...Pleasantly full as she was, Rika felt like crying. She might dine with someone, but at the end of the meal they would go their separate ways. She couldn't stay with that person forever. Even with her stomach full of warmth and the taste of delicious food lingering on her tongue, she remained alone. It didn't matter who she had for company. She was beginning to understand that the more delicious the time she spent with others, the more alone she felt.
I used to read so many books it was hard to keep track of them all, when I was a kid with a buttload of time on my hands. But since college, it's been hard to find the time to get lost in a good book. So when I picked up the English translation of Butter by Asako Yuzuki, I told myself I had to at least put some effort into finishing it.
Four months later, I had made a decent dent into it, but I wasn't sucked into it until a few days ago. I finished the second half of the book in two days.
Butter is fascinating because you expect one thing going into it, but what you get is completely different. Marketed as a thriller loosely based on a true story, where a journalist interviews a convicted serial killer to uncover unknown truths about the case, this book is somehow so much more than that, but without the sensationalism expected of a serial-killer-centered thriller.
Summary: Rika is a journalist for a popular magazine. Kaji is a heavyset woman jailed for the deaths of multiple older men, all of whom she had been dating before they died, and all of whom supported her financially as their "professional girlfriend". Kaji refuses any and all interviews, as public opinion is skewed heavily against her. Rika discovers that Kaji ran a food-centered blog, where she shared recipes and glimpses into her conservative politics, and Rika decides to approach Kaji not as a journalist looking for an interview, but as a fan interested in her recipes and food knowledge. Kaji warily grants Rika an audience, and the two form a codependant bond -- Kaji lives vicariously through Rika by sending her on cuisine missions, and Rika takes on these assignments for a deeper glimpse into a serial killer's mind, trying to put herself in Kaji's shoes.
Eventually, Rika takes more and more of Kaji's advice, beginning to apply her philosophy to her own life. She gains weight by eating so richly - everyone around her criticizes her new body and her more independent lifestyle. Parallels begin to form between Kaji and Rika's lives, until Rika's childhood best friend Reiko tries to interfere with both the investigation and the growing friendship between the journalist and the convicted killer.
Kaji's manipulative nature rears its head, and she orchestrates the two friends on a trip to her childhood home. As Reiko and Rika search for the secrets behind what molded Kaji into the woman she became, they look for answers from people in Kaji's past. They begin to uncover the lies, half-truths, and missing details in Kaji's life story, painting a much lonelier picture than the self-satisfied "professional girlfriend" would ever admit.
Rika finally gets her interview with Kaji, but despite Reiko and her other friends helping to pull her out of her obsession with seeing things through Kaji's eyes, she is still blind to some of the killer's lies. Her piece is published, but Kaji had been secretly engaged to a journalist writing a competitive interview -- one that maintains that everything Rika's written is false.
Rika's professional reputation is as good as over, but now that she's out of Kaji's thrall, and surrounded by her loved ones, freed from a stifling romance, heavier yet happier, she pulls through, and moves on with her life.
The Konkatsu Killer
Kaji is fictional, but she was based off of a real woman, named Kanae Kijima. Kijima was convicted in 2012 of the murder of three former lovers, all of whom had died under suspicious circumstances. Dubbed "the Black Widow killer", she's been married twice during her wait on death row. She scammed millions of dollars out of older, desperate, and lonely men, but maintains her innocence, claiming that these men committed suicide after she broke up with them. She was convicted on circumstantial evidence only: all three men died in the same way, and all three men sent Kijima massive sums of money shortly before their deaths. Kijima runs a blog from prison, writing to her supporters about life in prison, her innocence, and food. It is morbidly fascinating to see - her blog is still up and running, and it actually looks like it was updated about eight hours ago.
Thoughts
However beautiful she became, however well she did at work, even if she got married and had children, society didn't let women off that easily. The standards were getting higher, and assessments harsher. The only way to be free of it - however scary and anxiety-inducing it was, however much you kept on looking back to check whether or not people were laughing at you - was to learn to accept yourself.
This book is more about the effects of misogyny, and the heavy expectations put upon women in modern Japanese society. This novel poses the hypothetical question: When are women allowed to let incompetent men fail? At what point does refusal to care for someone who has become dependant on you, become harmful? Why are women held responsible for men's self-neglect?
Rika is haunted by the death of her father, which occured after her parents' divorce. Her father neglected himself, only eating shitty takeout and wallowing in his own sadness and filth. When he lashes out at his daughter, she decides against cooking a meal for him. Immediately afterwards, he has a heart attack and dies. Rika is the one who finds his body. She carries the burden of his death, feeling responsible for his death by neglecting him in his time of need. Similarly, the men Kaji dated were wealthy, prominent men - men who couldn't cook, didn't clean, and became reliant on Kaji's care. When she tired of being responsible for the minutae of these men's lives, she presumably killed them: this, oddly enough, is left vague in Butter. It's clear that Kaji is crucified in the public's opinion, but it's never clearly stated that she is actually guilty: she, like Kijima, maintains her innocence, claiming that these men caused their own deaths via their dependency on her care.
But while the book explores these restrictive expectations of misogyny, it's more about Rika's journey breaking free from it.
I've started to realize that nothing ever happens if you don't impose on people.
Near the end of the book, as Rika is working to rehabilitate Reiko after her own failure to live up to these massive expectations that Kaji embodies, she finds herself surrounded by friends, at ease in the communal gathering space of her friend's apartment. The comfort she feels here, amongst her closest friends, makes her realize what a lonely existence Kaji leads, by catering her entire life towards men's expectations, limiting herself while maintaining the illusion of free-spiritedness. Rika gains her independence by embracing her body as it is, enjoying the food she wants to enjoy, working on herself and the skills she prioritizes for her own personal growth.
I'd like to one day have that same self-comfort, the confidence and ability to "embrace the suck" (as my favorite Radio professor used to say). I do only have one last note about Butter, before I turn it in for Bull Moose credit: it was pretty gay. Rika is hit on by multiple women, went to an all-girls school and thrilled in turning the other girls on, and had homoerotic tension with not just Kaji, but her best friend Reiko as well. Even before she breaks up with him, her boyfriend occupies very little of her brain-space, but she waxes poetic about Kaji's curves every time she sits across from her. THE WORLD NEEDS MORE GAY BOOKS!!!