Hooked, and Then Some: What Asako Yuzuki's Novel Taught Me About the Women Around Me

The idea of female friendship has been romanticised since time immemorial. We are told it is the most sacred of bonds, and in the same breath, we are told to be wary of the woman sitting across from us. Society hands us both the crown and the knife, and somehow expects us to figure out what to do with either. There is a particular cruelty in that contradiction: to be told that your most meaningful relationships will come from other women, while also being quietly taught to measure yourself against them. Most of us start small with a borrowed jacket never returned, an inside joke that still lands years later, the unspoken agreement to show up for each other without ever having to ask. These quiet rituals form the blueprint of female companionship that girls carry from school corridors into university hallways. I was one of those girls, and if you are reading this, I suspect you are too.

Hooked by Asako Yuzuki finds itself in the compelling territory of emotional obsession, female-driven narratives, and the quietly sinister seduction of Japanese cuisine. There is something about Yuzuki's writing that refuses to let you feel entirely comfortable, even when the prose is at its most domestic and mundane. She has a gift for making the ordinary feel inhabited by something just beneath the surface, something that has been sitting there for a long time, waiting to be noticed.

At the novel's centre are two women who could not be more different, yet are more alike than either would care to admit. Eriko is meticulous, sharp, and professionally driven, a woman who has built her entire identity around work, while concealing a loneliness so deep it has quietly governed every choice she has ever made. Her life, on the surface, reads as a success story but underneath, it is a very carefully maintained performance. Then there is Shoko, a domestic, unhurried and unapologetically unbothered woman whose ambitions are the small, deliberate pleasures of life, a snack from the convenience store, a cigarette in her own living room, a blog chronicling her life with a husband she cheerfully calls her demon-king. She is everything Eriko is not, and Eriko cannot look away.

What unfolds between them is a story of obsession and a precise and unsettling portrait of how women relate to one another, not always with warmth, not always with rivalry, but sometimes with something harder to name: a desperate need to be closer to a woman you cannot entirely understand, and perhaps cannot entirely stand. Yuzuki does not flinch from this but rather understands that women have long been pitted against each other, not out of natural animosity, but because society has made scarcity the condition of female worth. You can only be so successful, so beautiful, so loved, and the woman beside you is always, somehow, a measure of where you stand. And yet, the most dangerous thing is not the rivalry but the longing. It is the way women will push and pull and exhaust themselves trying to reach another woman who was never asking to be reached in quite that way.

Yuzuki's characters do not simply want to know each other, they want to possess the knowledge of each other, to decode and be decoded, to find in the other woman some answer to a question they cannot quite articulate. It is obsession dressed in the language of intimacy, and the novel never lets you forget how thin that line is. This may sound like a strange observation for a book review. It may even sound unfeminist. But I think the most honest feminism is the kind that sits with discomfort rather than smoothing it over, that acknowledges the full range of what women are capable of feeling toward one another, including the parts that are not easy or flattering or clean. Yuzuki shows us women who overcompensate, who try too hard, who bend themselves into shapes they were never meant to hold, all in the pursuit of closeness. And she asks us, quietly but firmly: what if the closeness you are seeking is not yours to take?

To every woman walking through the RGNUL gates for the first time, or the hundredth time, still figuring out who your people are and where you belong among them, this book is for you. Not because it will give you a blueprint for friendship, but because it will hold a mirror up to the version of yourself that has ever wanted something from another woman and not known how to ask for it. The version of you that has pushed when you should have waited, that has tried to understand someone who was not ready to be understood, that has mistaken proximity for intimacy and intensity for depth.

Female friendships are not ruined by indifference. They are most often strained by the opposite, by too much wanting, too much reaching, too much need dressed up as devotion. If you have found yourself here, in this University, searching for your person, and you have found someone who remains just slightly out of reach no matter how much of yourself you offer, that is not a failure of love. That is simply the shape of some connections. And the kindest thing you can do, both for her and for yourself, is to stop pushing. Because it is often true that the more you push, the farther they go. The beauty of a true friendship between two women lies in the choice to remain, across differences, across silences, across the versions of each other that are not always easy to love. 

And perhaps the most important thing Yuzuki's novel reminded me is that not every female friendship will last, and not every woman you meet is meant to stay. You will grow close to people and then grow apart from them. You will lose friends without a falling out, without a reason clean enough to explain. You will go through stretches of feeling entirely alone in a building full of people, and that loneliness will be real and it will be yours to sit with. None of that means you have failed at friendship. It simply means you are living it honestly.

What Yuzuki understands, and what I think we often forget, is that the truest female friend you will ever have is yourself. Not in the self-help, motivational poster sense of the phrase, but in the quiet, unglamorous sense of it. You are the only person who will be present for every version of you. You do not need the women in your life to know everything about you. You do not need to tell her every thought, every fear, every thing that happened on a Tuesday that you cannot stop turning over in your mind. What makes a friendship real is not how much she knows—it is that you chose to stay, despite the gaps, despite the differences, despite all the parts of each other that remain untranslated. Not every woman you know is supposed to be your closest confidant. Some friendships are simply about showing up, sharing whatever joy you can find in a given moment, and not demanding more from each other than what is freely given. There is grace in that kind of friendship, if you let yourself receive it.

So to you, wherever you are in your time here, I hope RGNUL treats you kindly. But if it doesn't, if the friendships take longer to find than you expected, if the loneliness arrives before the belonging does, please do not be hard on yourself. Keep your heart open. What is meant for you will find its way to you, one way or another.