Like ‘Butter’ by Asako Yuzuki? Here are four Japanese writers that explore misogyny through food

Asako Yuzuki’s novel Butter 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.

Fumiko Hayashi’s novels

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...

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