Food & Gender Politics in Asia: BUTTER – Asako Yuzuki, CHHAUNK – Abhijit Banerjee, PERFECT MATCH (Netflix)
Butter jumped off the shelf at me in multiple bookshops. I’m glad I got the one with a cover depicting a cow and the title in the original Japanese. This is a book about food, first and foremost. What it represents, the games for which it becomes a pawn, the politics in which it is currency.
The other cover with a hand lifting a cloche suggests a sexuality that isn’t true to the story. The caption of ‘A novel of food and murder’ is also a bit misleading. Multiple people have gone into this book assuming it to be a thriller or a murder mystery and finding themselves disappointed. The book isn’t that and in my opinion, it’s something richer and better.
‘Butter’ serves a feast of words using ingredients of gender
‘Butter’ by Asako Yuzuki is a book written for women, about womanhood. We define our gender identity based on other people. Men teach others how to be men. In theory, women should teach other women about womanhood too. But this too is overwhelmingly influenced by what cis men think and want.
Manako Kajii (based on a real case) stands accused of the murder of several men. The dead victims are all much older men and have been involved in dubious relationships of sex-and-wealth transfers with Kajji. All of them have died of non-suspicious causes and being their age, have been expected to die anyway.
But Kajji’s trial-by-media includes body-shaming and slut-shaming, things that don’t sit right with Rika, a journalist with a men’s magazine. In her quest to present Kajji in a fairer light, she finds herself questioning her empowerment, re-examining gender definitions and delving into her own traumas.
Rika is obssessed with the idea that Kajji is being unfairly represented because she isn’t thin. Kajji is completely unapologetic about her size. But confusingly, the prisoner also claims to hate feminists, spewing vitriol on independent women who don’t need men. Rika, fighting glass ceilings, trying to be a Cool Girl, daughter to a mother who won’t accept help, is dumbfounded.
Her best friend, Reiko is worried by what she thinks is an unwholesome obssession for Rika. Their friendship holds tightly to a bond even as their differences in relationship status pull them apart. We also meet Rika’s mother who walked away from slavery under an abusive husband right into hard labour under an ageing (and abusive) father. In the interim, she raises her daughter alone while apologising for not being able to make elaborate meals for her and staying thin, polite and efficient. Every chapter is steeped in the judgements that women pass on each other, the disappointments caused by men and the fantasies that have nowhere else to go but be projected on other women or turned inward into self-loathing.
Food is at the center of it all. It’s spoken of in loving, seductive tones by Kajji who weaponises it to survive. Rika’s dinner table traumas inform her indifference but she plunges into a pursuit of culinary pleasure to understand Kajji better. Reiko is frantic about building a tradwife world and food is the foundation on which her fantasy must rest.
What ‘Butter’ says about Japan & Japanese culture
The book was originally written in Japanese but if I didn’t know that, I would never have guessed that I was reading a translation. The story felt immensely relatable to me, an Indian woman similarly crushed under the burdens of male abuse, disproportionate labour, slut-shaming and mansplaining.
What was different was the politeness underlying every interaction. I’m not saying the people are actually better. But the violence is insiduous, the predations are quieter, the misogyny is nice enough to be invisible. Yet, this is a culture where underage girls are openly objectified and turned into sex objects by much older men. As the story goes, it’s where a young woman is targetted simply because old, rich men wanted to sleep with her despite her being fat.
The book made me think about Japan, a country that survived an atomic bomb attack by the Americans and lived to tell the tale. Was the reticence and politeness a trauma reaction, a collective way for the culture to survive that catastrophe? The book never mentions Hiroshima or Nagasaki. We don’t hear about it in any form of popular culture today.
Contrast this with the decades that Hollywood has spent spinning sympathy yarns about the Holocaust (even as they finance & glorify a much larger and more horrific genocide on Palestine). Think about Americans going on and on about 9/11 while they continue to fund terrorism in other countries and profit off the wars they create. Japan in contrast, seems very quiet and disturbingly so.
The population is ageing, a fact lightly touched on in the stories of Rika’s mother’s lifetime labour. And at least some women are questioning why men will choose to wither away and die without a woman to babysit them instead of entering the kitchen themselves. I don’t know what is coming when a culture like this exists as a silent, defiant counterpoint to the louder, more dramatic West.
LizzyBeth told me about eating food themed to food podcasts she was listening to and it gave me an idea. Twice, I visited a Tibetan restaurant to partake of chopsticks and tea, with only ‘Butter’ keeping me company. Momos were the perfect bridge between the Japanese book and an Indian me.
‘Perfect Match’ is a perfect accompaniment to ‘Butter’
I also chanced upon a C-drama (apparently this is a thing) titled ‘Perfect Match’ on Netflix. Later, I’ve dipped into a few K-dramas and there is a difference. It’s not just the language but K-dramas feel a lot more like Bollywood/Hollywood in the way they tell stories. But ‘Perfect Match’ had a slower, considered pace while things still continued to unfold.
Everyone looked really good. It’s because most of the main cast is very young, a fact I realised only on watching the add-on show where the actors outside costume play games. And ‘Perfect Match’ is a period piece set in Song dynasty China. Gorgeous interiors and exteriors, breathtaking costumes and distinct looks for every character (really, no excuse for racist ‘they all look alike’ jokes).
A widowed mother with five daughters and one adopted daughter come to the big city. The oldest daughter was married young to help support the family and was widowed shortly after. The second daughter is newly married to a man who runs around a bit too much. The mother is impulsive and loud-mouthed but also brave and fierce, raising her daughters to be similarly so, enough that their reputation as ‘all tigresses’ precedes them. They set up a tea shop and many hijinks follow.
How ‘Perfect Match’ looks at gender
Every daughter’s story is unique. The sisters all stand up for each other, sometimes in funny ways. True, the story speaks often of dowry, concubines, virginity, rape and street harassment. But none of these are presented as acceptable. And the women’s reactions are played for laughs, ranging from roundhouse kicks at a would-be rapist to chess-like strategies combatting the glass ceilings of business.
I really enjoyed the depictions of the men. Every single one comes with their share of notably male problems, ranging from womanizing to territoriality to ageism and projecting insecurities onto women. But it seems like the cultural assumption is that dramatic displays of anger or violence are undignified and unmanly. So we only see scenes of violence where petite, daintily dressed young women wield a stick or deliver a flying kick in the faces of poker-faced men who barely flinch.
Male storytellers usually ignore how traumatising even ‘normal’ stories are to women audiences when they describe or depict so much predation and violence by men on women. This feels like a decided choice to flip those tables. And because of their relative size and the accoutrements of elaborate hairdos and flowing gowns, it never seems like these actions will cause any actual harm or even scare the recipient.
I watched ‘Perfect Match’ alongside reading ‘Butter’ and completed both book and show on the same day. ‘Perfect Match’ brought the sweetness, light and laughs to the intense, brooding quietness of ‘Butter’. I think I would have enjoyed each of them less if it hadn’t been for the other. And that’s also a metaphor for a good meal – thoda meetha, thoda teekha.
Adding a tadka of ‘Chhaunk’ to my journey
I was in the middle of reading Asako Yuzuki’s ‘Butter’ when I spotted ‘Chhaunk’ in bookstores. A brightly coloured cover, an intriguing single word title about food and hardbound like Butter, I bought it greedy for my next book course, even as I was devouring the Japanese book.
I jumped into reading ‘Chhaunk’ the minute I finished ‘Butter’. Since I’d paired ‘Butter’ reading with a couple of Tibetan momo meals and a daily viewing of an episode of the Chinese ‘Perfect Match’, I wanted to repeat the idea. I opened the book for the first time, seated in a local fusion food place.
Not the overpriced hipster kind but a Gujarati-run vegetarian only restaurant offering such twists on ‘foreign foods’ like avocado sev puri and nachos dripping with spicy tomato chutney. It was a week day so it was quiet but the restaurant owner recognised me and we started a conversation. He told me about his days in the merchant navy and about the evolution of Andheri West from a far-flung suburb to the most happening part of Mumbai.
And I promised to lend him this book once I finished it. “But,” I said ruefully, “The recipes are mostly non-vegetarian. Bengali author, after all. So I can’t make any of them at home.” It was a heavy-handed hint asking if he could offer up an innovation. I’ll wait and if he takes that up, I’ll feel like this book and I have completed our journey together.
Because ‘Chhaunk’ is about people, conversations and ideas. Economics sounds like a boring/intimidating word to many people who aren’t in that field of study or work. But as another economist friend proves, it is a whole way of thinking about human life, the practices we follow and the systems we have in place, to serve us.
I enjoyed the first chapter but then I would, wouldn’t I? Titled ‘Women and Work’, it touches lightly upon the the disproportionate gender balance in the workplace. The book reads more like a collection of columns and this was an absolute banger to start on. Each chapter begins with a personal anecdote around food, draws out a core idea (like labour, privilege, ageism etc.), offers some factual insights and ends with three recipes.
I started by highlighting sentences I enjoyed and making notes in the margins as I did for ‘Butter’. But I realised soon that this book doesn’t really lend itself to that kind of activity. ‘Butter’ was fiction and lingered on certain ideas, allowing them to simmer in the reader’s mind while keeping a conversation going – like watching, even aiding someone to cook in a kitchen.‘Chhaunk’ in comparison, is a packaged ready-to-eat meal complete with the cutlery of facts and actionables (recipes).
I remember my friend Moksh telling me about getting to know his wife Aditi during their engagement. He said he was disappointed to find that she wasn’t a reader like himself. But, he added,
“When I visited her home for the first time, I noticed a shelf full of cookery books. And I realised, she reads! She reads books about food and cooking, that’s all. She is a reader!”
Aditi, by the way, has run a baking business, a food consultancy and is a digital marketer, arguably a profession that needs one to be constantly curious and consuming stories.
‘Chhaunk’ and gender
Coming back to ‘Chhaunk’, the first chapter alone didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know. Shrayana Bhattacharya (also an economist) wrote an entire book titled ‘Reluctantly Seeking Shah Rukh’ on gender politics in the Indian labour force. But I guess it is nice to have a buffet of ideas to pick from, especially contextualised to India and as much as I hated it, by a man in a position of authority. I hope men will read this book and listen.
I was a bit disappointed that the recipes at the end didn’t have anything specific to do with the theme of the chapter. What could have been included? Easy shortcut recipes to please demanding in-laws & husbands? I’ve already seen ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’ but maybe I could watch ‘Mrs.’ to accompany my current reading of ‘Chhaunk’.
My guess is these recipes were included picking from the author’s own personal knowledge rather than to suit the theme. That’s another comment on the gender politics of food. As ‘Butter’s protagonist Rika says about men,
“Even if they were alone, even if they were eating food from a convenience store, it only took a little bit of imagination and application to transform the moment into a pleasurable one.”
How Chhaunk improves my experience with food
I am still reading ‘Chhaunk’ having decided to ignore the recipes. I’m not as enthusiastic a cook as I am a reader, any way. But it’s nice to have the recipes to read just to add validity to the author Abhijit Banerjee’s expert ideas of economics revolving around food.
And truly, I also feel validated by many of the ideas expressed in the chapters I have read so far. The second chapter is titled ‘The Burden of Age’ but also conveys ideas about class and how power flows through and within families. It’s the kind of thing that Indians are too sanskari to acknowledge. The recipes in this chapter are all vegetarian and are prefaced by a note about why they were included. If I weren’t so sensitive to sweet potatoes I’d try the Sweet Potato Stew. But Mimi’s Potatoes with Black Pepper sounds delicious. Perhaps I’ll give it my own dash with my new food love – green peppercorns.
Perhaps the right accompaniment to this book is cooking, not eating. Okay, maybe I am a slightly enthusiatic cook and a new cookery book reader.
Both Butter and Chhaunk stirred something deep in me—one through its rich, unsettling exploration of gender and survival, the other through its grounded reflections on society and sustenance. My reading experiences became more than just about words on a page; they extended into meals, conversations, and unexpected connections. Perhaps that’s the power of stories about food—they don’t just tell stories; they seep into your life, shaping the way you eat, think, and engage with the world.
Loved this post! I do love deep dives into food writing that explore it not as just a site of pleasure, but as things and actions that tell us so much about relationships, privilege, and place.
I’m currently on Chapter 4 of Butter (Ch 2 when I started reading this post I think). I found it sumptuous and rich, but that also meant I needed time away from the book to let everything marinate. I know I probably don’t have the full picture yet but there is already so much I can relate to as I journey with Rika into this connection she is sharing with Kajii, and how that gets her to rethink her own relationship with food, her body, and what her childhood and experiences have taught her to believe.
I, too, like the cover with the cow in it more. Especially considering the setting, both the importance and the reason the cows can’t give enough milk, and why butter means so much to the characters.
I really really love the way you have paired your books with not only tactile and audio but visual material that goes with what you’re getting out of the book. Perfect Match seems like such a lovely contrast to it, as does the food!
This week I found myself listening to a Japanese song called “Mori no chiisana restaurant” which combines themes of food and death. I don’t know if I’ll find it pairing as well with the book as I continue reading, but I find a lot of comfort in listening to it either while I read or after.
Chhaunk sounds so interesting too! Especially what you’ve said about the essays (the disconnect between recipes and essay themes notwithstanding). Whenever I think of tadka or tempering, I think of them as a flavour base that you use to *build* a dish, to complement your main ingredient. How jeera goes better in certain places and mustard in others, or what browning onion-garlic-ginger can do to a dish vs just sweating them. When you described how each chapter begins with a personal anecdote that lends to the core theme of the essay, this symbolism of “chaaunk” was what came to mind. And pairing it with that lovely avocado sev puri sounds just divine.