SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times explores taboos. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Smooth like Butter: Japanese writer Asako Yuzuki dishes up slice-of-life takes on women issues
The more pressure on women to be domesticated and be adept in the kitchen, the greater their ability to kill.
This is the admittedly morbid, yet curiously conceivable, belief held by Japanese writer Asako Yuzuki. She wields this thought in the compelling narrative that is Butter, the 42-year-old’s first book to be translated into English, and which hit bookshops on Feb 29.
It caused a sensation when it was first published in Japan in 2017, as a delicious murder mystery that cast an unedifying gaze on women issues in the country.
Book review: Asako Yuzuki’s Butter whets appetite as gastronomic serial killer caper
Butter, a bestseller when it was released in Japan in 2017, is inspired by the true story of one of Japan’s most notorious serial killers, Kanae Kijima. She was convicted in 2012 for the murder of three lovers.
Its author, Asako Yuzuki, 42, is among Japan’s most prolific and eminent female writers with 23 novels to her name. Butter, however, is only her first work to be translated into English.
She builds a narrative around Manako Kajii, an imperious 35-year-old gourmand locked away behind bars. She had been found guilty of killing three lonely men, whom she seduced with her cooking and then made away with their money.
Book review: My Heavenly Favourite is Lucas Rijneveld’s wandering into a paedophilic mind
The 2020 winner of the International Booker Prize, Lucas Rijneveld, returns with a fever dream of a novel – a breathless, manic confession by a convicted paedophile, self-exorcising as he struggles helplessly against his unabated lust.
It is a kind of prison manifesto, reminiscent of that other notorious tract, Mein Kampf by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, who, incidentally, is the go-to imaginary friend of a troubled 14-year-old girl in this book.
These details should be enough to gesture at Rijneveld’s fearless transgression of any sense of propriety here, but nothing prepares you for how the non-binary author rides roughshod over rules moral, chronological and grammatical.
Book review: J.M. Coetzee’s The Pole And Other Stories offers a lifetime’s lessons distilled into compact stories
At the grand old age of 84, winner of not just two Booker Prizes, but also the Nobel Prize for Literature no less, South Africa-born writer J.M. Coetzee has nothing left to prove. His body of work speaks for itself.
Thus, in comparison to his earlier, sternly austere novels, this collection of short stories feels somewhat lightweight on first encounter, especially for long-time fans used to the unsparing glare of his denser works. Could it be that Coetzee has mellowed in retirement?
These mostly brief tales, which have appeared in assorted publications in various languages over the past two decades, flirt with familiar Coetzee themes and feature recurring characters.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers March 3
The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew is the No. 1 bestseller in fiction.
