Asako Yuzuki’s Butter lures readers in with its hypnotic bright yellow cover, much like margarine. The blurb reads like a mystery thriller where one might expect our protagonist Rika Machida, to eventually brandish her serial killer prowess, like Manako Kaji, the woman condemned by the court and society as the mastermind behind the deaths of three lonely businessmen. However, what unfolds is a much more complex journey, both in psyches and taste buds.
“There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine.”
The first half of the novel builds a complex, critical and compelling view into Japanese society. Butter begins with strong questions and a decadent narrative about why the Kajimana case is garnering as much interest as it is. Through an investigation of the same the narrative exposes hypocritic and misogynistic facets of society where all the responsibility falls on the woman, who is without exception, supposed to nurture the men in her life.
“It’s a miracle that someone that fat could con so many people into wanting to marry her! Is her cooking that good, or what?” is what a character Ryōsuke says about Manako Kaji. The main spectacle that intrigued people behind the Kaji case was the incredulity that a woman who was neither slim nor young—patriarchy’s holy grails for women—had as much self-confidence as she did. It allows the readers to question how according to the majoritarian normative a woman must have self esteem issues, and even more, a desire to reach the ideal standard of society. If not, she is a defective product at best, or an anomaly that intrigues the masses but scares them at the same time. Rika rightfully asserts, “Everyone in it, from Kajimana herself to her victims and all the men involved, seems to have a deep-seated hatred of women”.
The discourse Yuzuki is able to whip up around weight makes for the most empowering aspect of Butter. Rika starts to gain weight in her quest to retrace Kaji’s past by following in her footsteps, and the response of the people around her, especially men, is enlightening. From a coworker who showed zero interest in other people to her boyfriend who perhaps caught a glimpse of her at work but thought it necessary to inform her she has swerved a tiny bit from patriarchy’s expectation of a female body, everyone ensures that Rika is hyper aware of her body image. They offer unsolicited advice and mask their actions behind concern for Rika’s own wellbeing.
Rika sums up her relationship with her body image when she thinks, “She just didn’t have the energy. She was tired of living her life thinking constantly about how she appeared to others, checking her answers against everyone else’s”. Rika mentions how she liked the way her body felt, and she might have felt less repulsion against the idea of gaining weight if everyone around her was not so incessantly critical of it. The draw Rika feels to Kaji can also be explained through the societal discourse on weight. Kaji had a body unlike any women Rika knew. Throughout the novel the people around Rika constantly justify her weight gain as a result of her endeavours to gain an interview with Kaji. However it is interesting to ponder upon whether they are trying to validate Rika’s insecurities or justifying their own fear at the transgression of a woman. Through Rika, Yuzuki introduces the idea of “finding the tastes and body size that works for you”.
Kaji’s views of women are shown to be conservative, with an abhorrence of female independence; however, there is also something liberating and transgressive in her thinking. She says,
“Ignore all that nonsense about making an effort and so forth. All you need to do is to eat as much of whatever it is you most desire at any given moment. Listen carefully to your heart and your body.”
She speaks of body autonomy as a prerequisite to self confidence. And it is woefully sad that having body autonomy is one of the hardest challenges in a society raked with patriarchy. This is not just Yuzuki’s Japan, it is also the United States where abortion and gender rights are overturned, it is Afghanistan where Taliban has banned women from even hearing each other’s voices and it is India where each day a woman is raped and the newspapers run out of space to mention the gruesome tales. Kaji may not have the most progressive view of women in society but her ideal woman is at least someone who has control over her own body.
Kaji’s character is compelling because despite her dependence on men to maintain her lavish lifestyle, she never lets it overtake her desire for her own body, something she enacts through the act of eating. Kaji understands what a “good amount” means for her. Rika is right when she says that for Kaji, cooking is not an act of sacrifice or pain because she cooks what she wants to eat, she cooks for herself. The narrative points to how women are rarely able to make the food that they want to eat, more than often it is about fulfilling the demands of others, which in turn takes away the enjoyment of the task. It is no longer something a woman can just do, it becomes something that is expected of her as her natural, biological and domestic duty. In this way, I believe Kaji has a spirit that refuses to be domesticated. Despite her idea of a woman serving a man in her happy nuclear family model, in her life contrary to her beliefs, Kaji indulges in making the food that she wants and thus as Rika says, “[for Kaji] eating was fundamentally an individualistic and egoistic compulsion”.
As Butter’s narrative develops Rika is shown to lose her capacity for critical thinking and develops more as a failure of a journalist. She allows herself to be strung along by Kaji’s story all the while knowing she was a manipulator. Towards the end when Kaji, quite expectedly, flips the narrative Rika publishes in her interview with Kaji, Rika acts almost like a jilted lover. She wallows, thinking about “Kaji’s betrayal” forgetting that both women were a means to an end for each other. She victimises herself and says, “The thing [Kaji victims] had treasured had been cruelly shattered. She had to face it this time: Kaji was a killer. It didn’t matter whether or not she’d murdered her victims with her own hands. Clearly, there resided within her a violent loathing of other people”. Riko’s conclusion is reductive at best, if Kaji is a killer, so is every woman who finally starts to realise that they can live their life for themselves. And the biggest proof of Rika and her faulty reasoning about Kaji being a murderer is that Rika gets herself together eventually, “She could get up of her own accord, she could put things in her own mouth. She could taste them, too. She would ask for help” and if Rika can, the novel fails to ask the question why any other Kaji victims could not do the same.
Throughout the narrative, Yuzuki makes light of the constant breach of the private and public. We see this in the relationship between Rika and Reiko, Rika’s best friend, a workaholic who loved the thrill of her job but left it to focus on building a domestic life with her husband. In the novel it is apparent that Reiko regrets leaving her work and it manifests in the different ways she tries to insert herself in Rika’s investigation of Kaji by undertaking bold and dangerous steps. The issue arises because Rika fails to be her own person. Her viewpoint is too easily influenced by what Reiko is desperate to prove, she has no control over situations where as the journalist in touch with Kaji she should be in charge and as the narrative proceeds she seems to drown more and more in Reiko’s viewpoint ultimately embodying these opinions as her own. For me it was a sad demise of an inquisitive, questioning and interesting character and completely derailed the whole point that the narrative established in the beginning.
Interactions between Rika and Reiko throughout the story felt close to breaking the boundaries between platonic friendship. Lines like “The two friends were interlocking gloved fingers, like a young couple reluctant to part from one another” made me wonder countless times if Rika was just besotted with Reiko, but had no way to comprehend her feelings? But not even once does Yuzuki try to step outside her shrine of heterosexuality. There is not a single question in either of her character’s minds that they could be anything but heterosexual. While it could be seen as a compelling critique of compulsory heterosexuality I view it as a missed opportunity on Yuzuki’s part. Her failure to explore the spectrum in a narrative filled with plenty of queer desire and tension builds an impression of an author who is not willing to break the binaries but someone who is satisfied to critique the centralised circle of heterosexuality. Reiko expresses thoughts like, “If only Rika were a man” as she continues to dream of spending her days travelling with Rika, I fail to understand why the author deemed it necessary to exclude any and all exploration of queer desire.
In the second half, Butter starts to become a melting pot of contradictions clashing with everything Rika has believed to be true in the first half. The feminist questioner of the patriarchal hypocrisies that Rika embodied in the beginning transforms into an assimilationist version of Rika by the end. Yuzuki ties up her novel with a cliche trope of found family and renunciation of Manako Kaji as an antagonist and murderer. All the layers that Yuzuki developed throughout her novel in her characters are reversed until only the surface level impressions are presented as the final message of the novel.
Kaji says, “The quickest way for a modern Japanese woman to gain the love of a man is to become corpse-like. The kind of men who want those women, are dead themselves”. One minute Rika thinks of Kaji to be the only woman who is alive but the very next moment she reaches a realisation that it was Reiko that was alive and not Kaji. The author places Reiko and Kaji as narrative opposites where Kaji becomes the symbol of lows and Reiko attains the symbol of highs. The author decides to almost eliminate Reiko’s presence from this point onwards, she has served her purpose of being the stereotypical archetype and must go back within the boundaries of the same suffocating life that she wanted to escape. The future of her relationship with her husband is left open and there is no attempt to dive deeper into Reiko’s psyche as a faulty human who makes mistakes just like everyone. Rika starts lashing out at Kaji for being a manipulator and shifts the entire blame of Reiko’s actions conveniently onto Kaji.
Yuzuki’s Rika has reduced all her thinking and condensed it into two binaries that are simple for her to consume and live with. A deified friend in Reiko and an antagonistic villain in Kaji, Rika fails to go beyond the age-old binaries of the Virgin/Whore, Angel of the house/Fallen Madwoman, and the Good Girl/Bad Girl narrative of patriarchy. Despite creating characters with multiple layers and complex personalities that go far beyond the stereotypical binaries Yuzuki is not an author who wants to transgress the binaries. At best an assimilationist, she manages to create new binaries with the genetic makeup of the same cliche stereotypes that plague the majority of literature.
