Dav reviewed Butter by Asako Yuzuki
None
3 stars
Sometimes, I’ll read a book that’s won awards and wonder what I missed. This is one of those books. I appreciate the story coming about to the perspective that whatever is right for Rika is okay is at least where I hoped the novel would be going, given my fear about it being thinly-veiled celebratory misogyny for the first half (it spends a long time circling around the notion, driven by Kajii, that life isn’t worth living without it being to serve a man and highlighting the Japanese female beauty standard of thinness). That said, other than her ultimate alteration from “expectation of society plus fast food” to “woohoo bab I’m fat now, here eat loads of food slathered in animal fat”, there was very little actually going on. By the end, that she’d slowly grown conscious of the fact that the relationship between she and Kajii had turned mostly …
Sometimes, I’ll read a book that’s won awards and wonder what I missed. This is one of those books. I appreciate the story coming about to the perspective that whatever is right for Rika is okay is at least where I hoped the novel would be going, given my fear about it being thinly-veiled celebratory misogyny for the first half (it spends a long time circling around the notion, driven by Kajii, that life isn’t worth living without it being to serve a man and highlighting the Japanese female beauty standard of thinness). That said, other than her ultimate alteration from “expectation of society plus fast food” to “woohoo bab I’m fat now, here eat loads of food slathered in animal fat”, there was very little actually going on. By the end, that she’d slowly grown conscious of the fact that the relationship between she and Kajii had turned mostly just, for me, showed her initial insecurity, but also that what she was asked to do actually did become part of who she was - which kinda defeated the purpose of her becoming less enamoured with Kajii, as the ‘damage’ was done. She became a version of Kajii as a result - just one less centred on the idea of serving men. I wanted the lesbian sub-text to become something much more - it felt like that could have saved the text in a way that would have made sense given the run up. Dipped in the middle, peaks of interest at the beginning and end - could easily have shedded some weight of its own across the narrative. Ultimately, this is a tasting menu for a theme restaurant - paired with the actual food, this would have been an interesting concept. On its own… I struggled.
