Butter

Butter

Instead of food literature, Butter reads to me more like a slice of contemporary East Asian womanhood.

The reason I was drawn to it, however, is honestly much less profound: as a foodie, I have zero resistance to beautifully written food literature.

None of the textures, scents, colors, or flavors were lost in translation — which is more than I can say for some contemporary Japanese novels in English that read so miserably that I wondered if they were rendered by machine translation. With the detailed descriptions, I could almost visualize, if not taste, every delicacy referenced in the novel.

The narration was quiet and nuanced, with a tinge of dry humor. There was neither a tacky Hollywood-style reconciliation nor a deliberate literary device solely meant to shock the readers.

The only drawback? Reading it made me intolerably hungry the entire time.