Asako Yuzuki’s novel Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder is the latest literary sensation by a female Japanese writer to be served to, and savoured by, an international audience.
A reporter tries to investigate a suspected serial killer who has apparently lured a succession of men to their deaths by gastronomic means. To say any more would spoil the novel’s many narrative pleasures. But 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”.
The topic is a well established, albeit under-researched aspect of contemporary Japanese women’s fiction (although the author of Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature, Tomoko Aoyama’s, fascinating article on the subject is a great place to start).
