A glamorous overweight chef is accused and convicted of murdering her wealthy older lovers. Mixed race adoptees and their friends reunite after some have grown up in America, and all remember the mysterious drowning of a young girl in their midst. These stories held in recent books by Japanese women authors show their growing willingness to traverse territories previously unexplored by the popular fiction genre.
Butter by Asako Yuzuki
Rika Machida, an adventurous and competent journalist, wants to explore the case of the jailed home chef Manako Kajii, with a focus on attaining an interview with the notoriously prickly convict who refuses any contact with the media. Based largely on a true news story, Butter by Asako Yuzuki reveals the tricks and methods Machida uses to gain the interviews, mainly by asking the chef for her famous boeuf bourguignon recipe and seeking out her secret cooking techniques. Along the way, we see the ways this process affects the journalist’s personal life.
The writer Asako Yuzuki—born in Tokyo, 1981—is an accomplished author with numerous national literature prizes for her books, many of which were adapted for film, television and radio. When her best-selling book Butter was translated and published in England, it sold 280,000 copies, far more than the book’s Japan sales.
For readers that love exploring the chef’s love of the ingredient butter, those seeking discussion of stereotyped roles of women’s glamour and the antithetical treatment of overweight women, and/or those enmeshed in the personal lives of women journalists in a fast paced, competitive business: this book could be for you. A warning: though it is funny in parts, it is long and requires some patience to get through. And, as the excellent translator is British, some American readers might get tripped up on some of their colloquialisms.
Overall, the book is an enjoyable read for friends of contemporary Japan who are seeking refreshing new stories that reveal alternatives to pretty, stereotyped views of Tokyo women today.
Wildcat Dome by Yuko Tsushima
Yuko Tsushima, the pen name of celebrated writer Satoko Tsushima, was born in Tokyo in 1947 and died there in 2016. She was widely published and earned some of Japan’s top literary honors such as the Tanizaki Prize. She was the daughter of the celebrated and personally erratic writer Osamu Dazai, who committed suicide with a lover when Yuko was a baby.
Tsushima’s final novel, Wildcat Dome, written in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, joins her many books exploring the aftermath of war, militarization and its effects on everyday citizens. Some of the characters are mixed-race orphan children of United States military servicemen stationed in Japan. The book focuses on their circle of friends and the women who raised them in Japan before they were sent to the U.S. for adoption. A mystery floats over the conversations of the group: the drowning of a young girl when they were children and the continuing image of her orange dress.
The author Tsushima traveled widely and studied the storytelling folk methods of the Indigenous Ainu nation of Hokkaido, even bringing these studies to Paris researchers. She has also written about single mothers and abandoned women in Japan.
Critics have said the book is a “metaphysical saga of postwar Japan” and “a hugely ambitious exploration of denial, of the ways in which countries and their citizens avoid telling the truth.” IE Readers may experience Wildcat Dome as a bit of a difficult undertaking, with parts that are obscure, changing timeframes and references to unnamed characters. I found that, despite the slog, it was illuminating to explore the serious fiction of one of the most celebrated Japanese women authors.
Mayumi Tsutakawa is an arts writer and editor who often speaks and writes about the history of Japanese Americans including her family’s long history in Washington State. She was formerly head of grants for organizations at the Washington State Arts Commission and currently serves as an Asian film programmer for SIFF. Mayumi co-edited several multicultural anthologies, including They Painted from their Hearts: Pioneer Asian American Artists. (Photo credit: Humanities Washington)
