53 pages • 1 hour read
Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder
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Symbols & Motifs
Butter
The novel is saturated with repeated images and descriptions of butter. Before Rika Machida becomes involved with Manako Kajii, she doesn’t use butter and is unfamiliar with its taste. Tokyo’s recent butter shortage has also kept her from trying and appreciating the substance. However, when Kajii tasks Rika with eating warm rice topped with cold, specialty butter, Rika begins to realize the transformative power of food. Butter is symbolic of desire and pleasure and effectively awakens Rika’s character to how banal her life has been.
The narrator’s and characters’ descriptions of butter underscore its transformative capacities. When Kajii tells Rika to make the rice, for example, she insists, “When I’m eating good butter I feel somehow as though I were falling” (30). Rika soon discovers that it is “indeed, a lot like falling” and feels as if the butter on rice has transported her to a new realm of experience (30). Throughout the subsequent chapters, eating and cooking with butter mobilizes Rika’s Quest for Self-Realization and Liberation. Indeed, butter is a rich and decadent substance. Choosing to eat it is thus “an individual and egoistic compulsion” (179). When Rika stops denying herself the things that she wants, she begins to enjoy her life. She seeks out pleasure, follows her desire each day, and dispels all of her associated guilt. Therefore, when Rika is eating butter, she is empowering and gratifying herself. When she denies herself butter, she feels less free and more restricted by Societal Pressures of Body Image and messaging regarding self-control.
Rika’s New Apartment
Rika buys a new three-bedroom apartment at the end of the novel. Her experience of spending time with her friends and colleagues at Yoshinori Shinoi’s apartment inspires her to secure this new home. Before this juncture of the novel, Rika lives alone in a tiny, sterile apartment. Once she begins hanging out with Shinoi, Reiko Sayama, Kitamura, and Yū Uchimura at Shinoi’s, she realizes that she wants “to have an apartment of her own, the same size as this one. Or no, the size [doesn’t] really matter—the thing [is] to have lots of individual rooms, so that people [can] have their privacy” (340). Shinoi has to sell his apartment, which means Rika and her friends will lose this safe place. She thus buys the new apartment to give her loved ones “a place of escape” (340), refuge, and community.
The new apartment is the setting where Rika hosts her first dinner party. At the party, she tells her friends that she’d like them “to use it, and stay over if [they] ever need to, like a dorm” (444). She is thus offering them a community base and a retreat from their otherwise stressful realities. The apartment is a place to gather together, share interests, and connect authentically. It illustrates Rika’s internal growth and conveys her newfound ability to care for and love others on her terms. In opening her new home to her loved ones, she is opening her heart.
Turkey
The turkey that Rika cooks for her dinner party is symbolic of self-realization. Rika initially sets out to host this event because she’s decided “to roast a turkey […] for her own enjoyment” and “invite ten people over to eat it” (387). She’s realized that Kajii never got to do so, because she refused others’ friendship and isolated herself. Rika is thus forming connections and claiming Cooking as Love and Care by preparing this lavish, unfamiliar dish for her colleagues, friends, and family.
The way that Rika cooks, enjoys, and thinks about the turkey underscores its symbolic significance. When Chizu first tells her about Kajii’s negative response to making the meal in culinary school, Rika realizes that what the turkey represents isn’t “an affluent, full life” but “something you make on your own, and give with generosity to your loved ones—not so unlike a safe space” (368). For these reasons, Rika devotes roughly three days to preparing the meal. She’s proud of herself when she completes the project because she’s accomplished her goal and satisfied her guests. Indeed, the gravy is rich “with the juices of the turkey, its taste seem[ing] to contain the umami from all the parts of the bird,” and when “soaked up with the hot biscuits […] the combination of the crumbly pastry and the juice [is] unbelievably good” (445). The narrator uses this careful, sensory language to capture the turkey’s significance. The meal is indeed Rika’s way of enjoying her own life, expressing her love to her friends, and sharing her talents with them. She’s able to cook the bird at the novel’s end because she’s finally completed her Quest for Self-Realization and Liberation.
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