Hooked

Eriko has a spotless life: a demanding job in the seafood division of a large Japanese trading company, where she is working to bring Nile perch to the Japanese market, and not a single close friend. Shoko is a housewife who blogs about her chaotic, convenience-store-food life, and Eriko is a devoted reader. When Eriko tracks her down and befriends her, the two women seem to have found what each was missing.

But Eriko has little sense of how close is too close, and her need for control pushes the friendship toward obsession, threatening her own carefully laid plans and Shoko's life with it. Asako Yuzuki's novel is a tense, darkly funny study of loneliness, female friendship and the pressures placed on women at work and at home.

First published in Japan in 2015 as Nile Perch no Joshikai and winner of the Yamamoto Shugoro Prize, it was translated into English by Polly Barton in 2026, after the success of Yuzuki's Butter.