BUTTER

Rika Machida, an ambitious young reporter for a Japanese weekly, becomes obsessed with the suspected killer known as “Kajimana,” who extorted money from a string of lonely middle-aged men lured by her cooking.

Three of the men died in suspicious accidents, one of a drug overdose, another under a train, and another in a bathtub. Determined to score an interview with the assumed murderer, who is in a detention center awaiting a second trial, Rika overcomes the woman’s refusals by expressing great interest in food. To further gain her trust, Rika carries out the extreme assignments concocted by Kajimana, including having sex (with her droopy older boyfriend, as it turns out) before rushing out to consume butter ramen noodles at a particular restaurant. The ecstasy Rika experiences from the butter rush leads her to reject the usual dietary restrictions—and gain weight. That worries her, but the proudly corpulent Kajimana, an anti-feminist who flaunts her flesh in rejecting male conceptions of beauty and sexuality, mocks her concerns. The better Rika knows her (or thinks she does), the more she questions her new mentor’s part in the men’s deaths. Ultimately, the questions she doesn’t ask come back to bite her. Loosely based on a true story, Yuzuki’s debut novel, a bestseller in Japan, is a slow cooker at 464 pages—one with an appetite for indicting male-dominated society. But the book’s persistence, like that of its protagonist, proves to be one of its winning qualities. While not as seductive as the mouthwatering dishes Yuzuki describes, the liveliness of the writing, full of wry twists, breaks down any resistance.

Eating gets sexy in this offbeat confidence tale.