A review by staghunters
Butter by Asako Yuzuki

challenging dark slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5

I had very high hopes for this one and felt like that made this experience worse for me. 

Very promising start. Moves into a certain direction that I was looking forward to read and explore more, but the story changes tracks suddenly in the last stretch of the second act, right after a really tense moment ended in some sort of anti-climax.
For those that have read the book:
This is when Reiko goes to visit and stay with an old acquaintance of Kajii. It reads as if Yuzuki had planned for her to be killed, making this the single but in my opinion most impactful death in this whole story. This doesn't happen, but the way that Reiko is involved in the story is so minimal that she might as well have died.

Getting through the last 100 or so pages was a struggle, since a lot of the interesting stuff happens off-screen or is resolved on a whim and in a passing sentence. 
Rika and Kajii had a really interesting dynamic going on, and during the time that this developed and got more intense I had the most fun. But it is a shame that Yuzuki dropped such an interesting antagonist when a lot of the story still needed to be resolved.
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