Girlboss. Domestic goddess. Alpha female. Asako Yuzuki has little patience for shorthand labels that box women in. Nor is she herself easily defined. When the bestselling Japanese author appears on my screen, she wears a placid expression, reminding me of Shōko, the blogger and one of two protagonists in her latest novel, Hooked, who writes about her slapdash and often messy life in her blog, ‘Diary of Hallie B, The World’s Worst Wife’. It is this slack attitude that pulls Eriko, a saleswoman at a major Japanese trading company and the novel’s other axis, into an unexpected spiral of obsession. What emerges is a tale of female friendships, an unlikely feminist manifesto miles removed from Anne of Green Gables, a novel Yuzuki grew up admiring.
Yuzuki writes with an intimate understanding of women in all their shifting shades. She studied at an all-girls school where friendships flourished, before moving to a co-ed college where misogyny felt insidious. “It was the early 2000s and gender bias in Japan was even stronger than it is today,” the author recalls. “Women were routinely expected to behave in ‘feminine’ ways. I began to feel that pressure very clearly myself.”
It follows that Yuzuki is deeply unsettled by the return of the tradwife, a stereotypical ideal she fought so hard not to fall into. She considers women who conjure immaculate meals on a whim, maintain households and tend to their husbands like they’re bonsai trees as martyrs to a vanishing cause. And it was at home that she first saw signs of this struggle. “My mother was a homemaker but she actually wanted to continue working. She only quit because my father strongly urged her to,” Yuzuki says. Her mother did end up working again, in small intervals, with former colleagues and after the divorce, which “was quite progressive for a woman of her generation”. Even as a child, Yuzuki could see her mother’s frustration. “Her abilities had so few places to go.”
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