’s the same with me in a society where misogyny and femicide are rife.”
Although she describes herself as “very far from the ideal Japanese woman”, she has to fit writing around bringing up her son and managing the home. She likes writing in coffee shops; some days she will write 10 pages, others nothing at all. While it may not have changed her everyday life, the response to Butter in the UK has made her reconsider her future as a novelist. “I want to write about women who make mistakes that can’t be repaired. I want to write about women who seem like the best of friends but betray each other and the relationship falls apart,” she says, leaning intently into her screen. “I’m going to enjoy writing those kinds of books. So I am very grateful to the UK readers who have given me the courage to do that.”
• Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton, will be published by 4th Estate on 12 March. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
