By Hannah Osborne
Asako Yuzuki’s novel Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder is the latest literary sensation by a female Japanese writer to be served to, and savoured by, an international audience.
A reporter tries to investigate a suspected serial killer who has apparently lured a succession of men to their deaths by gastronomic means. To say any more would spoil the novel’s many narrative pleasures. But Yuzuki’s bestseller is just the latest fictional offering from Japan that writes about food as a means to explore women’s place in Japanese society and to subvert the very notion of “a woman’s place”.
The topic is a well-established, albeit under-researched aspect of contemporary Japanese women’s fiction (although the author of Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature, Tomoko Aoyama’s, fascinating article on the subject is a great place to start).
Here, I invite you to sample four tasty literary courses that present, for your delectation, the trials and travails of post-war Japanese women.
Japanese readers of Yuzuki may be aware of the writer’s fascination with Fumiko Hayashi. Hayashi wrote prolifically, from the late 1920s until her early death in 1951, about the everyday struggles of doggedly determined and resilient women from the underclass.
Her works include Diary of a Vagabond (1930), Late Chrysanthemum (1948) and Floating Clouds (1951), all of which (among many others) have been adapted for film by the master of literary adaptations, Mikio Naruse.
Hayashi, who was born in abject poverty, undoubtedly shared Yuzuki’s fascination with writing about food. Diary of a Vagabond (her literary debut) is peppered with descriptions of the peddling of food and its ravenous consumption by the poor and hungry.
Hayashi’s final and unfinished novel, Repast, was the first to be adapted by Naruse, in 1951. The film’s bleak portrayal of post-war domesticity centres on a housewife’s childless marriage to a man of frugal means, at a time when a patriarchal status quo was keen to continue women’s relegation to, and subordination within, the home. The kitchen is used as a visual metaphor for her confinement and repression.
The radically avant garde early short stories of Mieko Kanai, one of Japan’s present-day literary greats, frequently depict the preparation and eating of food. In Kanai’s work, food is used as a mechanism for interrogating and dismantling the power balance between the sexes in early 1970s Japan.
In Rabbits (1973), for example, the narrator Lily gives up high school in order to indulge full time in her and her father’s favourite pastime: preparing, cooking and eating huge feasts with meat from the rabbits they keep. However, the more Lily takes on the role of butcher and cook, the further removed from conventional society she becomes. Her mother and brother’s sudden secret departure is only the start of her journey into obscurity.
In another early short story, Rotting Meat (1996), we meet a sex worker who has inadvertently put her career in jeopardy by taking on a butcher as a client. The butcher upsets the balance of her routines and payment systems, insensitively giving her a whole unbutchered pig as a gift, while leaving her body too “tenderised” by his visits to be able to see other clients. His desire to make her into a respectable lady and marry her poses one dilemma too many for our narrator, who finds herself forced to choose between her vocation and her lover.
Banana Yoshimoto’s acclaimed novella Kitchen was a literary sensation when it first appeared in 1988, winning literary prizes in Japan and becoming an instant bestseller.
It follows orphaned girl Mikage as she negotiates the loss of her entire family by retreating to her late grandmother’s kitchen. How Mikage reconfigures the space as a place of comfort and wonder as she processes her loss leads to some breathtaking descriptions of things as seemingly mundane as vegetable peelers, glasses and bowls of rice and pork.
The centrality of the kitchen as a place where the mundane is transformed into objects of desire is revelatory of the optimism that characterised the years of the Japanese bubble. During this time, most Japanese people identified themselves as the wealthy middle class; opportunities for study, travel and consumerism abounded; and the possibility to break free of conventional gender roles appeared to be at hand.
Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store Woman about a neurodivergent woman who finds contentment and fulfilment in the regulations and regularities of her job at the convenience store is an off-beat, eccentric delight.
Keiko, the protagonist, spends her days surrounded by the food that she uses to stock shelves, as the hours are marked off by the predictable rushes for breakfast, lunch and snack times by businessmen and locals. The store’s endless sounds, and its ability to speak to the protagonist even when she is not at work, make it as omnipresent to her as the bento boxes she eats to survive: “When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.”
Murata shows how Keiko’s willing surrender to the routines and rules of her job is actually a subversion of the expectations Japanese society has for her as a single woman.
Hannah Osborne is Lecturer in Japanese Literature, University of East Anglia. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence
