Hooked - by Asako Yuzuki (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A Paperback Original

From the author of the international bestseller Butter comes a chilling and perceptive novel about obsession, female friendship, and the slow unraveling of two lives

Eriko's life looks perfect--from her prestigious job at a Japanese trading firm to her spotless apartment and devoted parents. Her newest project, to reintroduce the controversial Nile Perch into the Japanese market, is as ambitious as she is. But beneath her flawless surface lies a consuming loneliness. Eriko has never been able to hold on to a real friend.

Enter Shoko: a popular lifestyle blogger whose work Eriko follows obsessively. Shoko lives a life of controlled chaos--messy apartment, take-out dinners, a kind, easy-going husband. She writes about daily contentment, though her fractured relationship with her father gnaws at the edges of her happiness.

When Eriko orchestrates a "chance" meeting with Shoko, the two women strike up an unlikely connection. For a fleeting moment, Eriko believes she's finally found what she's always longed for. But as her fascination turns to fixation and Shoko's carefully balanced life begins to dissolve, both women are pushed to breaking points neither of them saw coming.

Deftly translated by Polly Barton, Hooked is a taut, provocative novel about modern womanhood, the hunger for connection, and the quiet, ordinary ways our lives can spiral out of control. With razor-sharp insight and disarming empathy, Asako Yuzuki explores how far we'll go to be seen and what happens when the ones who see us don't like what they find.

Review Quotes

Praise for Butter --

"The novel cleverly intertwines paeans to the pleasures of eating with indictments of Japan's standards for women." -- the New Yorker

"Asako Yuzuki has turned [Butter] into not just a fascinating psychological puzzle but also a damning indictment of Japanese misogyny and fatphobia." -- the New York Times

"The lure of Butter is the lure of butter: rich, salty and unctuous. . . . Butter is both an exploration of the life of an unusual femme fatale and a subtle polemic against the impossible beauty standards to which women are held." -- the Washington Post

"Ambitious and unsettling ... a thought-provoking and surprisingly feelgood take on friendship, transgressive pleasures, and society's impossibly contradictory expectations of women." -- the Guardian

"[Asako] Yuzuki takes a thrilling look into female relationships, revealing the complex nature of modern-day social conventions pertaining to a woman's appearance and her place in the home, and enriching the proceedings with mouthwatering descriptions of food. Like the meals Yuzuki describes, this leaves the reader satiated." -- Publisher's Weekly