My reading was slowed way down by this door-stopper of a book, so I thought I’d take the time to give a second round of thoughts about Butter by Asako Yuzuki. These thoughts are less about the serial killer subject matter of the book and more about how sexuality is treated in throughout the book. Because Butter is a direct commentary on society, many of the issues brought up are not hidden behind the serial killer as they are in other books. The narrator does not shy away from the topic of sex and sexuality. While Kajii heightens Rika’s understanding of her sexual self and her awareness of the sexual tension around her, at first glance, it may seem that these themes are less directly related to the murders than you would see in other serial killer books. But I wonder if that is because most serial killer books feature male serial killers, and we are primed to accept their sexual frustration as a main driver of their murders. With a female serial killer, we are less likely to think her acts are powered by sexual frustration because, in general, we tend to see women as less sexually frustrated.
It all comes back to the idea that “women can get sex anytime, so they can’t be sexually frustrated.” But I’d argue that this book deals a lot with the sexual frustration of women and encourages us to ask what does sexual frustration in women look like? What causes it? What can it lead to?
The Homoerotic Undertone of Rika as a Prince
It seems a lot of people online are excited about shipping Rika and Reiko, and just as many are frustrated that others are boiling down Butter to a romance novel. I think both can be true — there are definitely erotic undertones in their friendship, but it is far from the most important or interesting aspect of their friendship.
In school, Rika fills an important role: she is the prince. She attends an all-girl school and it is shown as the girls needing somewhere to place their sexual desire, so they place them on the most masculine student. Rika is tall, thin, and flat chested — androgynous enough for other students to cast her in the role of the school “boy”. This is the complete opposite of Kajii, who developed feminine features so early that her mother refused to acknowledge them let alone celebrate them. Kajii is ostracized for her early development while Rika is beloved for her lack of feminine characteristics. As a reader, I have to wonder if this is meant to be sexual or if it is another showcasing of misogyny. As the school “boy”, Rika has all the power. Girls bake her cakes and flirt with her. As the school “woman”, Kajii grows up hated.
When Rika becomes an adult, she attempts to keep that power by maintaining a low weight that keeps her with an androgynous shape. She refuses any interest in the female spheres of home and cooking, instead concentrating solely on work. When she is with her mentor, she makes sure to remove her makeup as if she’s removing her gender. When she begins to eat, she gets curves. Her breasts get bigger, her face rounder. Her boyfriend admits that he likes her body more, but also cautions her to control her weight gain because it is showing a lack of discipline. Those around her immediately begin to judge her more, from her friends and partner to her colleagues. Though she always had pressure to remain thin, as this was her only marker of beauty, she also had the pressure to remain thin because it was considered masculine — and that made her more likely to be loved by women and promoted in a heavily-masculine world.
On the opposite extreme, any of Kajii’s power came from her being overly feminine. She is soft, not only in mannerisms towards her marks, but also in body. She uses that archetype of mother/lover to pull her victims in and drain them of finances. Because she feels she cannot be seen as who she is, she uses how she is seen to her own benefit. What was interesting for me was the gender dynamic between Kajii and Rika. Many readers picked up on a sexual tension between them that, I have to admit, I missed. But then, attraction is complicated and there are MANY types of attraction. Not all of them register as sexual for me, even if they involve aspects of sex and gender. What was really interesting to me was the gender dynamic between the two women. In their conversations, Kajii took on the dominant role, which may be seen as traditionally masculine. Rika seemed happy, for the first time in her life, to take on the submissive role, and it was through that submission that she discovered her own definition of femininity which, ironically, did not contain the submissive nature that Kajii claimed femininity needs.
But what about the parts where Reiko is sad she’s losing Rika as her prince and expresses that she’d be happy if she simply had Rika to come home to every day? While there was some sexual tension, I feel like this said a lot more about the men in these women’s lives and the expectations of relationships rather than any actual sexual desire. Reiko, as all women in the book, isn’t being seen and valued for herself, but for how she performs femininity. Some of that pressure is her own, some is social, and some is from her partner. But wherever the pressure comes from, it results in a lot of pressure and loneliness. Rika is someone who Reiko feels seen by. She feels valued as herself rather then as a projection. Their friendship creates a space where each of them can be honest without performance and Reiko expresses a desire for a home life that contains that intimacy. For me, the important part isn’t whether or not she wants physical intimacy with Rika, it is that in her home-life she’s lacking the emotional intimacy it is only safe to have with another woman.
This is an intimacy Kajii lacks altogether. She spends her life building up a false intimacy with men, and towards the end of the book, we see that she is craving that easy, honest intimacy between women that she has been blocked out of from a young age, simply for developing too early. (I do think this is an over simplification of things… there may have been an inappropriate relationship with her father and she may simply have been born with less empathy that created a block between her and other girls that only got worse as she grew up and it was easiest for her to blame it on her precocious development because then it was framed as other women being jealous rather than a lack in herself). Kajii builds a life in Tokyo that is filled with false, shallow intimacy where she is doing all of the emotional labor. It is once she attends a cooking school — another all-women environment — that she realizes what she is missing out on and begins to kill off her lovers.
In other words, as I said in my previous post, this is a story all about loneliness and the many ways we feel it even when we are rubbing up against others every day. And there is a certain loneliness that comes from society valuing the romantic relationship above all when, often, it is in friendship that we can truly be ourselves.
Pedophilia and the Wasting Woman
The book brushes up against pedophilia several times. It’s implied that Kajii has an inappropriate relationship with her father. While we don’t see this on-page, there is a lot of derision in Kajii that her mother could not satisfy her father, and one has to wonder if that disgust is anger because she was required to fulfill more than she should have. There’s also something ‘off’ in Rika’s relationship with her own father, and while there might not be sex involved, there is a sort of expectation that the daughter fills the mother’s role after a divorce. More explicit is Makato’s fascination with the main singer of Scream, who is a prepubescent girl. He stops being a fan when she hits puberty (and it seems this is not just him, but perhaps he is following a wave of hate towards her). Though it covered in words that glorify personal discipline, and that she has “let herself go”, it is telling that the natural curves of puberty are seen as a shortcoming or failure. Then, finally, we have the actual on-page pedophilia: Kajii’s young sister is attacked by a pedophile when she is in primary school. The sister hits him with a rock and leaves him bloody. Kajii goes to him and takes him to a hospital, and the two become friends. It is implied that teenage Kajii is probably “too old” for him, but they develop an intimate relationship in a non-sexual way. At the same time, it spreads around town that she is in a sexual relationship with him, and Kajii seems to enjoy/be empowered by this rumor.
In other words — there’s a hell of a lot of comparing women to girls in this book, and there’s a lot to unpack. But what all of the situations seem to come down to is taking up space and power. Grown women take up both physical and metaphorical space. Their fat seems to be a sign of their desire. And, over and over again, it is shown that the one thing men want in the book more than anything is a woman who has no desires of her own. Kajii shows her knowledge of men to Rika — they want to be listened to, made to feel important and special. They don’t want a reciprocal relationship. Perhaps it’s important to say “not all men” here. Reiko’s husband seems to want her more as a full woman while they are dating than the child-wife she becomes when they get married. However, it is not just what the men want, but what society expects that drives this need for women to waste away to nothing.
When we see Kajii, as a fat woman, able to attract men, women are confused and angry. They have been told they have to border on child-like to get a boyfriend, but here’s a woman who’s full-bodied and has four boyfriends. But the key aspect is that Kajii is able to completely sublimate herself to the desires of her lovers. The size of her body does not matter. It is only when her personal desire grows (while attending the cooking school) that her lovers become unhappy with her.
Sex Within and Without the Family
The final really interesting aspect of sexuality that the book brings up is sex within and without the family. In the book, several parents of the main characters are divorced. Rika and Makato both grew up with single mothers, and it’s shown that the mothers are unable to give the classic nurturing childhood. In other words, they don’t have time to bake. Kajii’s parents were together, but she comments many times that her mother was unable to satisfy her father. We are unsure of whether that is sexually or through cooking and companionship: the book seems to equate these as the same thing, or at least on the same level. The role of food preparation becomes a stand-in for sexual satisfaction, and we often see that the fathers are unsatisfied with the meals the women prepare for them, even when the women make elaborate meals with several different dishes. In this complex web, there is an overlap between the wife and the mother. The husbands want a mother who caters to their every whim rather than an equal partner. Through their demands, they end up creating a world where their children are unable to experience a mother. Those children then grow up and are unable to create intimacy through sex or food.
That’s all a little amorphous. The clear connection of sex within the family is shown through Reiko’s story. When she’s a young girl she learns that her parents both have other lovers, and this is a tradition that has been in their family for years. Her father expresses to her that he can’t desire sex with his wife as she is part of his family, and familial love is not sexual. Reiko decides at that moment that she will only ever have sex with her husband (though she doesn’t follow through with this, it is her driving definition of sex and love). However, her husband is similar to her father. Once Reiko becomes his wife, he loses his sexual attraction to her. We learn this is because he has a kink for rough sex and he doesn’t want to hurt or degrade his wife. We see that Reiko and her husband both get lost in the role of husband and wife and lose their actual desire. It is only after she leaves him and they get their divorce papers in order that they are able to once again see each other as people. This was perhaps one of the most interesting parts of the book for me because being polyamorous, I am super interested in depictions of open marriages and the what and how and why of them. But basically, it seemed like a warning of how social roles can mute our desire and sense of self. While we might think of this as the good and respectful thing (“I’m putting my wife on a pedestal”), it can actually lead to a lack of intimacy that, if not found in healthy outlets, can destroy entire families.
Butter vs. A Certain Hunger
When I picked up Butter, I was already comparing it to Chelsea Summer’s A Certain Hunger. They are both books about a female serial killer and food, and they both came out around the same time (Butter came out in 2017 in Japanese, and 2024 in English, A Certain Hunger came out in 2023). They are both told while the killer is in prison and neither of them have a particularly strong sense of fear that something bad can happen since she is locked up. A Certain Hunger focuses more on the killer and her murders than Butter, but the books are strikingly similar in that they feel like they are less about murder and more about the crime of female desire. Dorothy in A Certain Hunger learns to embrace her desire from a young age. She wraps up food and sex in one emotion as a teenager and then rolls with that fierce, selfish desire her entire life. There is one turning point, before the murders start, where she is offered true intimacy and she has to make a choice between unrestrained desire and intimacy. She chooses her desires. But she cannot forego intimacy altogether, and her one intimate friend turns her into the police.
At first glance, Butter reads as the exact opposite. Kajii learns from a young age to completely sublimate her desire to that of men. Her need for fine food is a reflection of society instead of her own desire. When her own desire awakens, she begins to kill off the men around her, but is it only her desire, or her deep need for intimacy? Both books almost seem to say that a woman’s desire cannot coexist with men. However, taken deeper, both books are a meditation on desire, the true self, intimacy, and loneliness. It is less about the inability for a woman’s desire to coexist along men’s desires and more about how social expectations frustrate a woman’s desires. Which brings us back to the beginning — what does a woman with frustrated desire look like? Well, like this.
