Asako Yusuki, centre, signing copies of Butter in Piccadilly Waterstones last week<\/p>\n
HERS has been the name on the yellow book with a cow on its front cover gripped by thousands of Londoners since being translated into English.<\/p>\n
And yet \u2013 by her own admission \u2013 Asako Yusuki is not celebrated in her home country of Japan, where her international hit Butter was first published.<\/p>\n
Having sold almost half a million copies in the UK, however, she now finds herself on a global book tour. In Waterstones in Piccadilly last week, every seat in the house was filled, with tickets already sold out weeks before the author was due to appear.<\/p>\n
When asked to introduce herself, Asako simply says: \u201cMy name is Asako, I\u2019m a writer, but I\u2019m not popular in Japan, so I\u2019m surprised to be in a bookshop in London.\u201d She pauses. \u201cI don\u2019t want to go back to Japan, all Japanese ignore me,\u201d she jokes.<\/p>\n
Based on a real murder case of the \u201cKonkatsu Killer,\u201d Butter tells the story of Kajii, who is behind bars for allegedly killing three of her former lovers, and the journalist Rika who is desperate to get the real story.<\/p>\n
Asako\u2019s novel is not however a traditional whodunit. Instead she has taken media coverage of the case \u2013 laced with misogyny and fatphobia \u2013 as the guiding themes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat case was sensationally reported. There was a lot of buzz around the case itself,\u201d Asako said. \u201cI was more interested in the media coverage of it, and also the structure of Japanese media itself. So I would say I really wanted to focus on that side of Japanese society as well as how much Japanese people have internalised that media reporting, that trend of media reporting.\u201d<\/p>\n
The product has been read in the UK as a searing expos\u00e9 of Japanese beauty standards and the physical and mental burden women must take on in order to be seen as hard-working, worthy, or simply just acceptable.<\/p>\n
Asako said: \u201cIt wasn\u2019t my intention to expose the misogynistic element in Japan. I was merely writing an everyday life in Japan, this is what most women go through.\u201d<\/p>\n
In her quest to obtain an exclusive interview with the gourmet chef-turned-murderer behind bars, Rika writes to Kajii asking for a recipe. Their relationship develops into one of mentor-mentee as Kajii encourages Rika to explore the culinary world around her \u2013 tasting everything from rice with good butter to the delights of the French restaurant scene in Tokyo \u2013 and come back and describe the sensations to her.<\/p>\n
Here, the descriptions of food sometimes seem, to a British reader, other-worldly.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs the warm sea urchin was crushed on the surface of her tongue, it was transformed into sea-flavoured cream that blended seamlessly with the similarly rich taste of the flan pastry, redolent with egg yolk,\u201d writes Asako.<\/p>\n
Translator Polly Barton said this was one of the most difficult things to get right. \u201cI wanted to have it feel incredibly luscious and sensual, but not tipping over into that food-porny territory,\u201d she said. \u201cThere is a culture in Japan of describing food in a way that, particularly to a British audience, maybe seems a bit extreme. So striking that balance is something I was thinking about a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Rika starts to eat, she also puts on weight, and is criticised by everyone around her \u2013 her boyfriend, her best friend, her boss.<\/p>\n
Her own experience leads her to reflect on the impossible ways the women in her life must contort themselves to please the men around them. \u201cThe quickest way for a modern Japanese woman to gain the love of a man is to become corpse-like,\u201d she concludes.<\/p>\n
Butter is a book that rests on its female characters and their complexities, they are rude to each other, they betray each other, they are responsible at times for propping up the patriarchal standards that exist to crush them. This, according to Asako, is one of the reasons why the book was less well received in Japan. \u201cIn Japan, if your female characters are not working towards the same goal, you are seen as part of the problem,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
In London, we seem to be a little more forgiving of these women\u2019s flaws. We know how difficult it is to exist in a world that has a lot of unspoken rules and regulations. And this is perhaps why Butter has proved so popular with an English-speaking audience. Your boss might not directly tell you that you have put on weight, but having to care that people might notice can be just as oppressive.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Butter. By Asako Yuzuki (translated by Polly Barton), 4th Estate, \u00a314.99<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Asako Yusuki, centre, signing copies of Butter in Piccadilly Waterstones last week HERS has been the name on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":53239,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134,44417,44418,44419,44420],"class_list":{"0":"post-53238","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-isabel-loubser","13":"tag-the-camden-new-journal","14":"tag-the-islington-tribune","15":"tag-west-end-extra"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}