In 2024 you couldn’t walk five steps into a bookshop without seeing the distinctive yellow front cover of Butter — Asako Yuzuki’s smash hit serial killer novel.
At that time the award-winning author was no stranger to the world of fiction, having published 22 other novels. But her work was yet to cross Japan’s borders.
Originally published for Yuzuki’s home audience in 2017, it was seven years before her team decided Butter was the story that should debut her voice to the English speaking world.
This new market lapped up the novel’s absurd murderous protagonist: “There are two things that I simply cannot tolerate: feminists and margarine”. Clearly there’s demand for quirky crime satires.
As of March 2026, Butter was sitting at about 270,000 sales in Japan, and nearly 1.5 million worldwide. So why wouldn’t Yuzuki’s publishing team try and keep a good thing going?
In tandem once again with translator Polly Barton, Yuzuki brings us another deranged story in Hooked. And it’s fighting a namesake battle.
Falling for the world’s worst wife
Meet Eriko, a beautiful, successful 30-year-old woman from Tokyo working in the seafood division of one of Japan’s largest trading companies.
Every morning at 6am she arrives at the office before anyone else, her sharp business mind clocking in for the task of opening up new markets.
If you saw her walking along the street dressed for work, you’d think she had it all, but the truth is she hadn’t managed to keep a friend since she was 15-years-old. Even after eight years at the company, she hadn’t so much as been invited for a drink or a stroll to the convenience store with the other female staff.
Her lifestyle is a recipe for spending too much time online: (1) perpetually empty social calendar (2) living with her parents (3) no pastimes.
So when Eriko isn’t working, she’s reading the blog of Hallie B, the self proclaimed “world’s worst wife”. Unlike the rest of the top Japanese homemaker blogs, Hallie B’s is a showcase of her “laziness”.
Since her husband earns enough money to support her, she spends majority of her days lounging in front of the TV before chucking together pre-made meals for dinner.
That’s until by “chance”, lonely Eriko meets Hallie B (real name Shoko) in a Denny’s. Well really, she stalked Shoko’s blog until she discovered that this was one of her regular dining spots.
To Eriko, their seemingly warm and fuzzy meeting signified the start of a deep friendship. After 15 years of rejection from friends and boyfriends alike, Eriko thought she had meet “the one” the woman she could essentially do life with.
Women are terrifying ‘creatures’
From that orchestrated meet-cute onwards, Eriko begins bombarding Shoko and infiltrating every part of her life. Don’t we want astute and observant friends?
It gets so bad that Shoko, who has been contacted by a publisher interested in turning her blog into a book, reluctantly reaches out to them to intervene.
What she didn’t bargain for was Eriko’s work drive being about half as powerful as her yearning for a close female bond.
Yuzuki tells this nail-biting stalker saga through alternating chapters from the third person limited perspectives of Eriko and Shoko. We see Eriko’s justifications for her outrageous behaviour, and Shoko’s fear and longing to get rid of her for good.
The prose is at times deliberately tedious, and the repeated carnivorous fish metaphors that mirror the parasitic friendship do become tiring.
But Yuzuki does masterfully evoke a hatred for Eriko out of her reader, you’ll practically want to scream at her to back off. Instead of founding a friendship based on a para-social obsession, could she not try getting a hobby and making friends slowly?
The truth is clear. Eriko is terrified of women, she just can’t understand them. She’s like a bizarre offshoot from the novel’s lacklustre cast of male characters, though she isn’t afforded the same benefit they are from society’s acceptance of their inability to have real connections with women. Instead, she’s a failure.
Yuzuki is using Eriko as a misogynistic mouthpiece, commenting on the practice of othering women by labelling them “crazy” and “terrifying creatures”. To Yuzuki, this flippant attitude lacks any empathy for the female experience. It’s precisely Eriko’s inability to see beyond her own perspective that has left her so alone.
The difference is that Eriko sees her lack of female friendships as a major failing, as Yuzuki writes: “These days, TV series and films about female friendship outperformed those centring love stories. Everyone flaunted their female friendships on social media.”
To someone naturally predisposed to perfectionism, the wild lengths Eriko goes to in order to cling on to Shoko are unsurprising, and come across quite deadpan. In Eriko’s view, sitting next to a friend shackled by blackmail is better than sitting alone.
Tech, truth and the twist
With any Yuzuki work it is best to ask yourself if the characters really are who they say they are.
Outside of Hooked’s central commentary on the potential for toxicity in female friendships amid a modern-life loneliness crisis, there is much else to be gleaned.
Through the storytelling vessel of wife-blogging, Yuzuki critiques the perfectionism-laden internet and the need for social media users to show proof of life online.
“Without photos, none of this would have any meaning at all,” she writes from Shoko’s perspective.
Yuzuki ponders why activities begun in an earnest pursuit for joy often become entangled by monetisation ploys.
It’s certainly the case for Shoko, who began blogging as a hobby, growing an audience as a result of her authenticity and her breaking of the “perfect wife” mould.
Of course, as she gained popularity, the publishing sharks started circling before she slowly stepped into the exclusive circle of homemaker bloggers and became obsessed with being perfect like them.
In her crafting of this plot, Yuzuki is really positing that even if we were given the choice to somehow unplug from the internet, we would never choose to do so.
Writing from Eriko’s perspective, she said people would pay any amount of money to find others who “felt the same as them”.
“It was this desire that made it so hard for people to give up the internet.”
What Yuzuki does masterfully is play a double bluff. By telling the story through both Eriko and Shoko’s eyes, she lulls her reader into thinking all the cards have been laid out. But she holds one close to her chest until the very end.
Though Hooked doesn’t have quite the same sheen as Butter, it’s still a feverishly good time.
Rating: 3.5/5
Hooked is out on March 12 and is available in-store and online.
https://thewest.com.au/entertainment/books/hooked-by-asako-yuzuki-review-stalker-friendship-tale-gets-under-the-skin-as-bestie-goals-turn-sinister-c-21903780
