Walk through a bookshop in London today and you might get the odd feeling that you’ve slipped into a parallel universe.
On the tables by the door, on the “Staff Picks” shelf, even at the airport, a bright yellow cover keeps following you: BUTTER by Asako Yuzuki.
It has sold more than a million copies worldwide.
In the UK it won the British Book Awards’ Debut Fiction prize and became Waterstones’ Book of the Year – the first time a Japanese author has taken that title.
A few shelves away, in the crime section, you may spot another Japanese name: Akira Ōtani’s The Night of Baba Yaga, winner of the CWA Dagger for translated crime and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ mystery.
On paper, these successes look like simple “good news for Japanese literature”.
But when Yuzuki and Ōtani sat down for a long conversation in the Japanese magazine Bungei, a different story emerged – one about class, gender, precarious work, earthquakes, and how to keep laughing in a country that often feels like it’s falling apart.
Reading their dialogue, I realised it’s not just a story about publishing.
It’s a story about a generation.
The “Ice Age” Generation, Smiling Through Their Teeth
Both Yuzuki and Ōtani were born in 1981, part of what Japan calls the “employment ice age” generation: those who graduated into the brutal job market of the late 90s and early 2000s, when stable corporate jobs suddenly evaporated.
Yuzuki describes herself as a “flower garden” kid: girls’ school, four-year university, the kind of path that’s supposed to lead to a solid company job and a sensible life.
Instead, she was rejected by around fifty firms before finally getting hired – and even then, she felt society wasn’t especially interested in her generation arriving in the workplace.
Ōtani’s route was almost the opposite.
She went to a public girls’ school where many students came from households with limited means.
After graduating, she didn’t even try to join the salaryman race.
She bounced between day labour and temp work, sharing factories and offices with people who had already been chewed up and spat out by “black companies” that used and discarded employees.
The irony is sharp: the “good girl” who did everything by the book and the “drifter” who never even opened the book both ended up with the same sense of betrayal:
We did what we were supposed to do. Why is survival still this hard?
That anger and exhaustion runs under their fiction.
But on the surface, both women are funny, sharp, and quick to turn their own misery into a story.
That contrast – the seriousness of what they’ve lived through, carried with a joking lightness – is one of the things that foreign readers seem to be responding to, even if they can’t fully name it.
Literary Parties: From Whispered Politeness to 100-Decibel Joy
The Dagger ceremony that Ōtani attended was held in a grand building near Holborn in central London.
At first she accidentally walked into a different event – a diamond industry party with pink and purple neon lights, pounding house music and champagne flowing at “let’s make some questionable decisions” speed.
The Dagger crowd, made up of writers, editors and publishing people, was quieter by comparison, but only relatively.
Even in the waiting room before dinner, everyone was talking at what she describes as “about 100 decibels”.
Yuzuki laughs and says that in Japan, literary events feel much more subdued and shy.
She’s the rare person who will attend a prize party even when she has lost.
In the Anglophone world, by contrast, she finds people in the literary ecosystem overwhelmingly extroverted: cheerful, talkative, quick to joke even about very dark things.
On an Oceania tour, she ends up at the hotel breakfast buffet chatting to a man who turns out to be the writer Philippe Sands, former president of English PEN.
They start from small talk about buttered toast and end up with him asking: “My country did terrible things as a colonial power. What about yours?”
Yuzuki answers in a mock-dubbing style English – half joke, half critique – about how many Japanese people treat “not seeing, not hearing, not speaking” as a kind of intelligence.
Sands roars with laughter and calls her “truly a fun person”.
You can feel the point behind the anecdote: in these spaces, the writer is not only the producer of a text but also a live performer of their own sensibility.
You are expected to be able to go from jokes about TV dramas to genocide and back to pop idols without changing the channel too harshly.
Darkness is real, but it is carried with a light step.
For writers who want to reach international readers, this is quietly important.
In the English-language ecosystem, readers and media don’t only consume the book; they consume the author as a continuous stream of stories, posts, interviews, panel appearances.
The persona has to be alive.
Reading as Pleasure vs Reading as Virtue
In London’s larger parks, Ōtani noticed a scene that could have come straight from a stock photo site: young couples lying in the grass, each absorbed in a thick paperback. It wasn’t a performance. Reading wasn’t being done for Instagram or as a self-improvement project. It was just what you did to relax in the sun.
Yuzuki contrasts this with Japanese media’s tendency to sell books as a moral investment:
“If you’ve read this many books, you must be a pretty respectable human being, right?”
Reading is framed as something that makes you purer, better, more productive.
Book clubs attract the sort of man who tells everyone, “If you read this book, you have to read that book too,” always raising the bar.
From there, the two of them drift into the familiar, slightly depressing question interviewers like to ask:
“What do we gain from reading?”
Yuzuki admits she often doesn’t know what to say.
The answers people want – “You’ll become a better person,” “It will clean your heart,” “Your grades will improve” – feel like PR copy for a product that’s struggling to sell.
In the UK, she says, nobody seems to feel the need to wrap books in moral packaging.
You don’t have to justify a crime novel or a queer thriller with a lofty social benefit.
You can just say:
I loved it. It was fun. It made me think. That’s enough.
For anyone writing in or for English, this difference matters.
You’re not auditioning to be a life coach. You’re offering a particular way of seeing and feeling the world.
That alone can be valuable, without being virtuous.
Local Stories, Global Eyes
Yuzuki has been told that BUTTER is seen in Britain as a feminist story, and that her next translation – The Women’s Friendship Society of Nile Perch – is being positioned with an English title, HOOKED, that layers ideas of being caught, obsessed, and delighted.
What she thought of simply as “Japanese stories” about food, friendship, murder and social pressure are being slotted into genres that Anglophone readers already recognise: cozy mystery, feminist crime, domestic noir.
Ōtani’s The Night of Baba Yaga has been labelled a “bizarre love story” and, more broadly, a queer thriller.
Some readers expect a more straightforward lesbian romance and complain that the love story is too thin; others focus on the violence and yakuza elements.
She herself didn’t write it as a “category piece”, but once it travels abroad, the ecosystem insists on a shelf.
Both women have found that deeply local details can become surprising points of friction in translation.
Yuzuki mentions a scene where a girl stabs a boy and makes him bleed – with a stick of sweet potato snack known as imo kenpi.
Her translator protests: “There’s no way something like candied sweet potato can stab someone like a knife.” Yuzuki, like anyone who has actually bitten into one, insists that yes, it can.
Ōtani reports similar queries about Hakata dolls and canned coffee: tiny icons of Japanese everyday life that become opaque once you leave the archipelago.
You either have to explain them, find a substitute, or let them remain slightly foreign objects in the text.
The paradox is that these very local items are partly why foreign readers are interested.
But they only work if the story around them has enough emotional clarity to carry across cultures.
The local seasoning is not a substitute for structure or voice.
To Younger Writers: Courage, Tilt, and Not Tilting Too Far
Ōtani offers two lines that feel simple but stay with you:
- “You can only do it by taking the work seriously.”
- “Tilt, but don’t tilt too far.”
By this she means: writers need their obsessions, their narrow angles of view, their strange fixations.
You have to be skewed in some way to produce original work.
But you also need the ability to see beyond your own narrowness, to shift from the hair on someone’s finger to the scale of the universe and back again.
Without that alternation between micro and macro, she says, you won’t write anything with a truly wide reach.
She’s honest, too, about the politics around her success.
As an openly gay woman writing about yakuza, non-regular work and queer desire in a conservative society, she has the sense of being slotted into a “diversity quota”.
At the same time, she insists, what is ultimately being judged is the book.
Yuzuki’s message is more practical.
She worries about the number of young writers who burn out or give up, especially in an industry where print runs and income are shrinking.
So she has started giving what she calls “soul lectures” at the Japan Writers’ Association – not only about craft, but about tax, places you can go for help, and the importance of having somewhere to run when things collapse.
Writing is romantic, but the writer’s life cannot be built on romance alone.
There is a generational tenderness here: two women from a “lost generation”, who somehow managed to surface in the international spotlight, trying to make the sea slightly less brutal for the ones who will swim after them.
Beyond Export: What This Moment Really Means
Behind these books are:
- a precarious generation that never fully recovered from its first economic shock
- a society that lives with earthquakes, inequality and shrinking expectations
- women and queer people who have had to improvise survival in spaces not designed for them
- and a global literary market hungry for voices that can turn all of that into gripping, darkly funny, deeply human stories.
What travels across borders is not just “Japaneseness”.
It is the ability to stand in the middle of that mess, smile, and tell the truth in a way people want to keep listening to.
For anyone who wants to write for a global audience – especially from Japan, or from any other place that feels peripheral to English – that may be the most important lesson of all.
Don’t write as if you’re applying to be a better person.
Don’t write as if you’re giving a TED talk.
Write as if you’re at a too-loud party, at a too-late hour, telling someone the story you absolutely cannot leave unsaid.
The rest – covers, prizes, translations, marketing – is mostly weather.
The climate is what you carry inside.
This essay is based on a conversation between Asako Yuzuki and Akira Ōtani published in the Winter 2025 issue of the Japanese literary magazine Bungei.