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 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, sexual violence, gender discrimination, and disordered eating.
Rika and Reiko say goodbye at Niigata Station. Reiko is staying an extra day before visiting her parents in Kanazawa Prefecture. She wants to see her old housekeeper and her dog, Melanie. Rika notes how strange yet strong Reiko is and thanks her for her help, encouraging her to find a new job. Before parting, Reiko adds that she understands how hard the trip must’ve been for Rika, considering her father’s death. She assures her it wasn’t her fault. Rika dismisses the conversation and says goodbye.
When Rika gets home, she screams when she thinks her trench coat is a person lying “face down on the floor” (241). She calms herself down while making dinner. However, thinking about Kajii’s victims reminds her of her father’s death. She eats dinner, realizing she wants to make a feast for her loved ones.
Rika and Shinoi go out to eat. Rika shares her plans to attend Le Salon de Miyuko to determine how the school relates to Kajii’s crimes. She also asks Shinoi to find her the names of any sex offenders from Agano.
Back at the office, Rika and Yū chat about Yū’s Scream sweatshirt. Yū reveals that Makoto stopped attending concerts with her because one of the singers gained weight. Realizing she hasn’t contacted Makoto since her trip, Rika texts him that she can’t hang out.
Ryōsuke appears at the office to see Rika. Reiko hasn’t come home, and he can’t contact her. He reveals their recent marital and fertility troubles, but Kitamura interrupts the conversation, calling Rika to the staff room.
Kitamura confronts Rika about her meetings with Shinoi and Kajii. He chastises her for having no integrity. Annoyed, Rika dismisses herself.
Rika visits Kajii and tells her about Niigata. She shares what she discovered about Kajii’s past and asks about the culinary school. She becomes unnerved when Kajii mentions Reiko, revealing Reiko visited her two times to accuse her of endangering Rika. She continues to insult the friends, calling them weak. Rika begs to know where Reiko is.
Chapter 10 Summary
“22 February”
The narrative shifts into Reiko’s first-person point of view. After Rika leaves, Reiko heads to Kanazawa. On the way, she contacts her subject in Tokyo and reflects on the recent lies she’s told Rika. In Kanazawa, she lets herself into her parents’ house and takes Melanie. Reiko has painted a false picture “of [her] home situation” to Rika (268). Her parents didn’t reject her; Reiko chose to leave and remake her life. She remembers the day she discovered her parents were having affairs. They explained it was their marital arrangement and they couldn’t sleep with people they saw as family. From then on, Reiko vowed to live a different life, wait to have sex until marriage, and devote herself solely to her husband.
Reiko returns to Tokyo and travels to Shirō Yokota’s house. She’s convinced he’s the sex offender from Kajii’s past because he housed her just before her arrest. She contacted him through an online dating site. She plans to spend three days at his house proving her theory that he helped Kajii kill her victims. She spends the night cooking and cleaning. Lying beside Melanie later, she misses Rika.
“23 February”
Reiko takes Melanie for a walk while meditating on her and her parents’ marriages. Back at Yokota’s, Reiko dismisses his moody demeanor and makes breakfast before he leaves for work. Then, she snoops through his office, desperate to find something nefarious. She finds nothing to prove her theory. She reflects on her meetings with Kajii, still afraid Rika is in danger.
Reiko spends the rest of the day cleaning. When Yokota returns, she serves him dinner, but it doesn’t please him. She asks about his relationship with Kajii, desperate to understand why he isn’t falling for her in the same way. She thinks about Rika, wishing she were a man.
“24 February”
Over breakfast, Yokota interrogates Reiko’s intentions. After he leaves, she starts cooking but quickly realizes life with Yokota is no different from life with Ryōsuke. The bell rings, and she tells herself whoever it is, she’ll still feel lonely.
Chapter 11 Summary
Kajii refuses to answer Rika’s question about Reiko unless she explains how she killed her father. Rika says she betrayed him when she broke her promise to visit and cook him a gratin. She waited several days to visit thereafter and when she arrived, he was dead. Kajii argues that she and Rika are both murderers: they killed the people they were close to when they stopped caring for them. Then she monologues about cooking, sex, fashion, and beauty, insisting most people are already dead because they don’t know how to enjoy life. Rika wonders if she’s been dead, too. Then, Kajii reveals that at the end of her last meeting with Reiko, she reminded her there were four tigers in The Story of Little Babaji.
Outside the Detention House, Rika calls Ryōsuke and invites herself over. She cooks him the gratin recipe she meant to make her father. It turns out poorly, and she realizes the same thing would’ve happened years ago.
Realizing there’s a fourth person involved in Kajii’s story, Rika meets with Shinoi to discuss the case. She believes Reiko is trying to investigate Yokota’s involvement in Kajii’s crimes and muses on how the media represented him and Kajii. Shinoi shares a story about his daughter’s weight gain and a subsequent eating disorder, blaming himself for not being present.
Noticing Kitamura spying on her, Rika confronts him and asks for help finding Yokota. Then she answers Makoto’s call. Frantic, he demands to know why she’s been ignoring him. She realizes she doesn’t love him and promises to talk in person soon.
Rika and Kitamura head to Yokota’s house. Once there, Rika notices Reiko’s cooking and cleaning and realizes she’s more self-possessed than Kajii.
Chapter 12 Summary
Rika brings Reiko back to Shinoi’s apartment per his invitation. She spends the days caring for Reiko, as she hasn’t spoken since leaving Yokota’s. Realizing she needs help, she asks Kitamura and Yū to check on Reiko when they’re free.
Rika tells her editor she wants to step back from Kajii’s case because she’s afraid it’s hurting her and her friends. The editor argues she’s doing well and encourages her to join the culinary school, where she got her two spots under false names.
Rika meets up with Makoto. They discuss his decision to stop supporting Scream, his negative opinions of women, and Rika’s weight gain. Then they break up. Rika momentarily hopes he’ll profess his love, but he doesn’t.
Rika returns to Shinoi’s apartment. Yū is working, and Reiko and Kitamura are playing video games. Rika starts cooking dinner, but Shinoi arrives with fried chicken before she’s done. Rika realizes she can’t control her friends and should stop trying.
Rika visits Kajii and accuses her of hurting Reiko. She threatens to abandon the interview if Kajii doesn’t tell her about the culinary school. Kajii explains she wanted to make friends she could talk to about food but only connected with one woman.
One night at Shinoi’s, Reiko breaks her silence. She talks at length about her and Rika’s friendship, her marriage, and her hopes that Rika finds someone who loves her. Rika suddenly realizes she can’t protect Reiko on her own and wants a flat like Shinoi’s where she can give her friends a safe place. Shortly thereafter, she’s surprised to see Shinoi serving Reiko instant ramen and teasing her. Their new closeness moves her.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
Rika’s return to Tokyo from Niigata changes her perspective on Kajii’s case, her closest friendships, her relationship with Makoto, and her regard for food. The Niigata trip is symbolic of self-discovery and thus mobilizes Rika’s Quest for Self-Realization and Liberation. Leaving Tokyo offers her the time and distance to evaluate her daily life and thus to pursue change. Once she comes home, she begins to think and behave differently. These shifts in her character capture how Kajii’s case is gradually transforming Rika’s sense of self and reality and helping her rethink notions of love, care, and beauty.
Rika’s conversations with Kajii in Chapters 9 and 11 alter the stakes of the narrative. This is particularly true because these visits cause new narrative revelations to surface on the page. In Chapter 9, Rika learns that Reiko has visited Kajii twice—once “just after New Year, and again at the beginning of [the] month” (257). Then in Chapter 11, Rika is compelled to reveal the circumstances surrounding her father’s untimely death when she was in middle school. These revelations illustrate how personal Rika’s involvement in Kajii’s case has become. The allusions to her best friend and her father shift the balance of power between her and Kajii, causing Rika to lose her control over her subject. She feels pain during these conversations because she notices sudden similarities between her and Kajii. “Maybe,” she realizes in Chapter 9, “what drew her to Kajii was the anger that had accumulated within her over the years”; this rage parallels Kajii’s rage, which the narrator likens to “an inextinguishable flame that burn[s] everything it touch[es]” (258). The personal aspect of Rika’s involvement with Kajii in turn underscores Rika’s unresolved trauma while fueling her concern for her friend. The chapters that follow inspire Rika to try distancing herself from Kajii in an attempt to protect herself and her loved ones.
The novel employs another plot twist in Chapter 10 when the narrative shifts into Reiko’s first-person point of view. Except for this chapter, the entirety of Butter is written from the third-person point of view and is limited to Rika’s perspective. The formal shift in Chapter 10 grants access to Reiko’s private interiority and reveals that she’s not only “lied to Rika about a number of things” in recent days but also that she’s told Rika a falsified story about her parents, childhood, and upbringing (268). Reiko is also on a Quest for Self-Realization and Liberation, but like Rika, she is hesitant to let her friend into the vulnerable aspects of her journey. Her solo project of retrieving her dog and investigating Shirō Yokota reveals her desire to prove her strength, independence, and ability.
Reiko’s experiences with Yokota parallel Rika’s experiences with Reiko. Just as Rika has been meeting with Kajii in private, hoping to solve the case on her own, Reiko spends three days with Yokota, convinced she has to prove her theory by herself. Repeated images of Rika and Reiko cooking and serving food surround these solo endeavors. These pastimes align with their society’s expectations of them as women and thus their culturally prescribed notions of femininity. The friends have been taught that they have to care for others, work hard, and pursue truth without others’ support. In turn, they isolate themselves and push each other away. At the end of Chapter 10, for example, Reiko’s experience cooking and cleaning at Yokota’s place inspires her revelation about her societally—and self-imposed—servitude. She suddenly understands that she can’t rid herself “of the sense that if [she stops] moving, the merry-go-round called [her] family [will] simply cease to rotate” and fears that if she does stop moving, she will no longer be loved (291). The revelation marks a turning point in her character arc, provides insight into Rika’s definitions of strength and womanhood, and augments Reiko’s loneliness. Like Rika, she has chosen to carry life’s burdens on her own because she wants to be cherished and respected. Doing so creates a wedge between her and Rika, which Rika’s concurrent attempts to carry her burdens alone augment. The friends can’t come together and make amends until they individually realize their errors, own their mistakes, and alter how they relate to each other.
The images of Rika and Reiko spending time with their friends at Shinoi’s underscore Cooking as Love and Care and grant the narrative a hopeful, redemptive tone. The characters are using the space to relate in new ways, which “feels really relaxed somehow” (337). Because they’re sharing time, food, and conversation in the apartment, “it feels like a family habitat” and lets people freely “use it how they want” (337). The apartment is symbolic of community in these ways and thus encourages Rika and Reiko to redefine what domesticity, femininity, and friendship mean to them. At Shinoi’s, the rooms are shared as much as the household responsibilities—an equitable dynamic that, in turn, helps Rika and Reiko see themselves anew.
