Can you be a feminist and a possible serial killer?
This book was sold to me as being about cannibalism, but there’s absolutely nothing about cannibalism in it. Not sure if I misread something or if something got lost in translation.
This book by Asako Yuzuki was translated by Polly Barton. The subtitle is “A novel of food and murder,” and it certainly is that.
It’s told almost exclusively from the perspective of Rika Machida, a journalist at a crossroads. She’s not married, but she has a boyfriend she seems OK with. Her focus is on becoming the first female editor of the newspaper where she works.
Her latest ploy to get attention at work is to gain an exclusive interview with Manako Kajii, a woman appealing her murder conviction. Her lawyers have told her not to speak to the press, but Rika is determined to break through, and with a tip from a friend, she eventually does just that.
Manako has taken Japan by storm, not so much by being an alleged serial killer as by being an overweight woman who was able to attract and extort for money multiple men before she allegedly murdered 2-3 of her lovers.
Manako loves the finer things in life, especially when it comes to food. Butter is a particular favorite of hers, but it must be the real thing. No margarine. Hence the title.
Her philosophy is that men just want someone to take care of them, and as long as a woman does that, she’s set for life.
She also thinks a woman doesn’t have purpose if she doesn’t have a man to serve, and (according to her) that’s where all women’s suffering (i.e. feminism) comes from.
As a professional woman, Rika disagrees with this backwards notion of gender roles, but she also feels she has been strict about her diet and weight to meet gender norms … until she starts speaking to Manako.
To get on Manako’s good side so she’ll agree to an exclusive interview, Rika starts cooking and baking with expensive French butter. Pretty soon she’s gained 10 kilograms (about 5 pounds) and all the “accepting” people in her life (her boyfriend, her best friend) immediately start making negative comments about it.
Rika keeps getting deeper and deeper into Manako’s life and way of thinking, and although it’s tempting to see how she gets there, it’s also easy to see her slipping further and further away from journalistic integrity.
I don’t know what the standards for that are in Japan, but she definitely crossed several lines of journalistic integrity as it’s measured here in the States.
I really wanted to like this book a lot more than I did, but as a friend of mine said, it doesn’t know whether it wants to be a murder mystery or a coming of age story, so it doesn’t do either very well. I, for one, was hoping for much more murder than this book was serving.