What’s behind the boom in Japanese fiction?

‘There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine’. 

This is a quote from the novel Butter by Japanese writer Asako Yuzuki, which was published in translation last month to great acclaim. It’s billed as ‘a novel of food and murder’, inspired by the true story of a gourmet chef/serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case. It sounds gruesome but has plenty of descriptions of ‘scrumptious food’ apparently. I’m tempted to give it a go.

As are many others it seems. Butter is just the latest in a string of Japanese novels claiming prime display space in UK bookshops. To quote a few examples: Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Toshikazu Kawaguchi); Bullet Train (Isako Kotaro); Ms Ice Sandwich (Mieko Kawakami); The Woman in the Purple Skirt (Natsuko Imamura); Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Satoshi Yagisawa); Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata); The Kamogawa Food Detectives (Hisashi Kashiwai), and now Butter. According to a Guardian article, a quarter of the two million translated novels sold in the UK last year were Japanese.