Asako Yuzuki (born 1981) is a Japanese novelist from Tokyo. She graduated from Rikkyo University’s Department of French Literature. Her fiction explores friendship, rivalry, and loneliness among women through food, work, and everyday life. “Hooked,” originally published as “Nairu Pachi no Joshikai,” follows a trading-company employee and a housewife blogger whose friendship becomes distorted by expectations of intimacy and growing obsession. It won the Yamamoto Shugoro Prize in 2015. In “Butter,” a journalist’s encounters with a woman accused of killing several men expose social assumptions about appetite, body size, and femininity. Translated into English by Polly Barton, the novel won the Debut Fiction category at the British Book Awards in 2025. Through experiences as familiar as enjoying a meal or negotiating closeness with a friend, Yuzuki examines the constraints placed on women by other people’s expectations.