Hooked by Asako Yuzuki review – follow-up to global hit Butter

Asako Yuzuki’s international bestseller Butter was a taste sensation that mixed a true-crime story of a convicted gourmet killer with a critique of capitalist society and deep-seated misogyny; Yuzuki’s prose, a blend of the banal and the profound, fuelled its success.

Hooked is the follow-up for English-language readers, though it was written earlier, in 2015, and again benefits from Polly Barton’s crackling translation. More introspective in tone, its high-wire plot and uneven trajectory deliver a relentlessly dizzying experience that some fans of Butter may see as a trial run.

The novel centres on two 30-year-old women in Tokyo: Shoko, a laid-back, unambitious stay-at-home wife, and Eriko, a perfectionist senior executive at a seafood company. Eriko becomes obsessed with Shoko’s pseudonymous blog, The Diary of Hallie B, the World’s Worst Wife, and engineers an encounter at a cafe mentioned in a post.

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