Hooked

In Japanese, the onomatopoeic phrase doro-doro (どろどろ) is used to describe something that is thick, muddy, viscous, or sludgy. The term refers to the sound and texture of something congealed and unpleasant. Over time, the term migrated from the physical realm into the social, where it came to characterize a particular kind of emotionally murky human entanglement. 

Applied to relationships, doro-doro evokes situations mired in resentment, jealousy, betrayal, and unspoken hostility. Nowhere is the term deployed more frequently than in descriptions of female friendship, where it underwrites a persistent cultural assumption that bonds between women are, at their core, unstable and prone to devolving into rivalry. This stereotype pervades Japanese popular culture, animating countless television dramas, manga, tabloid features, and workplace anecdotes that treat female sociality as inherently sensational and suspect. 

The 2014 Fuji TV drama First Class is an example: Set in the offices of a fashion magazine, it popularized the concept of “mounting”—a term borrowed from primatology to describe the constant jockeying by which women publicly assert dominance over one another through status symbols, subtle put-downs, and social maneuvering. The show’s popularity revealed how legible—and how entertaining—mainstream Japanese audiences found the notion that women’s relationships are governed by covert warfare. 

Scholars of gender in Japan have argued that this trope is a patriarchal alibi, discouraging solidarity among women by casting female intimacy as pathological rather than politically meaningful, while pushing women to compete for male approval rather than support one another. In Hooked, Asako Yuzuki directly engages with this cultural framework. Characters such as Eriko’s colleague Sugishita accept the doro-doro logic uncritically, offering the throwaway observation that “female jealousy is a scary thing” (18) and presuming that women befriend one another chiefly to secure a target for comparison. Eriko has so thoroughly absorbed this cultural script that it forecloses on her ability to sustain any lasting closeness. Her escalating fixation on Shōko can therefore be read simultaneously as a grim fulfillment of the stereotype and as its sharpest indictment. Rather than deploying the doro-doro framework to confirm that female bonds are naturally toxic, Yuzuki uses it to examine how patriarchal expectation—compounded by loneliness and thwarted self-worth—corrodes intimacy from within and steers it toward destruction.