Live to eat!

Journalist Rita is the only woman in her newsroom. The work culture is so demanding that employees take a day off only once every several years, when a relative dies. Women face unrealistic expectations about their appearance: at 166 centimeters tall, gaining weight beyond 55 kilograms can bring taunts about being fat and constant demands to pull themselves together.

Kajii defies that attitude. She eats what she wants and becomes plump. The article asks where the line between right and wrong lies in a culture that imposes such judgments.

Although Japan now has a female prime minister, the country remained far behind other democratic Western countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2025 global gender-gap index. Iceland ranked first, Estonia 11th and Japan 118th among 148 countries. Pakistan ranked last.

The article discusses Asako Yuzuki’s bestselling novel Butter, first published in Japanese in 2017. It has sold more than 1.7 million copies in 40 countries. Its international success, the article argues, does not automatically make it bad literature. Entertainment, too, can contain something worth thinking about.