11 March 2026

Asako Yuzuki’s acquired taste

Butter author Asako Yuzuki’s latest novel offers clues about what is behind the vogue for Japanese fiction

There is nothing more complicated in the observable universe than friendship between women – with its resentments and sexual jealousies, real affection and fake niceties, slow burns and catastrophic unravellings. Given that this is the central theme, plot and purpose of Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, I suppose we can forgive the author for the multiple infractions she otherwise commits against good linguistic taste. There must simply be too much else to think about.

This is the second book by Yuzuki – a bestselling Japanese millennial novelist – to be translated into English; it follows the zeitgeist-dominating success of Butter in 2024, which sold over 300,000 copies in the UK. We follow Eriko, a high-achieving weirdo who is “as flawlessly beautiful as any doll”, and Shoko, a scruffy blogger with a boring husband and a “hopelessly unrefined flat face”. Nagged by a profound existential loneliness, they find each other and try to become friends.

But remember that thing I said about Eriko being a weirdo? It makes for a hyper-compelling opening act – stalking, a bad sushi date, creeping trepidation, and the sense that you might actually be one fifth of the way through a novel that’s going to turn into a thriller. Eventually, however, the pacing falls apart. The excessive concern Yuzuki dedicates to the logistics of importing Tanzanian fish into the Japanese market could be to blame here. And there are only so many times the reader can be forced to ask, head in hands, “Why on Earth would these women ever be friends in the first place?”

While Yuzuki is too busy grappling with the themes and the plot, we end up in a banal linguistic universe where sunsets are “hazy” and smoke is “thick”, where the sun is “bright” and tears “spurt.” Resentment “lapped through her body like a wave” while she “curled up in a blanket… like a bug in a chrysalis” (extraneous simile alert). Meanwhile, Eriko’s life was formed of a series of perfect layers “like an exquisite mille-feuille”. Several hundred pages later, Shoko says her father’s toenails – “which had turned black and formed multiple layers” – were also like a mille-feuille. What does she think a mille-feuille looks like?

As a prose stylist – though maybe some of these choices fall within the purview of the translator, Polly Barton – Yuzuki pinballs between the glib and the strange with arresting intensity. It’s a good story, let down at the sentence level. And that’s not where Yuzuki’s chronic uniqueness ends. Hooked is a novel that takes the MFA cliché about good writing – “show, don’t tell” – and laughs in its face. This book belongs to the competing and all-the-rarer “tell, tell, tell” school of novelising.

Here, for example, is how Hooked handles Shoko’s internal angst. After spending the best part of a chapter carefully but indirectly casting Shoko as a woman tormented by her outsideriness, Yuzuki loses her nerve and says: “Becoming close with Eriko might help her finally shake off the ever-pervasive sense of being an outsider.” Or how about when Eriko, in a moment of anxiety, recalls in precise detail the recipe for a warm milky drink. Using all the context clues available, the average reader will be able to deduce what Eriko is really longing for: childhood comfort. But Yuzuki loses her nerve again and rounds off the passage: “That was what she most wanted now. The drink that her mother had made for her when she couldn’t sleep as a young girl.” More than once I felt myself stifling a scream: “I KNOW!”

But, this close reading of a relationship between two off-putting women survives on the strength of the subject matter. I suspect it will also survive for another reason: the Anglosphere – but Britain most specifically – is obsessed with stories about Japan. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata encouraged us to probe the unfamiliar existence of an autistic 30-something working in Tokyo’s financial district. In Hooked the reader will understand the women in the universal sense. But a cynic might suggest curiosity is really piqued by the exoticism of it all – the foreign fast-food chains, the sweet melonpan, the office dynamics at Japan’s answer to Amazon.

The British reader’s head will say, “I am a cultural omnivore compelled by the full range of the female experience”; her heart will say, “Aren’t these foreigners strange!”

Hooked: A Novel of Obsession
Asako Yuzuki
4th Estate, 400pp, £14.99

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[Further reading: Michael Pollan’s hunt for consciousness]