Butter and blood

WHAT ATTRACTED me to this book was the promise of some good writing about eating, something that is never easy to pull off. If you look at the work of most restaurant reviewers, you’ll find adjective-heavy descriptions of food on the plate, but few descriptions of what it really tastes like on the tongue or what it does to the body - that’s quite subjective.

It’s one of the reasons why, in a quarter of a century of intermittent food writing, I tended to favour interviews with chefs over my own musings on the meal I had just polished off (and which, you dear reader, did not). Chefs know about eating.

And there are glimmers of that in this complex mystery, although it’s easier as a fiction writer to liken the sensation of eating good butter to one of falling than it is as a journalist. If I had written: “The body plummets, starting from the tip of the tongue,” it would have been edited out.

The basic plot is that a female journalist, Rika Machida, sets out to get an interview with Manako Kajii, a serial killer convicted of seducing three lonely men with her cooking, all of whom then died in suspicious ways. Machida approaches obliquely, asking for a recipe.

The relationship that develops between Machida and Kajii is reminiscent of that between Clarice Starling and Dr Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. Machida wants something from Kajii; Kajii is imperious, manipulative and seductive. Over the course of many months, their lives become entangled.

Machida’s on/off lover, her best friend and her work colleagues are all gradually drawn into a story of modern Japan, and Japan’s ideals of what a woman should be (skinny, unassertive and domesticated) underpins the plot. But it’s more than a book about fat-shaming, as some reviewers have suggested: it’s a book about the way in which relationships and goals change over time, and it’s a book about women, written by an award-winning female author.

Parts of the plot are implausible: what weekly magazine editor would give a researcher six months to land an interview - and where were the legal safety nets (the sworn affidavits, for instance) that any professional would put in place to protect from the accusation that it was all made up?

But plots are often implausible, and I liked this book for its underlying theme - how do Japanese women find happiness in a misogynistic and male-dominated society? The writing about eating is pretty good too - it must have been, it was a 17-hour listen - and Nigel Slater, whose writing I admire, has given it his thumbs up.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton, 4th Estate, London.