TOKYO – 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.

But what exactly about the dairy product does she find so fascinating?

“The more butter is used, the more delicious something is,” she says, speaking from experience, having once worked at a Japanese confectioner. She declines to reveal its name, but divulges that it is “very famous in Singapore”.

She quips that she enjoys eating and that her love of food – of different cuisines – feeds into the plot line of Butter.

Frowning at a social stereotype that has been hard to unshackle, Yuzuki notes that Japanese women would play up their cooking skills on matchmaking profiles, knowing full well that this would add to their appeal to men.

“Women who are good at cooking are said to be a source of comfort for men, who let their guard down,” Yuzuki says. “But the better one is at cooking, the better their ability to murder if they are dissatisfied.”

And it could well be a slow death: serving sodium-rich dishes to someone with high blood pressure, for example, could throw investigators off the scent by making it seem like an accident.

As it happens, Japan has at least two “Black Widow” killers – women who prey on men by fulfilling their desires while milking them dry, then offing them and moving on to their next target.

Yuzuki’s protagonist Manako Kajii is based on one of them: the convicted death-row serial killer Kanae Kijima, who poisoned three would-be husbands between 2007 and 2009. She is suspected to be behind four other deaths.

Kijima, who is awaiting execution at the Tokyo Detention House, was dubbed the “konkatsu” (marriage-hunting) killer. She could hardly be considered a looker by Japanese standards, but managed to hook and reel in her victims into her vortex.

Cue the mockery – and confusion – by keyboard warriors.

Yuzuki observes how commentators sought to quell the dissonance by perpetrating a myth that she “must have been cooking something that was very high in calories and she was so good at cooking that men fell into her trap”.

Media coverage at the time focused on how Kijima attended the famous Le Cordon Bleu culinary school. 

“It is as if a woman who loves cooking must be doing it for a man – as if the school is a place for bride training.”

Yuzuki notes with a hint of exasperation that during media interviews conducted for the release of Butter in Japan, she often had to field such questions as “Do you like to cook?” or “What do you cook for your child?”

“It was as if the media had to portray us women as a little more approachable and less intimidating,” says Yuzuki, who is known to be empathetic on gender issues.

Over 23 novels and counting, she has written extensively about issues such as the gender gap and the idealised image of women in Japan through female protagonists.

She lives in Tokyo with her husband and a six-year-old child who “currently identifies as a boy”.

Yuzuki burst onto the literary scene in 2008, when she won a Newcomer Award for the novella Forget Me, Not Blue.

While she wanted to be a writer, she felt unable to live up to the task. “I always thought novels are the realm of a handful of extremely talented people.”

So, she first dabbled in television. But she came to realise that the industry is bound by myriad rules in Japan, where dramas are often produced on a shoestring budget.

Rather than enjoying creative freedoms, she felt pigeonholed into building a story around an in-vogue celebrity whom the talent agency wanted to cast. Sponsors were another consideration.

“This is also why I think Butter will unlikely get dramatised in Japan,” Yuzuki says, pointing to what she sees as general discomfort with the idea of a drama that features characters who do not conform to society’s expectations of beauty.

She then joined the confectioner where, she says, she was hopeless at coming up with product ideas that would sell.

“I was thinking of all kinds of unusual sweets,” she says. “It was then that a senior told me it would be better for me to chase my dreams to be a novelist than to think about sweets and that I would probably be more successful.”

Ironically, Yuzuki has found success in television, with several of her novels adapted for the small screen.

Ito-kun A To E (2013) was dramatised for the eight-part Netflix Original drama The Many Faces Of Ito (2017), about a jaded romcom screenwriter who is out of ideas for her next story. She disguises herself as a romantic adviser to mine stories, only to realise four of her “clients” are in love with the same man.

Nile Perch Girls’ Association (2015), made into a 2021 drama serial of the same title, is about a successful businesswoman who runs into the laid-back writer of her favourite blog. The two become fast friends, though things take a drastic turn when the blog fails to be updated on schedule.

“As a writer, I wanted to depict real-life human relationships, such as about women interacting with one another,” Yuzuki says. “But people suddenly began saying I was writing about sisterhood or feminism. It is not so much that I had changed, but that readers and society changed first.”

She points to the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and the Tokyo Olympic Games, which cast a spotlight on human rights issues in Japan. Yet, the changes do not go far enough.

Married couples are still legally bound to share a surname, a law that has proven detrimental to women who have built up careers by their birth surname. Business lobby groups, among others, are now calling for change.

Japan is also the only advanced country without laws that allow joint custody and this is under debate.

“It is true that on the surface, progress is slow,” Yuzuki says, adding that she will continue to take on gender issues, including through genres like historical fiction. “But at least the social consciousness has changed significantly and that has impacted how issues are reported.”

Yuzuki, a graduate in French Literature from Tokyo’s Rikkyo University, counts herself fortunate to be in an industry where women have been thriving.

She cites such authors as Sayaka Murata (Convenience Store Woman, 2016), Mieko Kawakami (Breasts And Eggs, 2019), Yoko Tawada (The Last Children Of Tokyo, 2014) and Yu Miri (Tokyo Ueno Station, 2014) as having paved the way for her, stressing that she never thought she would ever be read in English.

She has come full circle.

As a child, her reading diet comprised translated Western coming-of-age novels, whose worlds captivated Yuzuki more than Japanese ones. She cites classics such as Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne Of Green Gables (1908) and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868 and 1869).

“I used to prefer stories about horse-drawn carriages, the idea of a teatime and people playing dress-up to Japanese stories,” she says.

“In Japan, many children’s novels are about kids who help adults or who strive, endure and overcome hardships. But Western stories are simply about children being children, even during hardship,” she says.

One of her favourite writers is Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, who wrote the Pippi Longstocking series, with the first three books published from 1945 to 1948.

Now, Yuzuki hopes Butter can be both an introduction to unfamiliar cuisines and the state of gender issues in Japan.

She suggests Japan might be decades behind Europe, citing parallels in Butter with the Belgian film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975).

The film, a slice-of-life take on a widowed housewife who morphs into a sex worker when her son is away, had an outsized impact on society at the time.

“Housewives and housework were deemed an invisible burden, but this was made visible for the first time and it was seen as very feminist,” she says.

“The housework was never-ending, the cooking took so long and making a single dish was so difficult. But her son probably ate the dish in about 15 minutes and said nothing about its taste.”

Butter, meanwhile, is peppered with mouthwatering descriptions of food, including the preparation of a 10-person serving of roast turkey. Thus, it is surprising when Yuzuki confesses to never having eaten such a huge turkey before.

The novel was translated into German in 2022 and Yuzuki expresses surprise in finding her book being sold along with a butter knife as a promotional item in Germany.

At book clubs there, readers cooked and ate the meals as they appeared in the novel, while discussing the story.

One such dish is deceptively simple – a twist on the Japanese tradition of steamed white rice topped with raw egg and soya sauce. But instead of an egg, the dish is served with a dollop of butter in the novel.

“The Koreans, the Germans, the Italians – they all have said it was delicious,” Yuzuki says, musing about the power of food, and literature, to transcend borders.