Book excerpt: Butter by Asako Yuzuki
a young journalist's encounter with the richness of food and how it defines women's role and appearance in the society
A sliver of butter perched atop a mound of steaming rice garnished with a single drop of soy sauce was a taste that had quickly become an addiction for Rika. She’d used lashings of the same butter on her morning toast, too, and as a result the hundred grams of Échiré that she’d bought in the Marunouchi store had vanished in just a few days. In the midst of the end-of-year rush at work, where she was having to shave off hours of sleep, she had no time to buy more.
When her hunger became too much to bear, she decided to sate it with whatever was close at hand – such had been her rationale for buying the Calpis. As it happened, though, this alternative brand brought together a creamy richness reminiscent of condensed milk, with a clean, fresh aftertaste. It was a different species of deliciousness to Échiré, whose umami-rich flavour lingered on and on eternally, and Rika took to it immediately.
Rereading Manako Kajii’s blog, Rika discovered that Kajii repeatedly sang the praises of Calpis butter, and felt a kind of pride that her taste buds had not misled her.
Previously Kajii’s prose had seemed to her ever so turgid, but now, since her butter awakening, the odd phrases here and there would fall into her like droplets.
Rika had asked for the cardboard box full of blog printouts, which Yū had been so impatient with her to tidy away, to be sent to her apartment. There was no space for it there either, so she had put away her table and resorted to perching a tray or placemat on top of the box so that it doubled as a dining table, resenting all the while how student-like it made her living situation.
The recipes for the French dishes and cakes featured on Kajii’s blog were far beyond Rika, reading to her like arcane magic spells hailing from another world, but this tarako pasta, which required that its components be simply mixed together, seemed like something she could manage, and what was more, she had succeeded in locating the necessary ingredients at the late-night supermarket.
These days, Rika hardly ever went into diners or bento take-out shops on her way home. She felt like the kind of meals she made – putting butter on hot rice or toast, and eating that together with salads, instant miso or other cup soups she’d bought – hardly deserved to be called ‘cooking’, but at least she no longer felt an aversion towards using her kitchen.
In the past, she hadn’t even been able to summon the energy to make instant ramen. She’d harboured the sense that using water or heat in any way would drain her stamina – a stance that now seemed to her very grudging.
The dusky-pink pollock roe she removed from its polystyrene packaging gleamed wetly and, for an instant, the image of Kajii’s puckered lips passed through her mind. Leaving its outer skin on, she broke up the roe with a fork and mixed it unfussily into the spaghetti.
She sliced off a knob of the Calpis with a knife and perched it on top, then watched as the pale-yellow solid gently began to change colour, spreading out to the sides and turning golden, mingling with the fish eggs. The full, milky aroma of the butter married with the salty marine tang of the roe as the scent of the dish went rising up to her face, and she breathed it deeply into her lungs.
She garnished the pasta with a scattering of shiso leaves she’d torn up with her fingers, then moved the bowl of pasta over to her cardboard box. There was a rosy-cheeked frankness about the pink of the roe, and in combination with the oozing butter, it looked positively carefree.
Rika took up her fork and wound up the spaghetti, before lifting it to her mouth.
Cloaked in a coating of minuscule fish eggs and butter, the spaghetti strands sprang around on Rika’s tongue as if in excitement. The dish was adequately salted, but there was a relaxed, mellow quality to its taste. What a wonderful combination pollock roe and butter made!
Though she said it herself, the spaghetti had been cooked to perfection. You didn’t find restaurants that served meals with this much butter, Rika thought. The more expensive the butter, the better the quality; the more that you used, the richer the taste.
Rika felt the deep and generous flavour of the dish pushing into the distance her sense of irritation with herself and how gutlessly she’d behaved that day.
In its upcoming issue, the Shūmei Weekly’s cover story was to be about a young, popular politician who was currently making great strides in his career, and the editorial desk had been pestering her for dirt on him. Rika had been covering him closely in the lead-up to the election, but from what she could make out, he was a truly good egg. And yet, she’d managed to pick through his plain-dealing behaviour and root out some slight idiosyncrasies and changes in expression, which were then exaggerated so as to paint him as the very picture of arrogance.
As if to banish all thoughts of the issue, Rika chewed enthusiastically on the flavoursome noodles. The bright, fresh taste of the shiso stimulated her appetite, and she found herself letting out an ‘mmmm’ of satisfaction. The fact that she’d created this taste herself added to the preciousness of the moment.
This was all it took, she thought, to experience a sense of satisfaction of a kind she’d not had before. To make something yourself that you wanted to eat and eat it the way you wanted – was that the very essence of gratification? Until not long ago, she’d had no idea what it was that she wanted to eat, but since she’d begun using her kitchen, she was becoming able to picture, albeit vaguely, the objects of her desires.
Copyright © Asako Yuzuki 2017
Extracted from BUTTER with permission from Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins UK
First published in the Japanese language by SHINCHOSHA Publishing Co., Ltd in Tokyo in 2017