The Konkatsu Killer case, in which a woman named Kanae Kijima was suspected of poisoning men she met through matchmaking services, dominated Japanese tabloids for years. What struck Yuzuki was not the crimes but the angle every outlet kept returning to: that Kijima had trained at a famous French cookery school, and what that supposedly said about her motives toward men.

Asako Yuzuki

What interested me most was that the media focused on how the suspect went to this very famous French cookery school—rather than the crime itself, they were obsessed with that. They were focusing on the lifestyle she led, her private life. They portrayed women who attended that school as being only there to learn how to tempt men through cooking. To the media, it was about how she was perceived by men, rather than her and her story.

---

a-rabbitsfoot.com, “A Rabbit’s Foot Asako Yuzuki: J’Accuse!”

The coverage did more than irritate her. It named a pattern she had been circling without quite naming: Japanese media habitually filtered women’s stories through male approval. Cooking was the subject she loved, and that made the distortion impossible to set aside.

Asako Yuzuki

Japanese media … often reflect the perspective of powerful men. … This realisation was a turning point for me. Until then, I hadn’t really questioned much or paid close attention to politics or media bias. But when it came to something I love – cooking – it struck a nerve.

---

scroll.in, “How the real murders behind Asako Yuzuki’s hit novel ‘Butter’ exposed Japanese media’s misogyny”

The grievances that fed the book were not limited to headlines. Yuzuki’s work as a novelist put her in daily contact with women in Japan’s publishing and media industries, and what they described privately contradicted the surface impression of female success.

Asako Yuzuki

There’s like a spinning ball in my head every day. Even when I’m enjoying food or movies, or other things, it’s still there. So the tension from the characters in the plot come from these grievances that are swirling in my head all day.

---

a-rabbitsfoot.com, “A Rabbit’s Foot Asako Yuzuki: J’Accuse!”

Writing about these grievances carried an obligation beyond the single book. Japanese women writers had spent decades building credibility in a literary world that resisted them, and Yuzuki felt that history as a constraint on what she could afford to waste.

Asako Yuzuki

The way has been paved by those who came before me, and I do not want to betray them. In Japan, even though the changes are slow, I don’t want to betray their efforts and their legacy—both female authors who are already known abroad, and those who remain and work in Japan. It’s a motivation and duty.

---

a-rabbitsfoot.com, “A Rabbit’s Foot Asako Yuzuki: J’Accuse!”

To write the food in Butter with precision, Yuzuki did not rely on secondhand accounts of Kijima’s training. She enrolled at the same Tokyo cookery school Kijima had attended, working through the curriculum herself so that every dish her characters prepare carries the texture of a lived lesson rather than a researched one.

Asako Yuzuki

In order to research this book, I studied the cuisine in the book at the same school. Much of the description of the food in the book came from my own personal experiences. It comes across in a way I thought of deliberately to entice readers. It’s a genuine reaction from a genuine experience I had with food itself.

---

a-rabbitsfoot.com, “A Rabbit’s Foot Asako Yuzuki: J’Accuse!”

The journalism world that Yuzuki’s protagonist, a magazine reporter named Rika, moves through required equal care. The detail that unsettled international readers most turned out to be the one she had taken the most trouble to verify.

Asako Yuzuki

With BUTTER, I think the most surprising detail for readers was the idea that there are virtually no women in senior editorial roles at weekly magazines. I based that on actual interviews with people in publishing, but I kept getting asked, ‘Wait, is that really the case?’

---

niewmedia.com, “Butter’s Asako Yuzuki on Why Overlooked Japanese Novels Became Global Sensations | NiEW”

The daily mechanics of writing such a densely researched book came down to a single self-imposed constraint. Yuzuki describes her phone as her greatest enemy, and she devised a physical solution.

Asako Yuzuki

The most important thing is that I avoid using my phone. I’m somewhat addicted to my phone. It’s my greatest enemy when writing. So I lock it away or give it to someone, and so I can’t use it until nighttime.

---

a-rabbitsfoot.com, “A Rabbit’s Foot Asako Yuzuki: J’Accuse!”

The English translation arrived through a collaboration Yuzuki had no hand in arranging, but it shaped the book’s second life abroad. Translator Polly Barton, known for bringing politically alert Japanese fiction into English, brought her own editorial sensibility to the project, and Yuzuki credits that alignment for the reception the book found in Britain.

Asako Yuzuki

The combination of writer and translator can really make a book. Polly is a feminist. She really thinks about what books she feels need to be translated at this moment, and she’s very popular. Some people will read a book just because she’s translated it.

---

theguardian.com, “Butter author Asako Yuzuki: ‘I’m very far from the ideal Japanese woman’ | Fiction in translation”

In Japan, Butter was reviewed as a deliciously dark thriller, and its feminist argument was largely sidestepped. In Britain, the same material arrived under a marketing line drawn from the novel: ‘I hate feminism and margarine.’ That line reads differently in the two cultures, and Yuzuki had predicted it would.

Asako Yuzuki

I intended it to be a humorous line, but it didn’t really get much of a laugh in Japan. However, in the UK, people found it hilarious.

---

niewmedia.com, “Butter’s Asako Yuzuki on Why Overlooked Japanese Novels Became Global Sensations | NiEW”

The joke lands because British readers catch the sarcasm in pairing a political stance with a processed food product. In Japan, where the feminist framing was treated as incidental, the irony had nothing to stick to.

The pressure on women to be thin runs through the novel’s Tokyo scenes not as background texture but as argument. Yuzuki grounded that pressure in a specific urban contradiction she observed firsthand: a city that sells thinness on every billboard while stocking its convenience stores with affordable, irresistible food at every hour.

Asako Yuzuki

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. 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 this temptation but under pressure at the same time.

---

theguardian.com, “Butter author Asako Yuzuki: ‘I’m very far from the ideal Japanese woman’ | Fiction in translation”

Yuzuki’s villain, Manako Kajii, uses food with a precision that mirrors her control over people. The novel frames Kajii’s cooking not as generosity but as a form of dominance, and Yuzuki articulated the thin line between those two things in a single formulation.

Asako Yuzuki

There’s a fine line between nurturing and dangerous precision.

---

scroll.in, “How the real murders behind Asako Yuzuki’s hit novel ‘Butter’ exposed Japanese media’s misogyny”

Where body pressure fixes women from outside, Kajii’s recipes work inward. Yuzuki extends the food metaphor into a theory of character that runs beneath every meal scene in the novel.

Asako Yuzuki

To me, a recipe is like an instruction manual for understanding the person who created it.

---

vogue.in, “Asako Yuzuki writes women she knows you won’t like. Butter and Hooked are proof she won’t stop | Vogue India”

Writing feminist fiction in Japan carries a specific risk that Yuzuki had already experienced with Butter: stories about women who behave badly get absorbed into a cultural conversation that uses them as evidence against women generally. That dynamic had been shaping what she wrote, and she named it directly.

Asako Yuzuki

I’ve always wanted to write stories like these, but in Japan, where women’s social status remains low and misogynistic discourse is pervasive, the kind of stories I want to tell risk being turned into negative campaigns against women.

---

vogue.in, “Asako Yuzuki writes women she knows you won’t like. Butter and Hooked are proof she won’t stop | Vogue India”

The Japanese critical response to Butter had pushed her toward what she describes as ‘vitamin novels’: warmer, tidier books with less corrosive central characters. British enthusiasm for the original book’s confrontational edge arrived years after the Japanese publication, and it reset what she believed she was permitted to write.

Asako Yuzuki

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 the relationship falls apart. 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.

---

theguardian.com, “Butter author Asako Yuzuki: ‘I’m very far from the ideal Japanese woman’ | Fiction in translation”

That the book found its largest audience at all surprised her. Butter had sold steadily in Japan without the cultural eruption that followed its English translation and its Waterstones Book of the Year win, and the distance between those two receptions was genuinely difficult to process.

Asako Yuzuki

To be honest, I never imagined that my book would become this popular in Japan. It felt almost like entering a parallel world.

---

niewmedia.com, “Butter’s Asako Yuzuki on Why Overlooked Japanese Novels Became Global Sensations | NiEW”