Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder

“What the public found most alarming, even more than Kajii’s lack of beauty, was the fact that she was not thin. Women appeared to find this aspect of the case profoundly disturbing, while in men it elicited an extraordinary display of hatred and vitriol.”

Rika’s reflections on Manako Kajii’s situation reveal the misogynistic bent of her case. The passage establishes Rika’s interest in understanding and interviewing Kajii. She’s skeptical of Kajii’s conviction because the media has interrogated her appearance instead of her character. The passage contributes to the novel’s explorations of societal beauty standards and instigates Rika’s first visits to the Detention House.

“The first thing Rika felt was a strange breeze emanating from the back of her throat. The cold butter first met the roof of her mouth with a chilly sensation, contrasting with the steaming rice in both texture and temperature. The cool butter clashed against her teeth, and she felt its soft texture right down into their roots. […] It was a taste that could only be described as golden. A shining golden wave, with an astounding depth of flavor and a faint yet full and rounded aroma, wrapped itself around the rice and washed Rika’s body far away.”

The narrator uses vivid sensory detail and figurative language to describe Rika’s experience eating quality butter on home-cooked rice for the first time. She likens the experience to “a strange breeze” and a “shining golden wave,” and uses diction like “emanating,” “clashed,” “steaming,” “aroma,” and “wrapped.” These linguistic stylings depict Rika’s transformative experience and convey eating and Cooking as Love and Care.

“Tucking into a delicious meal cooked for you by a girlfriend young enough to be your granddaughter, before falling into an eternal sleep…Was that really a death tragic enough to merit the fuss the world was kicking up about it? Even Rika’s attempts to put herself in the victims’ place couldn’t diminish the deliciousness of the spaghetti in front of her.”

Eating the noodles she made for herself compels Rika to reflect. Her contemplative, inquisitive tone conveys how food is influencing her outlook on life, relationships, and Kajii’s case. She is asking herself questions about Kajii’s victims while eating because she’s trying to embody Kajii’s story to understand it. In turn, the experience compels Rika to question her notions of contentment and love.

“Instilling desire in someone was a lot of fun, regardless of whether that person was male or female. But Rika had always believed that using your own wiles to excite someone was a malicious thing to do, in some ways—a base act, a dirty deed. Who had made her think that way? She wondered now.”

Rika begins to compare eating good food to experiencing sexual desire the more food she samples at Kajii’s bequest. She uses a reflective, questioning tone because she’s trying to make sense of how she sees the world and why. The moment thus points to how Rika’s society has dictated her regard for herself, her body, and her experience of pleasure.

“She had, of course, been faintly aware of the changes to her body. There was a heaviness around her jawline, and her breasts had got bigger, so that the underwriting of her bra felt tight. She could see the fat gleaming pale and white on her lower abdomen. Having a sense of what was happening, she’d got on the scales kept in the medical office at work, only to find that she weighed more than she had ever done. Unable to believe it at first, she’d stepped on and off the scales repeatedly.”

The narrator’s detailed descriptions of Rika’s body and her experience weighing herself convey Rika’s anxiety over her weight gain. The narrator details everything from Rika’s jaw to her breasts and stomach—depictions that mirror Rika’s obsessive concern for how she looks. She steps on and off the scale because she’s struggling to reconcile with the new reality of her body—slight weight gain that is fracturing her sense of self. The passage captures the negative effects of Societal Pressures of Body Image.

“Caring for, supporting and warming the hearts of men is women’s god-given role, and, without fail, performing it makes women beautiful. They become goddesses. Don’t you see? You find so many hard, spiky women these days because they lack love towards men, and are unsatisfied as a result. You have to understand that women can never hope to rival men’s power.”

Kajii’s monologue about gender roles disrupts Rika’s worldview. Kajii is arguing that her expression of femininity is inherently right. She uses words like “god-given” and “goddesses” to emphasize the significance of her beliefs on Rika. Her assertive tone challenges Rika as it contrasts sharply with Rika’s questioning internal experience.

“Are you still worrying about what I said? I’ve told you, that was my mistake. I don’t think you have to be thin or anything. All I was saying is that it’s not good to let yourself go. You’ve been forcing yourself to eat for professional reasons, no? That’s not your fault. If you’re gaining weight as a result of the effort you’re making for your work, then it’s unavoidable. Just look at how I’ve ended up, thanks to all the socializing I have to do for work.”

Makoto Fujimura tries to appeal to Rika in conversation to make amends for his criticisms of her appearance. He uses repeated questions and halting syntax, which show his simultaneous discomfort and reluctance to accept Rika. His words also align with the social expectations Rika is trying to interrogate throughout the novel. She doesn’t innately mind her weight gain but is aware that people like Makoto won’t accept her altered appearance if it isn’t “for professional reasons.” Makoto is thus a micro representation of Rika’s larger societal context, including its rigid beauty standards.

“Images of her father’s self-destructive lifestyle after the divorce, which she usually tried not to remember, now came flooding back to her, making her stomach clench up even further. She definitely had some of him in her. She couldn’t help but feel that she resembled him more by the year.”

Rika’s reflections instigate a brief narrative flashback to Rika’s father’s death. However, because Rika refuses to continue meditating on the tragedy, the narrator doesn’t describe what happened in detail at this juncture of the novel. Rika’s reluctance to face her past inspires the withholding tone of the passage—evident in the description of her clenching her stomach.

“Cradling the bowl in her two hands, she drank down the last of the buttery broth. When she held it up, the bowl shrouded the entirety of her vision. A starry sky formed of grease glinted at her out of the darkness. Sensing eyes on her, she raised her face from the bottom of the bowl and looked towards Yasukuni-dōri. She couldn’t shake the sense that Kajii was standing there in the night, watching her.”

The hungry way that Rika eats her bowl of ramen illustrates her enjoyment. She gulps down every drop of the soup because she is embracing her desires and reveling in them. The narrator likens the greasy bowl to a “starry sky” as the dish consumes Rika’s entire sightline. This imagery illustrates how immersed she is in her food and conveys the transportive nature of this dining experience.

“That look again, Rika thought—of late, even when she was cruel to Rika, there was a certain curiosity, a desire for affection mixed up in Kajii’s expression. Did she really hate women as she said? Was it not that she was trying her best to convince herself of the fact? If so, then why, when she was otherwise so true to her desires, would she try so persistently to push away this wish to be close to another woman?”

Rika closely studies Kajii’s appearance and demeanor to gain access to her interiority. In turn, she asks questions about Kajii’s character. The interplay between her external experience and internal musings captures Rika’s thoughtful nature and underscores her desperation to thoroughly make sense of Kajii’s true self.

“‘Treating yourself badly is a way of directing your anger at someone. I myself…’ But she couldn’t say it. Right now, she couldn’t say it. She kept her eyes fixed on the foam oozing out of the washing-up sponge. Could it be true that, quite unconsciously, she’d been hurting people? That by living her life the way she had, she’d been hurting her mother, Mizushima, Reiko and Makoto, just like her father had once done to her? By treating himself badly, he had accused the people around him.”

Baking the cake with Yoshinori Shinoi changes how Rika sees herself. The experience marks a pivotal moment in her Quest for Self-Realization and Self-Liberation. She’s not only bonding with Shinoi but also reflecting on her habits and past relationships. The shifts between Rika’s lines of dialogue and her internal monologue capture her attempts to reconcile her behavior with her beliefs about herself.

“That was something that her victims failed to notice, Rika thought. Taking her cooking as an expression of her affection towards them, they’d happily eaten it. Wasn’t the same true of Makoto? She’d made him a single bowl of pasta and he’d mistakenly assumed she was forcing her affection on him, hinting she wanted to get married, and rejected her as a result. But that was pasta Rika had made for her own sake. That was why it’d tasted so good.”

The more food Rika experiences, the more she sees Cooking as Love and Care. The pasta she made for Makoto gives her perspective on Kajii’s case because it is grounded in her own experience. She is thus learning that cooking isn’t only a form of giving to others; it’s also a way to empower oneself and enrich one’s own life. This reflective passage thus marks another turning point in Rika’s Quest for Self-Realization and Liberation.

“‘You should—you need to…’ Take it a bit easy, relax, don’t blame yourself—all the phrases Rika could think of didn’t have any meaning. Why had she grown so scared of drawing close to her best friend? It was just that she was desperate not to lose her. Rika stood up, went over to Reiko’s bed and hugged her. Burying her face in her hair, she smelled a rich, sweet smell that made Reiko’s words from before seem like a dream.”

Rika and Reiko Sayama’s evening at the Niigata Hotel challenges Rika to be a better friend and person. She stops herself from saying the canned phrases that come to mind (“Take it a bit easy, relax, don’t blame yourself”) when Reiko is vulnerable with her because she doesn’t want to trivialize Reiko’s experience. Her body language illustrates her true care for her friend and conveys her desire to relate to her. The sensory details regarding Reiko’s sweet smell also parallel the narrative’s surrounding food descriptions and capture Rika’s enjoyment of Reiko’s company.

“Rika felt as though she could see a red stain diffusing through the white milk that had collected in the bucket. Something about this vision was making her tremble. The image of that spreading patch of red made it hard for her to breathe. Then, she saw it—the ivory carpet, stained with blood. In its very center lay her father.”

Rika’s experience at Taiichi Akiyama’s dairy farm transports her into the past. The images of the stain, the milk, and the blood initiate this flashback and compel Rika to confront the truth of what happened to her father. In this scene, Rika’s work is becoming increasingly personal; it conveys her need to heal from her trauma to achieve self-realization.

“The first person outside of her immediate family to look favorably at Kajii was a sex offender. She had reworked the story to give it a more palatable taste, transforming it into the one of a mysterious older man and a precocious young girl in a secret relationship. It was through making contact with the worldview of a sex offender that her life had changed. In that worldview, the woman was to blame for everything.”

Rika’s experiences in Niigata help her to understand Kajii better. The Niigata trip is a narrative device used to expand Rika’s perspective and offer her insight into her subject and herself. This reflective and revelatory moment also contributes to Rika’s ongoing attempts to resist societal standards of femininity and claim autonomy over her own body and identity.

“She considered her best friend of ten years. There was the woman with the air of a thirteen-year-old girl, and there was the woman who had shoved Rika aside to obstinately interrogate Kajii’s family. It didn’t seem that just one of those was the true Reiko, but rather that both personas were aspects of her whole. The Rika of this moment could appreciate that fully.”

Rika’s reflections on Reiko create a parallel between Rika’s and Reiko’s self-discovery journeys. Reiko’s seemingly contradictory behaviors are granting Rika perspective on her own life and personal growth. Furthermore, by embracing Reiko’s contradictions, Rika is proving her negative capability.

“Visiting Agano, I started for the first time to feel genuinely sorry for you. Maybe if you’d had someone like Reiko in your life—it wouldn’t have mattered if they were a man or a woman, just someone you could talk to about what was on your mind—then things wouldn’t have worked out this way. Maybe then you wouldn’t have needed to be so impossibly self-contained, to do everything on your own. If I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere, I could have easily ended up like you.”

Rika uses an assertive tone when confronting Kajii about her own friendless life. She repeatedly uses the word “maybe”—affecting a conditional, journalistic slant to her words—and simultaneously identifies key sources of tension in Kajii’s experience. The moment conveys Rika’s newfound ability to claim her opinions and use her voice with Kajii, a character who has conversationally dominated her throughout the novel.

“Rika felt the tension she’d been holding inside her body relax. She felt a far greater sense of redemption at this pronouncement than by the words Reiko had uttered at Niigata Station: ‘It’s not your fault.’ This woman who didn’t tolerate other women had made an exception for her. Kajii was right, Rika thought. I killed him. For the first time she accepted the fact calmly: Rika Machida was a murderer.”

Rika’s unexpected response to Kajii’s assessment of her reveals Rika’s desperation to make sense of her father’s death. She prefers to own her guilt because, as a woman, she feels inherently to blame for all men’s downfalls. The moment frees Rika while ushering her along her ongoing Quest for Self-Realization and Liberation. She is no longer afraid of identifying with Kajii and feels comfortable owning her flaws.

“The idea that a single home-cooked dish could save a person was a delusion. But how much suffering, how much bondage did that delusion cause for women? To think that a badly made meal like this could have saved somebody’s life was arrogant and self-obsessed in the extreme. However hard she tried, Rika couldn’t have erased her father’s loneliness. Playing the good daughter on that day wouldn’t have altered the situation a jot.”

Cooking the gratin for Ryōsuke Sayama helps Rika reconcile with her father’s death. For years, Rika has attributed her failure to make the dish for her father as the cause of his premature demise. Once she makes the dish in the present, she realizes how little perspective she’s had. This moment captures the interplay between Rika’s past and present experiences and shows her work to overcome her trauma and liberate herself.

“I don’t think I’m a lazy person, necessarily, but I’m not confident that I can maintain the effort needed to keep you and the rest of the world happy twenty-four-seven. I’m not young any more, and I don’t want to give myself up to other people for their consumption. I want to decide how I work and interact with other people based on what I think really matters.”

Rika owns her experience in conversation with Makoto to claim autonomy over herself. She stops submitting to Makoto’s impressions of her behaviors and appearance because she’s learned that she can’t make everyone happy and that trying to do so is compromising her ability to enjoy life. This is the first time that Rika articulates her need for self-care and self-love in conversation with another character, evidenced by the phrase “I don’t want to give myself up to other people for their consumption.”

“All this time, she had thought that she alone could protect Reiko. She’d wanted to make Shinoi feel less lonely, and she’d been plagued by guilt about her mother, who was so tied up with taking care of her grandfather. But actually, thinking that she could solve their problems was sheer arrogance—just as she’d been unable to do anything to save her father in the final stretch of his life. Her loved ones’ issues were their own domains, as individuals, and not places that she could go stomping into. Quite possibly, the only thing she could do was to create a place of escape where the people close to her could come when they needed to.”

Rika’s experiences at Shinoi’s house with her friends help her to conceptualize what she wants from her future. The space has afforded her a newfound sense of community and safety. She thus decides to create a similar place in her own home for her friends, a decision that spurs her into productive, regenerative action. The moment conveys how Rika has changed, in that she owns her weaknesses and claims her strengths.

“The classic and the new, the bitter and the sweet, the costly and the easy-to-come-by seasonal ingredients, the soft and the hard, the powerful and the delicate—she wanted to include anything that appealed to her, trusting in her instincts as she combined things. That was the true pleasure of cooking and, it seemed to Rika, a route to enriching her life.”

Rika’s reflections on food and cooking are connected to her newfound outlook on life. Cooking as Love and Care has transformed how Rika sees herself, her relationships, and her future. She likens exploring food to exploring the world, a metaphoric parallel that underscores how eating and cooking have contributed to her personal growth.

“She wasn’t like Kajii’s victims. She could get up of her own accord, she could put things in her own mouth. She could taste them, too. She would ask for help.”

The narrator’s use of anaphora and a declarative tone conveys Rika’s internal resolve. Rika refuses to succumb to her sadness and despair. She is making an active change in the present moment and exercising her agency, which, in turn, conveys her desire to grow and live a realized life.