Hooked by Asako Yuzuki

What a great cover.

Eriko has everything on paper. Prestigious job in a Tokyo trading firm, devoted parents and a spotless apartment. What she doesn't have is a single real friend. When she engineers a meeting with Shoko, a likeable housewife blogger she's been following obsessively, she believes she's finally found her person.

What follows is a slow, unsettling unravelling. Admiration tips into fixation, fixation into something darker. Asako Yuzuki is forensic about loneliness and what it can make people do.

Butter

Butter was my introduction to Asako Yuzuki (also deftly translated by Polly Barton) and it was one of those reads that lingered with me (as well as giving me hunger pangs). So when Hooked landed I was happy to give this a go.

Whereas butter was more of a slow burning literary thriller, I’d say this is more of a character study of two women, Eriko and Shoko, who both want to be recognised for where they are in their lives and are ultimately seeking connection and acceptance in their own ways.

Eriko and Shoko

The book moves between the two women in a twin narrative, and you get deep into the architecture of their inner lives — the overthinking, the jealousy, the insecurity that sits just beneath the surface of everything. Eriko's obsession with Shoko darkens gradually, her behaviour tipping from awkward to something more unsettling. There's an inevitability to how it all unravels.

Shoko begins as Eriko's opposite — easygoing, unambitious, apparently unbothered. But her growing online following starts to pull her into territory she wasn't prepared for. Others' perceptions begin to shape her, and slowly she becomes the product. It's a quiet transformation but a telling one.

There were moments I found genuinely uncomfortable — one scene between Eriko and her manager had me reading faster just to get through it. Eriko isn't easy to like. At her worst she seems completely unhinged, so deep in her own head that she's lost the plot entirely. But by the end I'd found some sympathy for her, which I hadn't expected.

There's also a neat thread running through the novel around Eriko's work — she's trying to push through a deal to reintroduce the Nile perch, a carnivorous fish, back into the Japanese market. Yuzuki doesn't labour the metaphor but it's there if you want it.

Themes

As a bloke it was an interesting read for me about the societal expectations placed on Japanese women, and about loneliness in adulthood. It reinforced the idea that Japan is a patriarchal society, and many of the themes of women not having children, population decline and rural depopulation are popping up in a non-fiction book I’m reading about the same subject.

I’ve read other books about loneliness and I thought this was a modern take about the ache that we have for connection, though in the book a lot of it is a total desperation to be liked.

So much of our online lives seem to be a constant search for validation. Here we see Shoko not really caring to begin with - and that becomes the reason for her online popularity. Soon she is sucked into the whole vortex of needing to be liked, of obsessively reading comments and ultimately publicity.

My blog has never been popular, so this wasn’t something I could in any way relate to. I’m happy to remain permanently under the radar, even if means my hopes of reading books and blogging about them from a cottage overlooking the Atlantic ocean on the west coast of Ireland seem to be rapidly diminishing.

Summary

I liked this well enough, but it didn’t have the same drive for me as ‘Butter’. It’s not a thriller, though there is a uneasiness to some of the scenes in the book, and I was generally happy enough to keep reading, as curious as I was about where Eriko and Shoko's paths would take them.

I seemed to read the earlier sections a bit more quickly, and I felt it fizzled out a bit towards the end, but I think it was a suitable ending for both characters.

400 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 2015 -

Translated by Polly Barton - republished March 12, 2026 by Fourth Estate

I no longer include Amazon links in my reviews. Please support your local library and bookshops. Libby is also great.

If you do wish to purchase online, feel free to support independent bookshops and contribute to the hosting of this website by purchasing via  Bookshop.org 

Many of you do, and it contributes to the upkeep of the site and allows me to buy the occasional book (via bookshop.org, of course).

Asako Yuzuki’s ‘Butter’ featured on my list of Books to read before you visit Japan