Asako Yuzuki’s novel Hooked is about an elite corporate employee who begins stalking a popular housewife blogger and then blackmails her into an artificial “friendship.” Though it occasionally feels like a suspense thriller, Hooked is primarily a dark cringe comedy about two thirty-year-old women exhibiting their absolute worst behavior.
The story opens with a morning in the life of Eriko Shimura, an employee at a product trading company that specializes in imports of foreign food. Eriko lives with her parents in central Tokyo, and she attended a top-ranked university before using her father’s connections to enter her current job immediately after graduating. She puts meticulous care into her work and appearance, and she considers herself to be well-liked by her male colleagues.
Eriko’s one regret is that, after a devastating friendship breakup in high school, she hasn’t really had any female friends. As a way to compensate for the warmth missing from her life, she becomes a fan of a lifestyle blog written by a Tokyo housewife who goes by Hallie B. Unlike Eriko, whose daily schedule is intensely regimented, Hallie takes life easy and passes her time in small cafés and chain restaurants while trying out limited-edition pastries in convenience stores. For Eriko, Hallie’s blog is an accessible fantasy of casual friendship.
The perspective then switches to Shoko, the woman behind the Hallie B. blog. Shoko moved to Tokyo from the countryside, where she grew up with a wealthy but abusive father who eventually drove her mother out of the house with his negligence and bad temper. Like Eriko, Shoko has trouble forming attachments, passing like water between friends and jobs. She gets along well with her husband, though, and she finally seems to have found her niche as a Tokyo lifestyle blogger. When Eriko suddenly shows up at a café she frequents, Shoko initially finds her to be charming, and they exchange numbers after having a lovely conversation together.
What starts as a promising friendship doesn’t last long, however. Eriko, who lives in the same neighborhood as Shoko, begins stalking her in earnest, and Shoko is understandably creeped out. As their relationship cools, Eriko responds by becoming more intense. She also starts to behave oddly at work, even going so far as to sleep with a coworker who’s engaged to one of the office admin staff. As Eriko’s behavior becomes more extreme, Hooked generates a fair bit of narrative tension by keeping the reader wondering just how far she’ll go and what horrible thing can possibly happen next.
I will admit that I had trouble getting into Hooked. I’ve met some intense and unpleasant people in my life, but the way the characters in this novel behave feels unrealistic to me. It was only when I realized that the story is a comedy that it clicked for me. I guess it’s fair to say that Hooked is like Curb Your Enthusiasm, but with two Japanese women instead of Larry David.
Once I understood that Hooked isn’t supposed to be mimetic fiction, it became much more enjoyable. Instead of feeling bad about the extreme awkwardness that Eriko and Shoko bring to their everyday interactions, I was amused to see them get worse. There’s one scene in particular where Eriko unsuccessfully attempts to seduce her supervisor at work that had me grinning and clapping like a seal. Thankfully, as a comedy (dark though it may be), Hooked allows Eriko and Shoko a measure of self-awareness and emotional resolution toward the end when both women take meaningful steps toward getting their shit together.
Still, even despite the characters’ over-the-top behavior, Asako Yuzuki makes a number of astute observations about adult loneliness. I was especially impressed by the story’s portrayal of online parasocial relationships and the ways that social media can warp the ordinary human need for connection and validation. The way that such concerns are discussed in editorial think pieces tends to be shallow and prescriptive, and I’m happy that Hooked handles these issues with sensitivity and nuance.
The casual misogyny of Eriko’s male coworkers also struck a chord with me, especially in how these men echo the cliché that female relationships are full of drama and thus destined to fail. The novel’s central metaphor of the invasive Nile Perch, a destructive fish that ruins ecosystems, implies that women like Eriko might come off as “too intense” because they’ve been forced to survive in a fiercely competitive environment engineered by men.
Still, I feel that Asako Yuzuki refrains from making generalizations about gender and society, preferring instead to focus on the specific relationships between characters. Hooked reminded me a great deal of Natsuo Kirino’s suspense novels Out and Grotesque, but with a stronger focus on human nature as opposed to social issues. The dark comedy of Hooked is well-observed, and I could tell that Yuzuki was having fun while writing this novel. There were a number of scenes when it was clear that the translator, Polly Barton, was having a marvelous time as well.
Hooked succeeds because it manages to balance social commentary with a genuine empathy for its (deeply) flawed protagonists, and it’s a testament to both Yuzuki’s writing and Barton’s translation that a story about stalking and self-sabotage can leave the reader feeling strangely uplifted, and perhaps a little less alone.
Contemporary Japanese Literature 