Butter

Manako Kajii sits in a Tokyo detention house, convicted in the court of public opinion of seducing a series of lonely businessmen with her lavish home cooking before their suspicious deaths. She refuses to speak to the press — until journalist Rika Machida, on a friend's advice, writes to ask not about the killings but for her recipe for beef stew. So begins an unlikely correspondence conducted almost entirely through food.

As Rika visits again and again, following Kajii's exacting instructions to cook and eat with total attention, the interview curdles into something more intimate and unsettling. Rika begins to change — in her body, her appetites, and her sense of herself — and to see how relentlessly the world polices women's hunger, ambition, and shape. Drawing in Rika's oldest friend Reiko and a chorus of very different Japanese women, the novel widens from a true-crime puzzle into a panoramic study of contemporary Japan.

Loosely inspired by the real case of Kanae Kijima, the "Konkatsu Killer," Asako Yuzuki's novel — translated into English by Polly Barton — is a sensuous, sharply feminist story about food, fatphobia, loneliness, and desire.