Hooked

Eriko has the apartment, the devoted parents and the job at a major trading company, and none of it touches the loneliness underneath. Her work reintroducing Nile perch to the Japanese market is as ambitious as everything else she does, but her attention drifts to a blog written by a housewife named Shoko, whose posts about convenience store meals and an untidy home run against every expectation of the role. Eriko finds her, befriends her, and the friendship tips steadily into possession. Asako Yuzuki, whose novel Butter found readers worldwide, writes appetite and control as versions of the same impulse, and keeps the unease close to the surface of ordinary domestic detail. What sets the pace: • A friendship that shifts from admiration into obsession by degrees • Food, work and domestic life used to carry the psychological pressure • Two women written against the expectations placed on each of them • Contemporary Japanese fiction from the author of Butter For readers of literary suspense, translated fiction and book club novels about women under pressure. Available at Boipoka.