Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder

The novel is saturated with repeated images and descriptions of butter. Before Rika Machida becomes involved with Manako Kajii, she doesn’t use butter and is unfamiliar with its taste. Tokyo’s recent butter shortage has also kept her from trying and appreciating the substance. However, when Kajii tasks Rika with eating warm rice topped with cold, specialty butter, Rika begins to realize the transformative power of food. Butter is symbolic of desire and pleasure and effectively awakens Rika’s character to how banal her life has been.

The narrator’s and characters’ descriptions of butter underscore its transformative capacities. When Kajii tells Rika to make the rice, for example, she insists, “When I’m eating good butter I feel somehow as though I were falling” (30). Rika soon discovers that it is “indeed, a lot like falling” and feels as if the butter on rice has transported her to a new realm of experience (30). Throughout the subsequent chapters, eating and cooking with butter mobilizes Rika’s Quest for Self-Realization and Liberation. Indeed, butter is a rich and decadent substance. Choosing to eat it is thus “an individual and egoistic compulsion” (179). When Rika stops denying herself the things that she wants, she begins to enjoy her life.