Asako Yuzuki’s Butter follow-up, Hooked, dissects complexities of female friendships  

Hooked

By Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton
Fiction/Ecco/Paperback/395 pages/$34.88

Asako Yuzuki’s English-language debut, Butter (2024), was a runaway hit, a compulsively readable tale of gourmet murder and female rage. In search of a scoop, a journalist reaches out to a convicted serial-killer chef and becomes increasingly entwined with the femme fatale, whose insolent pleasure-seeking prompts a reappraisal of misogynistic Japanese beauty standards. 

Hooked is the shrewd follow-up. This earlier work, written in 2015, was picked from Yuzuki’s catalogue of more than 20 Japanese novels, no doubt for the same strands of social critique and engrossing relationship that made Butter an international sensation.

Its crimson cover with yellow lettering – an inversion of Butter’s lurid yellow, blood-streaked jacket that for months was inescapable on public transport – promises the same high-wire plot and seething discontent, a pitch it fully delivers. This time, Yuzuki turns her cleaver on female friendships. 

Hooked again centres two women living in Tokyo. Eriko is the uptight professional working in a big trading firm who becomes obsessed with slacker housewife Shoko. 

Alone during early mornings at the office, a sacred time for Eriko, who sorely lacks a life outside work, she reads Shoko’s blog, The Diary Of Hallie B, The World’s Worst Housewife. 

Drawn to Hallie B’s unambitious rawness, the opposite of her own “deadly serious” attitude to life, Eriko engineers an “accidental” meeting with Shoko in a cafe. At first, the two hit it off in a dreamy anime-like way, but Shoko is soon scared off when Eriko comes on too much, too fast. When Shoko starts distancing herself, Eriko doubles down and becomes a stalker fan. 

It is to Yuzuki’s credit that Eriko’s slide into sociopathy feels almost relatable, a horrific sequence of social cues misread and a desperate longing for companionship pushing a grown, 30-year-old woman one step too far each time. How thin the skin of one’s sanity, the author says with chilling persuasiveness. 

The book’s brilliance lies in Yuzuki’s beady-eyed examination of the ways in which female friendships are both idealised and villainised by men and women, without ever ceding the agency of her characters to all-powerful structural forces like capitalism and patriarchy.

At one point, Shoko thinks: “Letting go of Eriko meant missing out on her chance to become a real person forever.” 

The reasons behind Eriko and Shoko’s essential friendlessness are gradually revealed. Behind her perfect outer shell, Eriko is emotionally stunted, still the high-schooler once rejected by her best friend for her smothering neediness and hunger for approval. Though her anxious social demeanour may be inherited from her loner father, she is exposed as consistently self-absorbed and unwilling to be in the wrong. 

Shoko, who prefers the easy company of men, is not laid-back so much as lazy, with a streak of status envy that initially draws her to the glamorous Eriko. She, too, is wrapped up in self-preservation, reluctant to take on the role of caregiver and housekeeper to her ageing father expected of her.

The arc of her realisation about her difficulty with women is satisfying: “It was precisely because she shared the same ugliness as them that she struggled with other women, but this was, paradoxically enough, what made her need them too.”

And on men who sneer at “catty” female bonds: “Did they not react in that way because seeing women having fun with each other made them feel as though they themselves were being criticised?”

Yuzuki sketches the social minefield in which Eriko and Shoko’s lives slowly come apart in precise and confident prose, again translated by Polly Barton, who also did Butter. There are a few needlessly hyperbolic elements, like a violent young temp worker who commits an assault with a snack, and an overextended metaphor about the carnivorous Nile perch connected to Eriko’s work. 

These take little away from Yuzuki’s page-turning, good-faith dissection of the complex relationships between women, even showing what appears to be healthy and fulfilling bonds in the background. 

But her preoccupation is with the maladjusted, and when it comes to them, nobody – society, men, women and the individual – is let off the hook. 

Rating: ★★★★☆

If you like this, read: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions, 2012, $23.98). The first of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, this has become the classic exploration of female friendships, and the intimacy and jealousies that are built into them in patriarchal worlds.