Book: HOOKED
Author: Asako Yuzuki
Published by: Fourth Estate
Price: Rs 699
There is something deeply disturbing about Hooked. It is a story of two modern Japanese women, Eriko Shimura and Shoko Maruo, brought together by their fractured interiority. The jarring bit, however, is that they could be any of us; anybody who has ever tried — and struggled — to make friends as an adult.
The narrative starts off innocuously enough, with Eriko, a thirty-year-old office worker at a big trading company, coming into work early so she can spend some time reading her favourite blog, ‘Diary of Hallie B, The World’s Worst Wife’. But this small act of rearranging her life around the blog slowly turns into a raging obsession when she meets Shoko, the woman behind the blog.
Outwardly, the two women are very different — Eriko is attractive, put-together, accomplished, and comes from an affluent Tokyo background while Shoko is an ordinary housewife, an immigrant from the countryside, who wiles away time visiting junk food joints and writing her blog. Nevertheless, their strong desire for companionship becomes an equaliser.
From the very beginning, there is something uncanny about Eriko. Her every emotion is excessive. However, this excess within her is unknown to Eriko. Rather than malice, she is filled with desperation.
Shoko, too, is essentially a lonely woman in desperate need of friends. She is dazzled, at first, by Eriko’s attention. Afterwards, her escapist nature and weak character keep her tethered to Eriko.
Asako Yuzuki’s use of the Nile perch, a freshwater fish, as an analogy in the book is brilliant. Eriko feels sorry for the carnivorous Nile perch that was released into Lake Victoria by humans which ended up not only eliminating other species of fish in the lake but also polluting the waters. Eriko, too, ends up consuming Shoko completely, and her actions turn her meticulously structured, familiar life uninhabitable.
The role reversal towards the end is where readers get another whiplash. It makes one question one’s own breaking point, about one’s reaction to desperation, and the choices that one makes out of it. It also lays bare the thin lines that are intricately woven around social interactions. It forces one to assess how much, or how little, it takes to cross over from being a friend to becoming a stalker.
Those expecting a thrilling end to a fast-paced narrative that begins disconcertingly may be a bit disappointed. In true Japanese fiction style, nothing really sorts itself out miraculously. Instead, there is a slow fade into hopeful mundanity. But this softening actually grounds the story in reality, making it much more eerie than it would’ve
been if the readers could dismiss the narrative as fantastical.
The prospect of encountering an Eriko, or, indeed, turning into her, is not an impossibility. After all, as Eriko ruminates, “... if they hadn’t been released into the lake, the Nile perch would have gone their whole lives without realising how ferocious they were…”