Asako Yuzuki’s novel, Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder, has become the latest hit by a female Japanese author to capture an international audience. The story revolves around a reporter investigating a suspected serial killer who allegedly used culinary charms to lure several men to their deaths. Revealing any more would spoil the book’s intricate plotlines. Yuzuki’s bestseller is merely the latest in Japanese fiction that uses food as a means to examine women’s roles in Japanese society and challenge traditional notions of “a woman’s place.” This theme is well-established but still under-researched in contemporary Japanese women’s literature, though Tomoko Aoyama’s article in Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature offers a valuable starting point.
I encourage you to explore four literary works that depict the challenges faced by post-war Japanese women. Japanese readers of Yuzuki’s work might see her parallels with Fumiko Hayashi, who wrote extensively from the late 1920s until her death in 1951 about the daily struggles of resilient women from the lower classes. Her notable works, including Diary of a Vagabond (1930), Late Chrysanthemum (1948), and Floating Clouds (1951), have been adapted for film by Mikio Naruse. Born into extreme poverty, Hayashi shared Yuzuki’s intrigue with food. Her debut, Diary of a Vagabond, is filled with vivid descriptions of food trading and its consumption by the impoverished.
Hayashi’s final and unfinished novel, Repast, was the first adapted by Naruse in 1951. This film offers a grim look at post-war domestic life, focusing on a childless housewife married to a frugally minded man during a time when patriarchal norms sought to keep women confined to the home, using the kitchen as a symbol of restriction.
Mieko Kanai, one of Japan’s contemporary literary giants, uses food in her early avant-garde stories to explore and deconstruct the power dynamics between genders in 1970s Japan. In Rabbits (1973), for instance, the young protagonist Lily abandons school to immerse herself in cooking lavish meals with her father. As she embraces her role as butcher and cook, she becomes increasingly distant from societal norms, starting with the abrupt and secretive departure of her mother and brother.
In another of Kanai’s stories, Rotting Meat (1996), we meet a sex worker whose life is disrupted by a client who is a butcher. His insensitive gift of an unbutchered pig and the physical toll he takes on her body jeopardize her career and routine. His desire to make her a respectable woman and marry her forces her to choose between her profession and her lover.
Banana Yoshimoto’s novella, published in 1988, became an acclaimed literary sensation, winning awards in Japan and becoming an instant bestseller. It follows Mikage, an orphaned girl who copes with her family’s death by immersing herself in her late grandmother’s kitchen. Mikage’s transformation of this space into a realm of comfort reveals the optimism of the Japanese economic bubble, during which many identified as middle class, and opportunities for education, travel, and consumerism flourished, making the breaking of traditional gender roles seem possible.
Sayaka Murata’s novel, featuring a neurodivergent woman who finds solace and fulfillment in the routines of her convenience store job, offers a quirky and delightful narrative. The protagonist, Keiko, finds predictability in the store’s rhythms marked by breakfast, lunch, and snack rushes. Her profound connection to the store is illustrated by her belief that her body, nourished by convenience store food, integrates her with the store itself. Murata portrays Keiko’s adherence to the store’s rules as a subversion of societal expectations for single women in Japan.