4 hours ago
9
Asako Yuzuki’s international bestseller Butter was a taste sensation based on the true story of a Japanese female serial killer and gourmet chef who scammed and poisoned male victims with her culinary offerings. Attempting to get a scoop, a journalist bonds with the convicted prisoner by asking her for recipe tips, and gradually reassesses her own life and values as a result of this peculiar relationship. One review described the book as “the Martha Stewart Show meets The Silence of the Lambs”, but as well as the crime thriller/foodie mashup, a critique of capitalist society and deep-seated misogyny also emerged from the narrative. Yuzuki’s prose style, a mix of the banal and the profound, proved to be catnip for sales.
Hooked is the follow-up for English-language readers, though it was written earlier, in 2015, and like the previous novel is translated with crackling verve by Polly Barton. While a more introspective work, its high-wire plot and uneven trajectory make for a relentlessly dizzying experience. Fans of Butter might even view it as a trial run.
The book again features two women, Shoko and Eriko, living in Tokyo. One is a laid-back, unambitious “stay-at-home wife”, the other a perfectionist high-flyer in a senior role at a seafood company. Both are 30, an age which in Yuzuki’s telling spells disaster in Japan for unmarried women who are no longer “girls”. During her long office hours, Eriko becomes addicted to Shoko’s pseudonymous, self-deprecating blog The Diary of Hallie B, the World’s Worst Wife, and contrives to accidentally-on-purpose meet the blogger at a cafe Shoko mentions in one of her posts. They initially hit it off, but Eriko pushes too hard for an all-consuming friendship. An alarmed Shoko backs away, and Eriko begins an increasingly aggressive campaign of stalking and blackmail.
The unrolling suspense compels, as does the deep dive into both characters and their motives. Eriko is emotionally undeveloped, with a rigorously maintained outer shell. People, especially women, avoid her; she craves a “best friend”, having lost one at school due to her control freakery. At work she takes on the Nile perch account, overly identifying with this fish which devours all others in its bid to survive, a metaphor which is used rather too liberally throughout the book. “It wasn’t lonely, because it contained inside that enormous body the souls of the hundreds of thousands of creatures it had eaten.”
Shoko is also friendless, if companionable with her husband, Kensuke, whom she underestimates as a harmless buffoon. In the age of Instagram and TikTok the emphasis on the world of blogging now seems dated, but while technology moves on, the anxieties that fuel it do not alter. “The very essence of blogging lay in exposing the details of your public life then selling it off piece by piece … Denigrating the blog meant denigrating her entire existence,” Shoko reflects. As well as loneliness, both women struggle with their perceived roles. At the beginning of the novel, Eriko tries to justify her lack of female friends to the office pest. Shoko, grateful that her husband doesn’t make too many domestic demands of her, is resentful at the assumption that she will be the one to look after her ageing father in a remote province, when her two brothers live nearby. Her father allowing his home to become overrun with rubbish and cockroaches adds to a sense of impermanence and decay; even as Eriko, who suffers with disordered eating, lets up on her strict regime.
At times it is as if this pair of strangely similar women are blinking into the light of the 21st century. Yet while Hooked wears its aura of black comedy lightly, and its political statements more heavily, there are weirdly farcical aspects, such as a wildly contrived subplot in which a popular office temp turns out to be a psychopath. The most interesting takeaway from Hooked is that it doesn’t wallow in easy answers. And the finale, when it eventually arrives, tones down the manic drama to end on a quiet, even philosophical note.
