53 pages • 1 hour read
Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder
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Themes
Cooking as Love and Care
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination.
Rika Machida’s work with Manako Kajii transforms her perspective on food and cooking. As a 33-year-old woman living in Tokyo, Japan, Rika’s understanding of the culinary arts “is steeped in intense misogyny” (13). She’s been taught to equate cooking with her alleged female duty to men. Furthermore, because “a woman [who isn’t] slim” is seen as someone who isn’t “worth bothering with” (23), Rika has denied herself the enjoyment of eating. She lives a rigid lifestyle, ensuring her weight never surpasses 50 kilos. However, when she starts to connect with her research subject Kajii about food and cooking, Rika starts to reconsider the possibilities that food and cooking might offer her. With Kajii’s guidance, she begins to eat at different restaurants and cook new recipes. Over time, these pastimes grant Rika a new way to connect with others and to care for herself.
The novel’s inclusion of food descriptions shows Rika’s evolving relationship with cooking. The more food she eats and cooks, the more enriched her life becomes. In turn, the narrative becomes increasingly saturated with detailed descriptions of food and Rika’s eating experiences. In Chapter 1, for example, after Rika cooks herself rice with butter and soy sauce, she reflects on the meal her best friend Reiko Sayama recently made her:
The meal that Reiko had cooked her was so delicious that Rika could still now recall every part of the sensation of eating it. Its fragrance, its restrained yet impactful flavors, had seemed to gently embrace her exhausted body. The seasonal ingredients had filled her with a sense of vitality that had carried over to the following day. This was a different kind of deliciousness to that—a more blatant forceful deliciousness, that took hold of her from the tip of her tongue, pinned her down, and carried her off to some unknown place (34).
The narrator employs sensory detail and figurative language to capture the powerful nature of Rika’s recent culinary experiences. The food not only nourishes her but also awakens and transports her. Diction like “forceful,” “pinned,” and “carried” captures the intensity of this experience for Rika. Passages such as this one accumulate throughout the novel and illustrate how cooking is becoming Rika’s new expression of self-love and self-care. The novel, in turn, highlights that cooking doesn’t have to be a gendered responsibility but can be a form of self-empowerment for women.
Over time, cooking grants Rika a way to bridge social divides and foster community, too. The images of her cooking and enjoying food with Reiko, Misaki, Yoshinori Shinoi, and her other friends and coworkers reify the communal powers of food. To transcend her isolation and avoid repeating her late father’s destructive habits, Rika uses food to care for herself and bring other people together. Food and cooking, the novel thus argues, are essential to both the individual’s survival and her community’s well-being.
Societal Pressures of Body Image
Rika’s evolving relationship with food challenges her to resist her society’s restrictive notions of beauty and femininity. In Japan, women are “supposed to have a particular fondness” for fashion and are expected to maintain slim figures to garner respect (9). As a journalist, Rika also works in an industry where people are rewarded with professional success if they maintain their appearance. For these reasons, she is constantly self-conscious about her figure. When she starts to visit Kajii’s favorite restaurants and sample her favorite recipes, Rika begins gaining weight—a slight physical alteration that compromises her status in the workplace and incites the concern and scorn of her acquaintances, colleagues, and friends. As a result, Rika begins to question her self-worth. While a woman like Kajii has “[i]gnor[ed] other people’s yardsticks,” refusing “to lose weight” and deciding to “remain plus-sized” (23), Rika isn’t sure this rebelliousness is in her nature. The novel uses Rika’s internal conflict over her body image to show how societal beauty standards compromise the individual’s sense of self.
Rika’s ongoing work to be more comfortable in her body is a form of resistance. Because she’s so invested in Kajii’s case, she is reluctant to give up her new eating and cooking habits; she also finds it hard to make time to exercise. For circumstantial reasons, she doesn’t lose the weight she’s gained and tries to settle into her new physique—eventually realizing how strange it is “that she’[s] lost her confidence and been so thrown by a few offhand comments” about her appearance (85). She’s spent years exclusively eating things she did not want to just to maintain her figure—a habit that proves both illogical and destructive. However, Rika has abided by these standards because “Japanese women are required to be self-denying, hard-working and ascetic, and in the same breath, to be feminine, soft and caring” (125). In choosing not to lose weight, Rika is casting off these pressures. Her decision not “to return to [her] former way of eating” in turn helps her to “[kill] off [her] past self” (134).
By the novel’s end, Rika has developed a pride in her new appearance. Her pride is a way for her to rebel against her cultural standards and claim autonomy over her body. Even after she distances herself from Kajii, she continues to cook and eat the way she wants to. Doing so gives her a more holistic experience of life and makes her feel more grounded in her reality, her body, and her sense of self.
Quest for Self-Realization and Liberation
Rika’s involvement with Kajii launches her journey toward self-discovery. At the novel’s start, Rika is 33 years old and feels settled into the life she has created and the identity she’s curated for herself. However, once Kajii inspires her culinary adventures, Rika begins to realize that she hasn’t been living at all. When she visits Robuchon, for example, she studies “the chandelier laden with so many crystals that it seems [s] likely to fall from the ceiling” and wonders, “Was this the real world? Was the world in which Rika usually lived the fake one?” (98). Because she lives alone, doesn’t cook for herself, rarely sees her boyfriend, and devotes all of her time to work, Rika has grown accustomed to living a muted experience. She has unconsciously become more and more like her self-isolating, self-destructive late father, ensnaring herself in a life absent of comfort, love, or pleasure. However, once she begins to eat and cook at her leisure, she finds a new way to express herself, claim autonomy over her life, and build human connections.
Each dish that Rika enjoys or makes ushers her toward self-liberation. She begins to understand the transformative power of food when she eats the butter ramen after having sex with Makoto in Chapter 5. Like Kajii, she realizes that she can “pursue her desires” of her own volition (150). The ramen tasted like freedom to her, as “the hot noodles [are] more assertive, more forceful than Makoto’s warmth and smell” (150). The words “assertive” and “forceful” convey the empowerment and autonomy Rika increasingly feels. Indeed, in making decisions about her diet, body, and pastimes according to her whims, Rika is learning who she is. The food choices she makes are metaphors for Rika’s work to identify and pursue her desires. Instead of letting others consume her and dictate her behaviors, Rika is consuming life the way she wants to.
Rika becomes a realized, liberated person by the novel’s end. She not only understands her tastes, needs, and desires more clearly but also has learned to invite others into her life. Her intimate conversations with her friends, colleagues, and family capture her desire to both be her own person and to maintain authentic connections. In the novel’s final scene, Rika announces to her guests that if she “feel[s] like” making a turkey “with Japanese flavoring,” “then of course it is [possible]” (447). Her words are assured and capture her new sense of self-confidence. At the same time, she is communicating and sharing her ideas with others. The novel thus shows how trying new things can change the individual’s impression of herself and create new opportunities for connection.
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