The next time Japanese novelist Asako Yuzuki visits the UK, she would like to bake traditional Japanese muffins for Paul Hollywood on The Great British Bake Off, she tells me over a video call. It is evening in Tokyo, where she lives with her partner and eight-year-old son. “I’ve had my bath and am ready for bed,” she explains via translator Bethan Jones, apologising for being in her pyjamas. She believes the Bake Off judge would be especially impressed by “marubouro” muffins from Nagasaki. “Kazuo Ishiguro also comes from Nagasaki, and British people love Ishiguro, so they are bound to love these muffins,” she continues. “They go very well with tea.”
As readers of Yuzuki’s international bestseller Butter will know, food is central to her work. Inspired by the real-life 2009 “Konkatsu Killer” case—where 35-year-old Kanae Kijima was convicted of poisoning three men—Butter follows the relationship between journalist Rika Machida and Manako Kajii, a serial killer and gourmet cook, through a series of interviews in Tokyo Detention Centre. Yuzuki even enrolled in the high-end Tokyo cooking school that Kijima attended as part of her research. The result is an irresistible blend of social satire and feminist thriller, rich with descriptions of buttery rice and soy sauce.
Although the 44-year-old author has written more than 20 novels in Japanese, her publishers wisely decided that her 2017 novel Butter was ready for the English-speaking market, where there was a growing appetite for translated fiction by Japanese women writers. Hits like Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, and Hiromi Kawakami’s Strange Weather in Tokyo suggested that female authors had replaced Haruki Murakami for a new generation of foreign readers. These stories of alienated young women also resonated with English literary fiction’s trend toward exploring female interiority and friendship. Butter sold over 300,000 copies in the UK alone and was voted Waterstones Book of the Year in 2024. For a while, its distinctive yellow and red cover seemed to be everywhere on public transport.
It’s no surprise, then, that Yuzuki’s earlier novel Hooked—published in Japan in 2015 as Nairu pāchi no joshikai (Nile Perch Women’s Club)—has now been translated into English, again by writer Polly Barton. A similarly unsettling story exploring female power dynamics, the loneliness of 21st-century urban life, sexism, and the allure of social media, Hooked is set to be one of the standout publications of 2026.
But if I expected to meet a writer whose life has been transformed by huge sales and global success, I was mistaken. It feels strangely fitting to speak with Yuzuki without makeup, in her pyjamas and glasses, as both novels expose the pressures on Japanese women to always present a perfect face to the world. The simmering rage beneath the surface of these stylish page-turners is genuine: Yuzuki was angry when she wrote them a decade ago as a “young and unformed” writer in her thirties, and she is even angrier today. “I don’t think I could write a book like Butter or Hooked now, even if I wanted to,” she says. “If Butter had received that kind of response eight years ago, my writing would probably have taken a different direction. It’s really made me think about the path my life has taken.”
Far from being popular in Japan, the novels were criticised as overtly feminist. “Japan is a misogynistic society, and if you write about conflict between women, people seize the opportunity to say that women are scary or that you can’t trust them,” she explains. “When I wrote Butter and Hooked, I was writing what I wanted to write. But since then, society has worsened, and writing about…”She worried that stories about women outsmarting each other would only reinforce negative stereotypes about women. So instead of writing offbeat, dark satires, she shifted to what she calls sugary “vitamin novels”—stories more palatable to a Japanese readership. “Nowadays, the characters I write about are kind and nice to each other. They have weaknesses, but they help each other and things go well, which is what I felt I needed to write for Japanese society.” But ten years later, she wishes she had been able to continue writing novels like Hooked.
The idea for Hooked came after Yuzuki discovered that someone she was following on Instagram lived in her neighborhood. “I started to feel a bit guilty about the fact that I was having this glimpse into their life on social media,” she admits. The novel developed into a story of stalker-like obsession, following Eriko, a lonely office worker in her early 30s, who befriends Shoko, a popular “housewife blogger” living nearby.
The book was also inspired by the trend of Joshikai—”girl parties”—with restaurants and hotels catering to young women with disposable incomes. “It was partly a reaction to a male-centric society,” Yuzuki says. Flaunting female friendships—through selfies of girls’ nights out and spa breaks on social media—has become another lifestyle essential for a successful young woman in Tokyo. “How much was required from women as a default!” Yuzuki writes. “Attractiveness, chastity, youth, a calm disposition, a prestigious job, a range of hobbies, a winning smile, stylishness, a likable aura, consideration of others … and then of course, popularity with other women.”
Despite being “as flawlessly beautiful as any doll” and holding a smart job at Japan’s biggest trading company, poor Eriko doesn’t have a single friend. People just don’t like her. Yuzuki wanted to challenge the expectations of female friendship, “in a sense maybe more than I had towards romantic relationships,” she says. “I was trying to write about how we must overcome the way that we idealize friendships in order to grow, because this ideal female friendship is a fantasy.”
Alongside cult novels like The Vegetarian by Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang and Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, Butter and Hooked portray women as commodities, subjected to impossible standards—consumed and discarded after their sell-by date. Eating too much, or refusing to eat, becomes their only means of control or rebellion in the patriarchal societies of contemporary Seoul and Tokyo. The obsession with food in Butter cleverly subverts society’s obsession with slimness. Yuzuki was less interested in the “Konkatsu Killer” case itself than in the media’s response to it, particularly the misogyny and fat-shaming directed at a woman perceived as too old, fat, and ugly to seduce men. Like Rika, who gains weight as her craving for butter grows, Eriko starts bingeing on takeaways, and her immaculate appearance begins to unravel.
“If you walk through Tokyo, there are advertisements everywhere for weight loss, for plastic surgery. It’s probably worse now than it was 20 years ago,” Yuzuki says. “Women are struggling to control their weight, but there’s this society of convenience where you can go to a store and get tasty food 24 hours a day. They’re surrounded by temptation but under pressure at the same time.”
Yuzuki has always been fascinated by food. She grew up reading Western children’s classics—Pippi Longstocking, Anne of Green Gables, the Ramona series, and later boarding school stories—and was especially intrigued by what the characters ate. “They would have things like pie and apple preserve, things that I had never had in Japan,” she says. “Whe…”Looking them up gave me a sense of the era and the place. An only child, she was raised as “a traditional Japanese girl” and attended an all-girls school in Tokyo. She admits she wasn’t a particularly good student. Her father was a “salaryman” (office worker) and her mother worked in the clothing industry. In her third year of junior high, she contracted mycoplasma pneumonia and was in a coma for a month, followed by two months in the ICU. When she woke up, the first thing she wanted to read was Banana Yoshimoto’s 1988 novel Kitchen, drawn to its delicious descriptions of katsudon. “I was in a coma for so long, so I was hungry,” she said in a 2011 interview with a Japanese bookshop. She spent the rest of her hospital stay reading Japanese fiction, though her literary tastes shifted again when she later majored in French literature at a Tokyo university.
She always wanted to be a writer, but it seemed an impossible ambition at the time. “This is something I really want people to know,” she says. “In Japan, there are hardly any writers who can make a living from writing books.” She feels a strong sense of solidarity with her novelist friends Murata, Kawakami, and Kikuko Tsumura. “We belong to a generation that found it very hard to get jobs when we started looking for work,” she explains. “We felt we weren’t welcome in the Japanese workforce.” Their fiction is united by a frustration with workplace sexism, reflected in recent protests against rules forcing women to wear heels and banning glasses.
Alongside writing regular magazine columns, Yuzuki worked various jobs, including at a confectionery manufacturer. “I didn’t do very well in any of them,” she says. “And until my first book was translated into English, I wouldn’t have said I was doing very well as a writer, either.”
She didn’t meet translator Polly Barton until after Butter was published in English, but they worked more closely on the translation of Hooked. “The combination of writer and translator can really make a book,” she notes. “Polly is a feminist. She really thinks about what books need to be translated at this moment, and she’s very popular. Some people will read a book just because she’s translated it.”
The success of Japanese fiction abroad is finally changing the publishing scene at home. Her friend Akira Otani became the first Japanese author to win the Dagger award for crime fiction in translation last year for The Night of Baba Yaga (Yuzuki was also shortlisted for Butter). “She’s a rare Japanese writer who identifies as a sexual minority,” Yuzuki says of Otani. “For a long time, she wanted to write stories about LGBTQ characters who aren’t necessarily good people. But because sexual minorities face so much discrimination in Japan, she hasn’t felt able to do that. It’s the same for me in a society where misogyny and femicide are rife.”
Although she describes herself as “very far from the ideal Japanese woman,” she fits writing around raising her son and managing the home. She likes writing in coffee shops; some days she writes 10 pages, others nothing at all. While it may not have changed her daily life, the response to Butter in the UK has made her reconsider her future as a novelist. “I want to write about women who make mistakes that can’t be repaired. I want to write about women who seem like the best of friends but betray each other and see the relationship fall apart,” she says, leaning intently into her screen. “I’m going to enjoy writing those kinds of books. So I am very grateful to the UK readers who have given me the courage to do that.”
Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton, will be published by 4th Estate on 12 March. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about Asako Yuzuki and her statement I am nothing like the ideal Japanese woman
Beginner General Questions
1 Who is Asako Yuzuki
Asako Yuzuki is a contemporary Japanese author and essayist best known for her bestselling novel Butter which explores themes of food desire and female agency
2 What does she mean by I am nothing like the ideal Japanese woman
She is rejecting the traditional societal expectations placed on women in Japansuch as being quiet modest domestically skilled and prioritizing others needs above her own She asserts her individuality and complexity
3 What is the ideal Japanese woman shes referring to
Its a cultural stereotype often called the Yamato Nadeshikoa woman who is graceful gentle resilient familyoriented and skilled in traditional arts and homemaking
4 Why is this statement getting attention
It resonates with many modern Japanese women who feel constrained by outdated gender roles It sparks conversation about changing identities and societal pressure
Advanced Thematic Questions
5 How does her work like Butter reflect this statement
Her characters are often complex women with strong appetitesfor food love and lifewho defy passive stereotypes They are ambitious flawed and intellectually or sensually driven which contrasts with the ideal
6 Is she criticizing Japanese culture
Not exactly She is critiquing rigid onedimensional stereotypes Her work often celebrates aspects of Japanese culture while challenging the restrictive boxes it can create for individuals
7 What are common criticisms or pushback against her views
Some may see her as promoting selfishness or undermining traditional values that hold society together Others might feel her perspective is that of an urban elite and doesnt represent all Japanese womens experiences
8 How does her identity as a writer play into this
As a public intellectual and a successful career woman who writes about taboo topics like female desire and gastronomy her very profession and public persona embody a departure from the traditional ideal
Practical Personal Impact Questions
9 How can I read more of her thoughts on this
Beyond
