The subsequent time Japanese novelist Asako Yuzuki involves the UK, she want to bake some conventional Japanese muffins for Paul Hollywood on The Great British Bake Off, she says once we meet over video name. It is night in Tokyo, the place she lives together with her accomplice and eight-year-old son. “I’ve had my bath and am ready for bed,” she explains, through translator Bethan Jones, apologising for being in her pyjamas. She thinks the Bake Off decide could be notably impressed by “marubouro” muffins, from Nagasaki. “Kazuo Ishiguro also comes from Nagasaki and British people love Ishiguro, so they are bound to love these muffins,” she continues. “They go very well with tea.”
As anybody who has learn Yuzuki’s worldwide bestseller Butter will know, Yuzuki is all about meals. Based on the 2009 real-life “Konkatsu Killer” case (konkatsu means marriage looking), by which 35-year-old Kanae Kijima was convicted of poisoning three males, Butter follows the connection between journalist Rika Machida and Manako Kajii, a serial killer and connoisseur prepare dinner, by way of a succession of interviews in Tokyo Detention Centre. Yuzuki even signed up for the high-class cookery faculty in Tokyo that Kijima attended as analysis. The result’s an irresistible mixture of social satire and feminist thriller, dripping with descriptions of buttery rice and soy sauce.
Although the 44-year-old writer has written greater than 20 novels in Japanese, her publishers savvily determined her 2017 novel Butter was ripe for an anglophone market, the place there was a rising urge for food for translated fiction by feminine Japanese writers. Hits from Sayaka Murata (Convenience Store Woman), Mieko Kawakami (Breasts and Eggs) and Hiromi Kawakami (Strange Weather in Tokyo) steered feminine authors had changed Haruki Murakami for a brand new era of overseas readers. These tales of alienated younger girls additionally chimed with English literary fiction’s vogue for novels of feminine interiority and friendship. Butter bought greater than 300,000 copies within the UK alone and was voted Waterstones Book of the Year in 2024. For some time, you couldn’t go on public transport with out recognizing its distinctive yellow and crimson cowl.
No surprise Yuzuki’s earlier novel Hooked – revealed in Japan in 2015 with the title Nairu pāchi no joshikai (Nile Perch Women’s Club) – has now been translated into English, once more by author Polly Barton. A equally unsettling story of feminine energy dynamics, the loneliness of Twenty first-century city life, sexism and the seductions of social media, Hooked is about to be one of many hottest publications of 2026.
But if I used to be anticipating to fulfill a author whose life has been reworked by large gross sales and world success, I used to be improper. It appears unusually becoming to be speaking to Yuzuki with out make-up, in her pyjamas and glasses, as these two novels expose the pressures on Japanese girls to all the time current an ideal face to the world. The rage simmering beneath the floor of those trendy page-turners is just not confected: Yuzuki was offended when she wrote them a decade in the past, “a young and unformed” author in her 30s, and he or she is angrier at the moment. “I don’t think I could write a book like Butter or Hooked now, even if I wanted to,” she says. “If Butter had received that kind of response eight years ago, my writing would probably have taken a different direction to the one that it has,” she says. “It’s really made me think about the direction that my life has taken.”
Far from being widespread in Japan, the novels have been criticised as overtly feminist. “Japan is a misogynist society and if you write about enmity between women, people take the opportunity to write that women are scary or that you can’t trust women,” she says. “When I wrote Butter and Hooked, I was writing what I wanted to write. But since then society has got worse, and writing about women outsmarting each other is just going to reinforce the negative views of women.” So as an alternative of offbeat, darkish satires she switched to sugary “vitamin novels”, as she calls them, extra palatable to a Japanese readership. “Nowadays, the characters I write about are kind and nice to each other. They have weaknesses, but they help each other and things go well, which is what I felt I needed to write for Japanese society.” But 10 years on, she needs she had been capable of stick with it writing novels like Hooked.
The concept for Hooked got here after Yuzuki found that somebody she was following on Instagram lived in her neighbourhood. “I started to feel a bit guilty about the fact that I was having this glimpse into their life on social media,” she admits. Hooked developed right into a story of stalkerish obsession by which Eriko, a lonely workplace employee in her early 30s, befriends Shoko, a well-liked “housewife blogger” who lives close by.
The novel was additionally impressed by the development for Joshikai – “girl parties” – with eating places and inns catering for younger girls with disposable incomes. “It was partly a reaction to a male-centric society,” Yuzuki says. Flaunting your feminine friendships – selfies of women’ nights out and spa breaks – on social media has turn into but yet another life-style important for a profitable younger girl dwelling in Tokyo. “How much was required from women as a default!” Yuzuki writes. “Attractiveness, chastity, youth, a calm disposition, a prestigious job, a range of hobbies, a winning smile, stylishness, a likeable aura, consideration of others … and then of course, popularity with other women.”
Despite being “as flawlessly beautiful as any doll”, with a wise job at Japan’s largest buying and selling firm, poor Eriko doesn’t have a single good friend. People simply don’t like her. Yuzuki needed to problem the expectations of feminine friendship, “in a sense maybe more than I had towards romantic relationships”, she says. “I was trying to write about how we must overcome the way that we idealise friendships in order that we can grow, because this ideal female friendship is a fantasy.”
Along with cult novels The Vegetarian by Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang and Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, Butter and Hooked present girls as commodities, topic to inconceivable requirements, consumed and discarded after their sell-by date. Eating an excessive amount of, or refusing to eat, is their solely technique of management or insurrection in patriarchal modern Seoul and Tokyo. The obsession with meals in Butter slickly subverts society’s obsession with slimness. Yuzuki was not so within the “Konkatsu Killer” case as she was within the media response to it, specifically the misogyny and fat-shaming directed at a lady who was perceived as too previous, fats and ugly to have the ability to seduce males. Like Rika, who places on weight as her craving for butter grows, Eriko begins bingeing on takeaways and her immaculate look begins to unravel.
“If you walk through Tokyo there are advertisements everywhere for weight loss, for plastic surgery. It’s probably worse now than it was 20 years ago,” Yuzuki says. “Women are struggling to control their weight, but there’s this society of convenience where you can go to a store and get tasty food 24 hours a day. They’re surrounded by this temptation but under pressure at the same time.”
Yuzuki has all the time been fascinated by meals. She grew up on a weight-reduction plan of western kids’s classics – Pippi Longstocking, Anne of Green Gables, the Ramona collection and later boarding faculty tales – and was particularly intrigued by what the characters ate. “They would have things like pie and apple preserve, things that I had never had in Japan,” she says. “When I looked them up it gave me an idea of the era and also a sense of the place.”
An solely little one, she was introduced up as “a traditional Japanese girl” and attended an all-girls faculty in Tokyo. She wasn’t a very good scholar, she says. Her father was a “salaryman” (workplace employee) and her mom labored within the clothes business. In her third yr of junior highschool she contracted mycoplasma pneumonia and was in a coma for a month, adopted by two months within the ICU. When she wakened, the very first thing she needed to learn was Banana Yoshimoto’s 1988 novel Kitchen. She was drawn to its scrumptious descriptions of katsudon. “I was in a coma for so long, so I was hungry,” she mentioned in an interview with a Japanese bookshop in 2011. She spent the remainder of her time in hospital studying Japanese fiction. Her literary tastes modified once more when she majored in French literature at college in Tokyo.
She all the time needed to be a author however it appeared an inconceivable ambition at the moment. “This is something I really want people to know,” she says. “In Japan there are hardly any writers who can make a living from writing books.” And she feels a robust sense of solidarity together with her novelist associates Murata, Kawakami and Kikuko Tsumura. “We are of the generation that when we started looking for work, it was very hard to find jobs,” she says. “We felt that we weren’t welcome in the Japanese workforce.” Frustration at office sexism (there have been latest protests towards guidelines forcing girls to put on heels and banning glasses) unites their fiction.
Along with writing common columns in magazines, Yuzuki did a variety of jobs, together with working for a confectionary producer. “I didn’t do very well in any of them,” she says. “And until my first book was translated into English, I wouldn’t have said I was doing very well as a writer, either.”
She didn’t meet Barton till after Butter was revealed in English, however they labored extra carefully for the interpretation of Hooked. “The combination of writer and translator can really make a book,” she says. “Polly is a feminist. She really thinks about what books she feels need to be translated at this moment, and she’s very popular. Some people will read a book just because she’s translated it.”
The success of Japanese fiction overseas is lastly altering the publishing scene at dwelling. Her good friend Akira Otani grew to become the primary Japanese writer to win the Dagger award for crime fiction in translation final yr, for The Night of Baba Yaga (Yuzuki was additionally shortlisted for Butter). “She’s a rare Japanese writer who identifies as a sexual minority,” Yuzuki says of Otani. “For a long time she wanted to write stories about LGBTQ characters who are not necessarily good people. But because sexual minorities are discriminated against so much in Japan, she hasn’t felt able to do that. It’s the same with me in a society where misogyny and femicide are rife.”
Although she describes herself as “very far from the ideal Japanese woman”, she has to suit writing round mentioning her son and managing the house. She likes writing in espresso retailers; some days she’s going to write 10 pages, others nothing in any respect. While it might not have modified her on a regular basis life, the response to Butter within the UK has made her rethink her future as a novelist. “I want to write about women who make mistakes that can’t be repaired. I want to write about women who seem like the best of friends but betray each other and the relationship falls apart,” she says, leaning intently into her display screen. “I’m going to enjoy writing those kinds of books. So I am very grateful to the UK readers who have given me the courage to do that.”