BUTTER 🧈 Week 2

[pocketcat]

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Welcome to BUTTER Week 2

Week	Start Date	Chapter	Percentage	文庫ページ
Week 1	Jan 31	until line break ending with 電車に乗り込んだ	6%	40
Week 2	Feb 07	stop when you see chapter 3	13%	81
Week 3	Feb 14	until line break ending with 挑発するように揺れている	20%	124
Week 4	Feb 21	until line break ending with どうしても食べてみたくなったのだ	27%	167
Week 5	Feb 28	stop when you see chapter 7	37%	224
Week 6	Mar 7	stop at line break ending with 稀有な経験はないだろうと思う	46%	279
Week 7	Mar 14	stop at line break ending with 両手を打ち鳴らした	54%	323
Week 8	Mar 21	stop at the section beginning with 2月２４日	62%	371
Week 9	Mar 28	stop when you see the break 12	69%	413
Week 10	Apr 4	stop at line break ending さびしさがにじむことを。	78%	466
Week 11	Apr 11	stop at line break ending 再び汽笛が鳴った	86%	512
Week 12	Apr 18	stop at the end of the book, not including 解説	98%	584

Discussion Rules

• Please use spoiler tags for major events in the current chapter(s) and any content in future chapters.
• When asking for help, please mention things like chapter, page number, part of audio track, etc. Mentioning what version of the book you are reading may also help people locate the section
• Don’t be afraid of asking questions, even if they seem embarrassing at first. All of us are here to learn.
• To you lurkers out there: Join the conversation, it’s fun!

Readership stats

• I’m reading along with the club
• I’ve already read this and I’m here for the discussion
• I had no intentions of reading the book, but I desire to click a poll

[downtimes]

Oh boy. This is going to be a long one.

@StarlitGlitch

My main my now is oh boy Kindle is predicting it’ll take me 29 and a half hours to finish this book, which means reading about 24 minutes everyday until the end of the book club to stay on pace. I’m going to try to stay on track but it is daunting!

After this week’s reading, I’m now at 34:40h. So you are pretty fast already compared to me . All the lookups of the places we are at in Tokyo + looking into many of the foods combined with my normal grammar + vocabulary lookups if I’m uncertain I understand everything correctly, take quite a bit of time for this one.
I’m pretty sure I’ll continue with the story even though I’m not super into it. It has quite a good difficulty level and I feel my reading getting slowly better due to the slight challenge.

@pocketcat

I also found the descriptions and backstory detail exhausting to read. It reminded me at some points of reading 理由 by 宮部みゆき which was in itself a feat of endurance.

You are in for a especially grueling week I tell you. The first week still felt manageable for me regarding the amount of detailed descriptions. But now it felt like it really went overboard. Sometimes I lost the plot of the story because the thread is interrupted by 3-4 Kindle pages of some side tangent detailed description.
Especially the first part of this chapter went overboard for me. I get it, it’s butter-rice and cod-butter pasta. Not that great a meal in the grand scheme of things, do we really need 5 pages of explanation for them

The interaction between 恋人 (already forgot his name, sorry) and Rika was fascinating to me. How she thinks about why she was so bothered by his comment, especially. Even though he seems to have her wellbeing in mind when saying it.
I can see how she takes his comments as a rejection of her cooking. She clearly had expectations of him reacting more enthusiastically (again, “only” noodles with butter and cod…). I think looking forward to his reaction was a big part of why she prepared a serving for him, even if just unconsciously. Combined with the later part one can really feel that she craves a lot of outside validation from others.

Another thing I find interesting is how fast she seems to sympathise with 梶井. I mean, the woman is suspected of having murdered 3 people. But “oow she is in prison for the third Christmas in a row and can’t eat delicious Christmas cake…”. And we even learn a little later that the food in this prison is apparently especially good ^^. I’m not 100% sure if she really sympathizes with her or is still looking for an angle to get closer to fish for information. The lines seem blurry.

In that part I got totally lost. I totally forgot that she had another meeting scheduled with all the musings selecting a present for 梶井, her toilet interaction, and walking to the place. Her relationship with 篠井 also seems fascinating, though. Apparently she doesn’t feel the need for makeup in front of him and can talk freely, share stuff that she doesn’t share with others, all while they only meet once a month to exchange information a little. Fascinating, let’s see how often 篠井will come into play in the future.

But oh my god, from ordering some butter-corn until it arrives we have another 5 pages of musings with only marginal dialog in between. For my reading pace, some of these sections really drag.

What the hell. When she was musing how she was on purpose making her all-girls-school classmates thirst for her. To make herself feel better. I find that part kinda funny to read. Interesting to read her thoughts on manipulating others that way. I’m not sure if I understood everything 100% though.

I’m definitely interested in other people’s takes and what others took from this week’s reading, especially what stood out to others. Were the same interactions interesting to others; did I misinterpret some of the stuff I wrote?

[pocketcat]

@downtimes

Especially the first part of this chapter went overboard for me. I get it, it’s butter-rice and cod-butter pasta. Not that great a meal in the grand scheme of things, do we really need 5 pages of explanation for them

I’m catching up on this week (just a bad week for reading for me overall - only just finished my other club ) and I’m glad to know it’s heavier at the start because I only just passed the pasta and was like, "wow, that was a lot of intensely detailed food description "

[eefara]

@downtimes

I’m definitely interested in other people’s takes and what others took from this week’s reading, especially what stood out to others. Were the same interactions interesting to others; did I misinterpret some of the stuff I wrote?

I agree with your comments on how generally unimpressive the food is she’s so rapturously describing. Like, girl, what were you eating before this? Literal cardboard? Butter’s great, but buttered rice isn’t exactly on my top 10 rave about foods. I suppose it’s a good lesson to pause and really consider and appreciate the food you eat, which I do like.

@downtimes

Combined with the later part one can really feel that she craves a lot of outside validation from others.

Yeah, I’m starting to see a pattern of “horrifically overworked single woman with basically no friends or hobbies slowly realizes life is worth living outside of work and she only really has this suspected murderer to validate herself”.

[StarlitGlitch]

I finished the reading right before the start of week 3 but didn’t get around to writing my thoughts!

@downtimes

After this week’s reading, I’m now at 34:40h. So you are pretty fast already compared to me . All the lookups of the places we are at in Tokyo + looking into many of the foods combined with my normal grammar + vocabulary lookups if I’m uncertain I understand everything correctly, take quite a bit of time for this one.
I’m pretty sure I’ll continue with the story even though I’m not super into it. It has quite a good difficulty level and I feel my reading getting slowly better due to the slight challenge.

I am glad to hear I’m not the only one surprised by how long this book will take to read! I will admit I haven’t been looking up every things I probably should be. I’ve looked up most of the restaurants/stores but sometimes when there is a long list of ingredients I get lazy with looking up ones I don’t know.

Actually, at the beginning of this reading my predicted time to finish the book went up by several hours due to how dense it was! But the end part of the reading went by more quickly and it went back to the same pace as before.

Random, but the other day I sat next to a girl in my work cafeteria who had the Butter paperback with her! I debated trying to talk with her but chickened out since she was busy messaging someone and was about to leave it seemed.

Now I’ll put more specific thoughts on the reading and use a spoiler block to be safe.

Summary

Sounds like people have already looked them up, but just in case the restaurants and shops mentioned in the book seem to all be real! Here is the actual エシレ butter shop in 丸の内: Google Maps Perhaps I should try out their butter sometime for the sake of the book. The shop looks a bit more like a regular store you’d find in a mall than I was expecting.

I also found the Christmas cake mentioned! It is very different from the usual strawberry shortcake typically eaten for Christmas here.

Now for my actual thoughts. Same with others I am tired of the long food descriptions. I am not a foody and have never enjoyed talking about or listening about food. When my coworkers talk about food during lunch I just sit silently and wait for it to be over. I can’t describe foods very well, and even hearing well thought out descriptions of food it never seems to match to me what eating the food is actually like.

I was most surprised this chapter by Rika suddenly divulging that she used to do thirst traps at her girls’ school, like with the girl who said she used Rika as a next best substitute because she desired to love a man. I didn’t expect her to do something like that, but I suppose it makes sense in the context of her wanting to be wanted by others.

I think a theme from this book is about people having desires, how they react when they are not fulfilled, and then how that fits into a feminist lens.

Kaji desired to be taken care of in life and to enjoy the finer things. She felt that her desires deserved to be fulfilled, and when she felt she couldn’t have this fulfilled she felt entitled to kill men to try to fulfill this.
Rika on the other hand desires more from her relationship with Makoto, but feels that she needs to suppress her desires and to not be a burden.
However, Kaji hates feminists, and Rika seemingly would agree with feminist ideals. Rika has made some mentions essentially saying how even she doesn’t understand why this is.

Butter is something people also want in the book, but are unable to easily obtain because of the shortage.
I’ll keep seeing in future readings if there is more information that fits this theme for me!

[downtimes]

@StarlitGlitch

Oh, wow, that is helpful. I was struggling a bit to imagine the candles and nuts with the cake and kinda ignored that part! Thanks for digging out that picture.

[NicoleIsEnough]

@downtimes

Oh boy. This is going to be a long one.

I just wanted to say, thank you so much for sacrificing your time so I don’t have to
With other words, I decided to stop reading the book after chapter 1 (so I read a little bit of this week, but not everything).

There are multiple reasons for me dropping out. One is a pure coincidence: I just finished reading a book where a female Tokyo journalist goes to Kyushu to research a marriage fraudster, and the book touches upon a lot of Japanese clichés especially regarding women and traditional expectations towards (grown-up) children, and how some of them manage to free themselves from this and live their own lives. Sounds familiar? That’s what I thought as well. The thing is, I see that many Japanese, especially women, are like that, very anxious, very cautious about what the others think about them, trying not to stick out, and I am happy for each book that they might read and that might help them loosen this burden somewhat. But the thing is, I am not in that position, not at all. So I don’t need those books in masses. It was interesting to read the one I mentioned before, but now it’s time to read something else, I guess.

The second reason: I don’t even like butter that much, and I certainly don’t want to read about food all the time. The blurb said: butter and murder, but the murderer is already in jail, and so what’s left is the butter…

@downtimes

I get it, it’s butter-rice and cod-butter pasta. Not that great a meal in the grand scheme of things

I can understand the enthusiasm, though. In Japan, dairy products are a rare delicacy, and everything is crazy expensive. Cheese, cream, butter, you name it - everything costs like 3 to 5 times as much as in the West. Therefore everybody is longing for eating these highly renowned things. (Same with cake, by the way: In Germany, for example, homemade cake is a staple that basically every family can produce if they like. In Japan, nobody has an oven, and homemade cake is beyond imaginable for many Japanese.)

But I agree with you, that doesn’t mean I need to read books about these things

[downtimes]

Understandable reasons.

I do feel week 3 and week 4 are better than week 2; found it to be the low point so far. I haven’t read something comparable in Japanese yet, and find the thoughts of our protagonist still interesting. But I wouldn’t want to read a similar book soon either

[pocketcat]

Finally caught up to week 2 Gonna try to speed run week 3 tonight as well

I agree with everyone about how there are themes of desire (sexual, hunger) and craving validation. I kind of don’t like our MC, she seems so obsessed with all the wrong things and dips soooooo close to introspection only to veer away. I’m also not super impressed by the murderer in the sense of ‘why is she so obsessed with her?’. I wonder a bit if it’s because this lady does not fit beauty ideals, yet managed to catch men over and over? And our MC wants to capture that

[miwuc]

So I got myself some Échiré butter.

And… I guess I’m a バカ舌 because I mean, sure, it’s butter, you know?
I tried to compare it to some other “normal” (but still French) butter that I had and honestly the difference was quite subtle. I don’t have any Japanese butter to compare it to though.
To be fair over here it’s not that fancy or expensive (or well known). It was at 18 euros/kg, only ~40% more expensive than the good old “Président” butter that was next to it (they did try and hide the price difference by making it 200g vs the standard 250g). In Japan though the price is ridiculous. From what I found online, the 250g sticks are 76 euros/kg, and the little 30g ones are 115 euros/kg.

[miwuc]

@eefara

Like, girl, what were you eating before this? Literal cardboard? Butter’s great, but buttered rice isn’t exactly on my top 10 rave about foods. I suppose it’s a good lesson to pause and really consider and appreciate the food you eat, which I do like.

I watched a bunch of “意味あんの” youtube videos from the Youtuber I posted in the week1 thread where he compares different foods, and every time he cooks something he’s like めっちゃうまい, and I’m like wow, must be really tasty. And then there was this video where he compares cooking rice with and without washing it. And eating 100% plain white rice he goes めちゃめちゃうまい.
Maybe the Japanese are just like that.

[Myria]

@miwuc

And eating 100% plain white rice he goes めちゃめちゃうまい.

I have to say I really find plain Japanese rice めっちゃうまい as well

I don’t eat that much butter here in Japan so I don’t think I can chime in there, but I had an interesting observation. since it’s strawberry season I recently bought some fancy あまおう instead of the usual cheaper とちあいか, and I ate the あまおう and yes they are much better and have more flavor / more sweetness than the other Japanese brands I normally eat, but still, even the most fancy Japanese strawberries still taste like the „normal“ ripe German strawberries you get en masse during the summer… maybe Japanese food really has a thing with making everything delicious into a „delicacy“ and the „normal“, affordable stuff is just some less delicious version of that.

[pocketcat]

@Myria

instead of the usual cheaper とちあいか, and I ate the あまおう and yes they are much better and have more flavor / more sweetness than the other Japanese brands I normally eat, but still, even the most fancy Japanese strawberries still taste like the „normal“ ripe German strawberries you get en masse during the summer… maybe Japanese food really has a thing with making everything delicious into a „delicacy“ and the „normal“, affordable stuff is just some less delicious version of that.

I’m glad I’m not the only one confused by the fancy fruit A few years ago I was visiting Japan during the summer so I bought some of the ‘fancy’ grapes and remember thinking they didn’t taste notably better than regular grapes in America, and actually worse than some

I admit I have a probably have バカ舌 too, though…I have said before I’m probably the opposite of a super taster, where I just don’t notice/care a ton about taste. Natto? Fine. Durian? Fine. Malort? Fine.