Last year, amid a glut of same-same covers — rococo fronds, blurred peachy backdrops, Middle Eastern skylines, and blaring, 100-point titles, according to genre — one book rose to the top of the pile. It was a lusty yellow with an upside-down cow, Japanese typeface, smears of blood, and a single-word title: Butter. The author was Asako Yuzuki, and it became a sizzling cult hit and what they term “a global sensation”.
Translated from the Japanese and based on a true story, it centred on two women, one a gourmet cook turned serial killer locked away in prison and the other a journalist determined to breach her secrets. It played out as an unsettling mix of social satire and feminist commentary, and an intriguing introduction to Japanese food.
It also spawned a Western craze for hot rice with cold butter and soy sauce. Go on, Google it. Yuzuki’s canny publishers quickly followed up with another novel from her fat backlist. With an equally eye-catching cover, Hooked shot onto bestseller lists around the world soon after its publication in March. Once again, it is centred on two women, but if Butter was unsettling, then Hooked is unhinged.
Eriko and Shoko live in Tokyo. Eriko has a life most women would admire and a prestigious senior job at a seafood company. She is chic and disciplined, and lives in a spotless home with her devoted parents. Shoko is the rather slovenly, stay-at-home wife of an unambitious man. Neither woman has any friends and both have just turned 30, the age when good Japanese women are expected to settle into motherhood and homemaking. Many of these women write wildly popular blogs celebrating their consummate lives. Shoko writes a different but also popular blog, The Diary of Hallie B, The World’s Worst Wife, in which she celebrates the life of a fast-food-eating, slapdash schlump.
For Eriko, the blog is a transgressive delight that she dips into every morning. Here’s Shoko doing a lick of housework in her swimming costume, there she’s heading off to the local pool for a dip and a stop at the convenience store for a takeaway dinner. Here she is sitting smoking in a Denny’s wearing her husband’s old chinos, or whiling away the afternoons watching old Hollywood movies. Such freedom. Such daring.
Eriko becomes addicted to Shoko’s blog and engineers an “accidental” meeting in a café. She is, we begin to realise, deeply lonely. “Something inside of Eriko gave off a stench that put people off, that kept other women away.” Though they hit it off at first, Eriko begins to cling to the free-wheeling Shoko, and it quickly cascades into a curdled obsession.
One senses layers of loneliness in Japanese society. A new film, Rental Family, is about the “companionship agencies” proliferating there, agencies that supply clients with whoever they may require to present a perfect picture of their lives — a “girlfriend” for a single man to take to a family event or, as in the film, a stand-in “father” for a little girl so her single mother can present a happy family front at a crucial interview.
In Hooked, Eriko and Shoko also navigate the expectations placed on them, the universal pressure on women from families, misogynistic workplaces and society. For instance, Shoko is expected to look after her old bastard of a father, even though her brothers live close to him; Eriko is regarded as less of a woman because she has no husband. It’s a broader story, then, than that of stalking and neurosis. Both Butter and Hooked are slow and sticky; neither is what could be called a beach read, which is possibly the fault of the translation. But the shaft of light they beam onto Japanese culture is truly illuminating.
The food descriptions alone are irresistible: “The large plate was crowded with an assortment of riches — konnyaku and chicken liver salad with karashi mayonnaise, coleslaw with bitter melon, brown rice balls with sesame and red perilla, and slices of rolled omelette with sea lettuce.” I’m not alone in waiting hungrily for a third Asako Yuzuki novel.
From the May issue of Wanted, 2026
