53 pages • 1 hour read
Asako YuzukiButter: A Novel of Food and Murder
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
The first installment in Rika’s serial article about Kajii comes out in the magazine. Shortly thereafter, Rika and Reiko start attending cooking classes at the culinary school using false identities. The class is run by Miyuko Sasazuka, known as Madame. The recipes they cook in their first class impress Rika, and the other students’ camaraderie surprises her. One woman named Chizu remarks that she and Rika are alike because they’re there to meet other women instead of to cook. After they eat the meal they’ve made, Madame asks Rika if there’s a recipe she’d like them to try making together. The room goes silent when Rika mentions bœef bourguignon and several women dismiss themselves, upset. Madame explains they’ve cooked it too many times already. Afterward, Rika and Reiko discuss the class, theorizing that Chizu is the woman with which Kajii wanted to be friends.
During Rika’s next visit with Kajii, she asks about Kajii’s interest in attending culinary school. Kajii admits that she dropped out of university and pursued cooking school because she thought she could make friends with other women through the program.
After Rika’s next cooking lesson, she and Chizu go out for coffee. Chizu shares her impressions of Kajii and explains the students’ dynamic with each other. No one liked Kajii, because she was obsessed with orthodox cooking and brought her personal life and opinions into the classroom. Everyone else took the class to escape their regular lives. Like her classmates, Chizu enjoys cooking as an escape. Kajii was also the only student who didn’t have a family and didn’t see cooking as a personal pastime. In one class, she got upset and caused a scene when the class voted to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving. On her walk home afterward, Rika wonders what the turkey signified to Kajii.
Chapter 14 Summary
In the following weeks, Rika continues gaining weight and starts dressing differently. Her hair and skin look healthier, too. One day, she meets Hatoko Yamamura to discuss a three-bedroom apartment she’s considering buying. She received Hatoko’s contact from Kitamura. While she genuinely wants to buy her place, she also hopes to feature Hatoko’s story in her article.
Everyone at work compliments Rika for her article installments, which have been well-received. Her editor asks her to extend it into six parts.
At Rika’s next cooking lesson, she asks Madame for a turkey recipe. Madame lends her her cookbook. When she studies the roast turkey recipe later, Rika feels overwhelmed and doesn’t have the energy to practice it. Instead, she makes asparagus and hollandaise and lets Shinoi sample it. The friends also talk about Reiko, making Rika feel close to Shinoi.
Rika brings Kajii a copy of the magazine with an interview installment. Then, she asks Kajii why she didn’t want to cook the turkey, theorizing that Kajii couldn’t practice the recipe because she liked precision and didn’t have 10 people to serve her trial dinner. She insists Kajii is just a lonely person who doesn’t know how to make friends and announces her plan to make a turkey for her friends. She invites Kajii to join if she’s out of prison by then.
Chapter 15 Summary
Rika attends the first day of Kajii’s retrial. The defense again argues that the three men’s deaths were accidental, pointing to Tokio’s depression the weeks before his death.
Rika visits her father’s grave for the first time in eight years. She talks to him, reflecting on their relationship and her recent conversation with Reiko about her marriage and parents’ relationship. She realizes that she is like her father and wants to make connections before she dies.
Rika’s editor informs her that a journalist from a different magazine is refuting her claims in the Kajii article. The editor trusts Rika but wants her to step back from the piece. The journalist is a man with whom Kajii has allegedly fallen in love. The two are planning to publish Kajii’s biography together.
Rika goes to visit Kajii, planning to interrogate her about the other journalist. However, Kajii won’t see her. Outside the Detention House, she’s immobilized and gets hit by a car. A woman and her son rush to Rika’s aid. The woman scolds her son when he tries touching Rika’s cut. Then, she gets Rika a taxi. On her way home, Rika buys some butter before returning to her apartment.
Rika takes her mandatory seven-day leave from work. She can’t get herself to cook, and Madame won’t let her return to the cooking school. She spends days lying alone in her room, feeling incapable of reaching out to anyone. Realizing she’s acting like her father, she texts Makoto asking him to bring her some food.
Makoto comes over and makes Rika pancakes. Meanwhile, they discuss Rika’s article, their night at the hotel, and their relationship. Makoto apologizes for his behavior, and Rika explains her experience in recent months. After he leaves, Rika feels relieved that they can be friends. She eats a piece of cold butter, lies down, examines her scab, and thinks about the little boy outside the Detention House.
Chapter 16 Summary
Rika and Reiko meet up for the first time in a month. Over food, they discuss everything that’s happened to them recently. Reiko describes her and Ryōsuke’s work to heal their relationship and encourages Rika about her job. She’s also been in touch with Chizu. Rika has a sudden revelation about the turkey and Kajii’s blog.
Rika meets with Hatoko to discuss buying the apartment. She also asks to interview Hatoko, promising not to compromise her reputation in the article.
Rika invites her friends to her new apartment for a turkey dinner. She spends several days preparing, thinking about Kajii throughout. She now understands that Kajii invited her culinary classmates over for turkey, but they destroyed the invitations after learning about her arrest.
Yū, Reiko, Ryōsuke, Kitamura, Misaki, Shinoi, and his daughter, Saya Kamiyama, come over for Rika’s turkey dinner. Everyone exclaims at Rika’s new home and delicious food. Rika tells them she wants the house to be a place they can come whenever they want. That night, Misaki, Shinoi, and Saya stay over. They make plans to cook a turkey “in a Japanese-style” the next morning (447). Rika lies awake reflecting on her success and inventing a new turkey recipe.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
In the novel’s final chapters, Rika pursues personal change by resisting Societal Pressures of Body Image and completing her Quest for Self-Realization and Liberation. Throughout the novel, Rika has been occupying the interstice between what others expect of her and what she wants for herself. The disconnect between others’ perceptions and her own needs has caused her internal turmoil, which has compromised her autonomy, independence, and contentment. Over time, Rika begins to wonder if she has “been dead for a long time” and if everyone has been so obsessed with Kajii because they “have to keep on watching her from across the dividing line between life and death, as she burns through the rest of her life, living out her desires” (301). In Chapters 13-16, Rika decides to embrace Kajii’s holistic, unbridled way of living. She becomes more engaged with her life by making peace with her past, fostering new relationships in the present, and planning for her future. Examples of these changes include Rika’s visit to her father’s grave, her outing with Chizu, her text to Makoto for help, her apartment purchase, and her turkey dinner. The novel uses these scenes to illustrate how personal change comes about through definitive action. Indeed, Rika can’t claim her true self and embrace her desires until she actively resists societal impressions of who she should be and begins to live her life on her terms.
Rika’s apartment purchase and turkey dinner, two key symbols in the text, represent her increased autonomy and ability to see Cooking as Love and Care. With the help of her best friend, Rika has come to see that “[c]leaning and cooking are much more rock and roll than [she previously] thought” (355). By redefining societal notions about femininity and domesticity, Rika is empowering herself and realizing her desire to love others and create community through shared space and food. Rika initially started taking cooking lessons and house-hunting solely for professional motivations, but both crossed over into her personal life. She uses a cooking metaphor to capture the transformative significance of these pastimes, likening the experiences to “how, as you [go] on folding the dough for pie crust, the lumps of butter [will] all of a sudden cease to be visible” (376). This figurative language conveys how cooking has become both a part of Rika’s everyday life and an expansion of her outlook. She now sees and understands the world according to food—a pastime that has evolved from a work-related duty into a form of self-fulfillment.
Furthermore, inviting her friends to her new home for the turkey dinner is Rika’s way of fostering community. She may not have a marriage, boyfriend, or children, but she has loved ones in whose lives she wants to invest. This new communal realm grants her a more definite sense of identity and legacy. Rika is no longer tailoring herself to her culture’s, family’s, friends’, and coworkers’ opinions of her. Rather, she is curating her identity according to her desires. The turkey dinner reifies these facets of her experience. Rika cooks the original roast turkey according to a traditional American recipe. However, she decides that next time she will make it as noodles with soy and turkey dipping sauce. This is “the first recipe that Rika [has] come up with by herself and for herself, based on her tastes, desires, and physical conditions (451). The reinvented turkey recipe thus symbolizes Rika’s reinvention. She is claiming cooking as her form of self-expression while using the pastime to connect with others and liberate herself from her previous social strictures. This scene brings Rika’s character arc to its conclusion.
