Butter did something strange to a lot of readers. It is nominally about a journalist, Rika, corresponding with Manako Kajii, a woman imprisoned in connection with the deaths of men she met online. But it spends its energy on beurre blanc, on rice with butter and soy sauce, on the specific transgression of a woman who cooks richly and refuses to apologise for her body.
By the end you are not sure whether you have read a crime novel or been slowly recruited. Here are six books that scratch some part of the same itch.
1. The Last Bites by Chris Weiss
If what held you in Butter was the correspondence, a woman on the outside slowly being reshaped by a prisoner who will discuss anything except the crime, then this is built on the same current.
Ella is asked to cook a last meal for a man on death row. He requested her by name, from a restaurant she has not worked at in years, and he will not say how he knows her. Every visit gives her a little more food and a little less answer.
Like Yuzuki, I am more interested in what cooking for someone means than in the mechanics of the crime. Ella has spent her career deciding, privately, who deserves her best work. Now the state has handed her the hardest possible case.
2. A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers
The most direct match on this list. A food critic narrates from prison, in gorgeous prose, how she came to eat several of the men she slept with. It shares Butter’s central argument, that a woman’s appetite is treated as a symptom while a man’s is treated as a personality, and it goes considerably further.
Where Yuzuki is patient and cumulative, Summers is a scalpel. Read this one second.
3. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Keiko is thirty-six and has worked at the same convenience store for eighteen years, which everyone around her treats as a medical condition. Short, deadpan, and savage about the pressure on Japanese women to want the standard things in the standard order.
The overlap with Butter is exact: a woman who has arranged her life to suit herself, and a society that reads that arrangement as a crime scene.
4. Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
Murata again, and be warned: this one goes to disturbing places involving food, family, and what it takes to stop performing normality. If Butter left you wanting something with the same cool surface and much more underneath it, this is that book.
Read the content warnings. Then read it anyway, because nothing else is like it.
5. Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
Three women in Osaka and Tokyo across two time periods, thinking hard about bodies: ageing, surgery, fertility, poverty, and who gets to decide what a woman’s body is for. Kawakami writes physical detail with the same unflinching attention Yuzuki gives food.
The least plot-driven book here and possibly the one that stays with you longest.
6. Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
The gentle one, and a necessary counterweight. A young woman, orphaned, finds that the only place she can sleep is beside a refrigerator, and slowly rebuilds a life around cooking and an unconventional household.
Where Butter uses food as seduction and weapon, Yoshimoto uses it as first aid. If the Kajii sections left you feeling faintly unwell, this is the recovery position.
If You Want the Crime Back
Butter readers who wanted more thriller and less essay should try the culinary thriller guide, which covers The Dinner, Tender Is the Flesh, and where Hannibal Lecter fits into all this. And if the prison correspondence was your favourite part, the real question underneath it, what a person asks for at the end, has its own rabbit hole.
The Opposite of All This
Every book on this list is about hunger as a problem, something to be managed, hidden, punished, or indulged until it becomes dangerous.
Candle is about the one uncomplicated version. It is a free iPhone app that remembers the birthdays that matter and taps you on the shoulder a week ahead, in time to actually do something. No wall of names, no counter of everyone you have failed, no red badge. When nothing is coming up it simply says so.
And when the gift ideas run dry, its favourite suggestion is the one nobody on this reading list can manage: cook for someone, for no reason except that you are glad they exist.
The Book This Site Is Attached To
The Last Bites is a thriller I’m writing now. A chef named Ella, whose career came apart a year before the restaurant she built won its star, gets a call from a warden: a man on death row has requested a last meal, and the dish he named is hers. She has five days, a kitchen that can’t make it, and no idea how he seems to know so much about her while she knows nothing about him.
The first three chapters are free, and they open the moment you sign up.
Or read the premise first.