Asako Yuzuki is 44, lives in Tokyo with her partner and eight-year-old son, and has written more than 20 novels in Japanese. Outside Japan, almost no one knew her name until Butter — a feminist thriller about a serial killer and gourmet cook, based on the 2009 'Konkatsu Killer' case in which 35-year-old Kanae Kijima was convicted of poisoning three men — sold more than 300,000 copies in the UK alone and was voted Waterstones Book of the Year in 2024. That gap between international triumph and domestic friction is the central tension of this interview, and Yuzuki is honest about what it cost her. The 'Konkatsu Killer' case was the spark but not the subject. What interested Yuzuki was the media response — specifically, the misogyny and fat-shaming directed at a woman perceived as too old, fat, and ugly to seduce men. The novel follows journalist Rika Machida's relationship with serial killer and gourmet cook Manako Kajii through a succession of interviews in Tokyo Detention Centre. Yuzuki attended the high-class cookery school in Tokyo that Kijima attended as research. The food — buttery rice, soy sauce, the creeping weight of obsession — is the vehicle for a social critique of Japan's body standards: walking through Tokyo, she says, 'there are advertisements everywhere for weight loss, for plastic surgery. It's probably worse now than it was 20 years ago.' Hooked, published in Japan in 2015 as Nairu pāchi no joshikai (Nile Perch Women's Club) and now translated into English by Polly Barton, is the companion piece. It began with a banal observation: Yuzuki discovered that someone she followed on Instagram lived in her neighbourhood, and felt guilty about the glimpse into their life. This became a story of stalkerish obsession — lonely office worker Eriko, described as 'as flawlessly beautiful as any doll,' befriends Shoko, a popular housewife blogger who lives nearby. The novel riffs on the Joshikai trend, the 'girl parties' culture in which Tokyo restaurants and hotels cater for young women with disposable incomes, and the performance of female friendship on social media. The list Yuzuki quotes from the novel lands like a punch: '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.' The international success arrived too late to shape Yuzuki's domestic output. She was angry when she wrote Butter and Hooked a decade ago — 'a young and unformed writer in her 30s' — and is angrier today. But Japan's literary culture pushed back. '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.' Rather than continue with dark satire, she shifted to what she calls 'vitamin novels' — stories of kind characters who help each other, calibrated for a Japanese readership. She says it plainly: 'I don't think I could write a book like Butter or Hooked now, even if I wanted to.' And 10 years on, she wishes she had been able to carry on. 'If Butter had received that kind of response eight years ago, my writing would probably have taken a different direction.' The context for Yuzuki's international breakthrough is a specific anglophone publishing moment. Her publishers identified that the market for translated Japanese fiction by female writers was growing. Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman, Mieko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs, and Hiromi Kawakami's Strange Weather in Tokyo had already established the appetite. Female Japanese authors had, the article argues, replaced Haruki Murakami for a new generation of foreign readers. These stories of alienated young women also fitted English literary fiction's interest in female interiority. Yuzuki names Murata, Kawakami, and Kikuko Tsumura as friends and generational peers — writers who came up at a time when finding work was very hard, who 'felt that we weren't welcome in the Japanese workforce,' and whose frustration at workplace sexism (she cites recent protests against rules forcing women to wear heels and banning glasses) runs through their fiction. The biographical details accumulate into something coherent. Yuzuki grew up on a diet of western children's classics — Pippi Longstocking, Anne of Green Gables, the Ramona series, boarding school stories — and was fascinated by what the characters ate: pie, apple preserve, foods she'd never encountered in Japan. She contracted mycoplasma pneumonia in her third year of junior high school and was in a coma for a month, followed by two months in the ICU. When she woke up, the first thing she wanted to read was Banana Yoshimoto's 1988 novel Kitchen. 'I was in a coma for so long, so I was hungry,' she said in a 2011 interview with a Japanese bookshop. She later majored in French literature at university in Tokyo, worked a series of jobs including for a confectionary manufacturer, and didn't consider herself a successful writer until Butter was translated into English. The translator, Polly Barton, is herself a significant figure: Yuzuki notes that 'some people will read a book just because she's translated it.' The combination of the right book, the right translator, and the right cultural moment is the full explanation for 300,000 UK copies.
