Tokyo. Fluorescent light, deadlines, convenience-store dinners eaten standing up. Rika Machida is a journalist at a weekly magazine. She’s thin, tired, and always slightly hungry without ever noticing it. Behind glass in a detention center sits Manako Kajii, the woman the tabloids call a “gourmet killer.” She has been convicted of seducing lonely men with her cooking and then, the courts say, killing them. She refuses every interview. Except one. Rika comes for a story. Kajii gives her a recipe. Rice, hot and steaming. A cold slab of good butter melting into it, golden and slow. A splash of soy sauce. Eat this, Kajii tells her, and then come back and tell me how it tasted. And so it begins: a strange, intimate exchange across a visiting-room table. Butter and cream, beef stew and Christmas cake, pleasure and appetite and the quiet shame of wanting. With every dish, Rika’s body changes, her world softens and widens, and the line between interviewer and subject begins to blur. Inspired by a real criminal case that gripped Japan, Butter is a novel about food and desire, about loneliness and female friendship, and about the rules that tell women how much they’re allowed to want, to take up space, to taste .