Different Pans, Different Hands

Asako Yuzuki, Butter
1. This summer involved taking one of my children through World War II, using The World at War as a framework. Despite the intervening 50 years since the documentary--including better access to Soviet and eastern European archives--it holds up well.

One very notable exception whenever it talks about Japan, where the doc repeats a lot of the racist myths I was taught as a child: the Japanese lived as a collective, not as individuals; they lived by a strict Shinto/Buddhist code; they did not value human life, including their own; they thought the Emperor was a god. As it happens, in the last ten years or so I've read through a fair amount of Japanese literature in translation from Basho and The Pillow Book on, and my conclusion is that a lot of that propaganda is just wrong: Japan had an ongoing argument between liberals and traditionalists, with various fusions attempted, and suffered the same wave of fascistic repression as many other countries in the early 20th century and largely for the same reasons. To take the claims of the fascists at face value in Japan is no different than assuming there was a volk in Germany. It just wasn't that simple.

Most pertinently for our purposes, Japanese literature has always been held in high cultural esteem and there is a long and prominent history of women writers and novelists.

2. I approached Butter with some trepidation because of its True Crime hook. I do not generally like True Crime. I was somewhat more interested in the heavy role cooking seemed to play, since I like a good book on cooking. Neither of these assumptions turned out to be correct. It is not violent like Out, nor despite the heavy focus on what it means to be a woman in Japanese society does it turn into feminist consciousness-raising like Territory of Light or Breasts and Eggs. (To be clear, I loved all three of those books.) The closest literary analogy is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen spends the entire book learning to be able to write exactly one poem that is his and not someone else's idea of what he's supposed to write (or do); that the poem is not very good doesn't matter, it's that he has finally figured out how to begin.

So also here: the protagonist writes a story on a serial killer who had a cooking blog, and follows her recipes, and also attends a high-end cooking school, also following recipes, and the book ends with her putting her own twist on a recipe for no reason other than that she wanted to and it felt right. 

3. Some people do not share recipes at all. Some people share them, but inexactly, leaving out ingredients or steps. Some people share recipes with all details on the theory--"different pans, different hands"--that two people who follow the exact same steps with the exact same ingredients will produce different results because the people, time, circumstances, etc will be, must be, different. Butter is a kind of exploration of that idea: the same raw material of society can produce a variety of different people, and you can't make yourself over into someone you're fundamentally not, but there's always room for something more, something new, something different, if you want it.