Book review: Hooked

As they say, there are books you finish and books that finish you. After a month of reading Asako Yuzuki, I am at an end. The late February rains pummel down. Summer is over. The static of the downpour vibrates with my vacant soul. I am now inured to the most insipid prose I have ever read. What’s the point anymore? Books are just letters that become words that become paragraphs that become chapters and that’s it, on and on. It seems to me that disappointment has become ritual. I watch myself turn the page again and again with the dull momentum of habit.

Let me first start with Butter, the catalyst for Yuzuki’s explosion of popularity in Western literary markets. I really anticipated it. All the rage at last year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival, she has been billed as a new, transgressive voice in literary fiction, popular with the 20 and 30-somethings. But much like the walk to Everest basecamp—these days a crowded thoroughfare, heavily signposted, littered with rubbish—Butter only carries the illusion of being special. That deliciously yellow cover. The worldly implication. Look at how thick it is! But really it is less a novel and more a word collection, replete with every elementary literary cliché: single tears, racing hearts and chills running down spines.

But the biggest flaw is that nothing is left unsaid. Everything is made painfully obvious. And I mean everything. It does this through torrents of improbably thorough internal dialogue. There are literally entire paragraphs of rhetorical questions. There’s an essay for every granular emotional movement. It’s exhausting. I can only imagine the global commercial success of Butter is as an ornament for bedside tables. It is implausible that a generation of people with withering attention spans are able wade through the (rice) porridge.

And so, I turned to Hooked, dragging my feet in languor. Actually written pre-Butter, it’s only now made its way west thanks to its predecessor’s popularity. Hooked is a character study of two societal outcasts in Tokyo, Eriko and Shoko, who meet and entangle themselves in a mutual crash out. They are both performative and unlikeable people in different ways and struggle to maintain relationships, particularly ones with other women. Eriko develops an obsession with Shoko while Shoko is obsessed with herself, and both are apathetic to their parents. Through this lens, Yuzuki explores ideas about Japanese societal duty, gender roles, misogyny and the struggle for human connection. Tension and drama around friendships, expectations and desire platform uncomfortable revelations about what we want and need from the people around us. There are sapphic undertones, minimalist action and plot, and thought-provoking and original feminist themes. One does get a sense of the proverbial societal straitjacket; the system of constraints that capitalism places on gender, labour, identity and relationships to ensure its own hierarchy.

But, as with Butter, she goes way too hard in the paint on internal dialogue. Yuzuki’s narration is ponderous, constantly lapsing into emotional dissection that slows the story rather than deepens it. Insightful? Yes, in the sense a textbook is. Yuzuki’s style is weighed down by its own analytic impulses. Her dense, looping reflections strain to articulate every inner nuance instead of letting any meaning emerge organically. Your readerly perceptions are co-opted and there is no beautiful ambiguity, no room for interpretation and no place for your imagination. It’s a double whammy. Not only are there dense blocks of words to get through, but they’ve had all the intrigue wrung out of them too. And, as the somewhat uneventful plot thickens, the characters become less believable and more caricature. Which begs the question: what use is a social critique based on unrealistic people?

So, this review is both a lament and a pitch. Asako Yuzuki, I can’t help but resent you for what you have put me through. But, nevertheless, you need me. I’m an editor. I make a living cutting bloat and rescuing good ideas from well-intentioned prose. Don’t get me wrong—you’ve got the ideas right, the instincts right, even the emotional depth right. It’s just the words that go wrong. And that’s the thing with novels; they are made up of words. So, call me. We’ve got work to do.