Butter, Virtue, and Japanese Literature

1.

It is my favorite Japanese movie moment of all time. Tora-san is impossibly nervous, standing between two gorgeous young women, while a third gorgeous young woman takes their photo. Trying to be suave, he wants to say, “cheese” for the camera, but instead accidentally says “butter.” The women can’t stop laughing and this sparks them to invite him to travel with them on their Golden Week excursion, where he continues to make them laugh, reminding them of “butter.”

バター bataa is written in katakana to represent the English word.

Back in those days, butter was not so easy to come by. And for a man like Tora-san who mainly eats Japanese, cheese and butter were easy to confuse, both being imported English words into the language!

This is a roundabout way of telling you that I started reading the novel Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton. The book, which won the 2024 Waterstones Book of the Year Award, concerns a journalist who is interviewing a woman on death row in Japan for the murder of multiple men.

The story is based on the real-life case of the “Konkatsu Killer.” Supposedly enticing men into her life between 2007-2009, only to bilk them out of money before murdering them, the case got a lot of attention in Japan —Because, well, people wondered how could such “a fat and unattractive woman have gotten these men to fall in love with her?” That was the general consensus.

Yuzuki takes up this story in her novel and adds the wonderful detail of having the killer attract these men in part by using her glorious gourmet cooking skills! In this way, Yuzuki says she is interrogating the impossible beauty standards to which Japanese women are held.

And I think it’s not just Japanese women either!

2.

I was really excited to learn that the International Booker Prize (for translations into English) this year included two Japanese novels. It was a surprising long-list both because of the lack of Korean and Chinese titles but also because heavy weights Han Kang and Olga Tokarczuk were missing. Anyway, the two Japanese novels were Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, also translated by Polly Barton, and Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda.

I was trying to decide between these two books, when I remembered that I had never read Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Opening the first few pages of the novel, I quickly came to this:

Your plain fat woman is fine. Fat women are like clouds in the sky. They're just floating there, nothing to do with me. But your young, beautiful, fat woman is another story. I am demanded to assume a posture toward her. I could end up sleeping with her. That is probably where all the confusion comes in.

Which is not to say that I have anything against fat women.

A few years ago in Lithub, Mieko Kawakami (One of the authors longlisted this year) interviewed Murakami about his portrayal of women, specifically saying It comes down to the fact that making a woman feel guilty for having a woman's body is equivalent to negating her existence.

Yuzuki in her novel picks up where Kawakami left off in looking at how standards of beauty effect women—often in non-trivial ways.

In the opening pages of Butter, the protagonist mentions that Japanese women today eat fewer calories than they did during the war— when they were presumably starving.She also laments what is is like to be shorter than her best friend, how her stature demands endless dieting. She’s always hungry. This is the same for women everywhere. Yesterday, my Mandarin teacher was talking about the way her mother complains about her weight (“too much American food”) and I told her that even at my age, when you would think I could just let things go and love myself as is— but NO!! It is an endless battle!

I was reminded of this wonderful quote about Confucian excellence by the now deceased China scholar Jacques Gernet in his book A History of Chinese Civilization, in which he said that Confucian wisdom, inextricably linked with morality, could only be acquired “after an effort lasting every minute of one’s life, by control of the smallest details of conduct, by observation of the rules of life in society (i), by respect for others and for oneself and by the sense of reciprocity (shu)”

A task to last a lifetime!

So, instead of self-cultivation, what? Is it possible that, for many women, living up to impossible beauty standards is as all consuming as this?

Maybe…

3.

From Buttercream cakes to Beef Bourguignon, the murderess delights in all things rich and buttery! At her trial she is incensed having her painstakingly created Beef Bourguignon described as beef stew!! Horrors!

I loved the descriptions of Christmas cakes. Even now, every year, I crave those sponge cakes, covered in whipped cream and decorated with ripe strawberries. Or my beloved Buche de Noel cakes, which I only ever had in Japan. Oh my God, I am getting so hungry writing this!

The first food description in the novel is so simple, though: butter rice. And yet in two decades in Japan, I never once knew or heard of anyone eating this dish… I first heard about it after I was back in California and saw Episode 5 of Midnight Diner, when “an arrogant food critic is invited for a meal at the diner prompting resentment from the regular patrons. A visit by an elderly guitarist and his performance payment of a simple bowl of butter rice resurrects memories for the food critic.”

Just three simple ingredients, white rice, butter and soy sauce.

Here is the serial killer in the novel:

‘You must make yourself rice with butter and soy sauce.’ For a moment, Rika failed to process Kajii’s words, and she let out a quiet, ‘Hm?’ ‘Add butter and soy sauce to freshly cooked rice. Even someone who doesn’t cook can manage that much, I’m sure. It’s the best meal to truly understand the glory of butter.’ Her manner of delivery was so grave that it made it impossible to even think of ridiculing her. ‘I want you to use salted Échiré butter. There’s an Échiré shop in Marunouchi Station. Go there and look at it, properly, before you buy it. The current shortage is a perfect opportunity to sample first-class butter from overseas. When I’m eating good butter I feel somehow as though I were falling.’ ‘Falling?’

After I watched that I texted my ex and asked him why we never ate butter rice and he said, “I knew you’d hate it!”

Anyway, do you have a favorite Japanese butter recipe?

The novel is brilliant! And for those who don’t know, the Tora-san movies are the longest running series of movies in movie history.

Right now, I am loving La Grande Maison Tokyo on Netflix—which also makes me hungry!

Just as I was about to upload this post, Mandi A. sent this information about a new translation festival in Bristol—set up by Polly Barton! I would LOVE to go!!