Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
For a change, I’ve put up a longer take on Hooked on the AbstractAF podcast, so that’s embedded below. This written review does contain a few things I failed to mention there.
The first few pages of ‘Hooked’ made me think maybe this could be another 5 star read from Asako Yuzuki (I loved her novel ‘Butter’) – a slightly weird tale about Eriko, a successful 30-something working woman who has no friends & devotedly follows a blog. When she runs into the blogger, a home-maker called Shoko, who like her, seems to have no female friends, Eriko tries to become her pal. However, her desperate need to be ‘best friends’ with Shoko becomes obsessively unhealthy.
Set in Tokyo, ‘Hooked’ then follows Eriko’s desperate attempts to embed herself in Shoko’s life as her friend, but the harder she tries, the more repulsed the blogger is. Lonely and friendless in the big city herself, the blogger too craves for female companionship, although she is quite content with her husband’s company. How things get weird and ugly between these two different women is the crux of the story.
Mid-way through the novel, I was so disappointed with the way the story started to take shape that I seriously thought about giving it up. Let’s call the twist distasteful. Like how raw fish can smell rotten and off-putting, however, it’s not the same once its cooked, turning into something palatable, maybe even delicious. So after a half a day break, I finished ‘Hooked’, and while the second-half wasn’t as awful as I feared it would be, it didn’t necessarily bounce back to being a novel I’d want to remember either.
What I missed talking about in the podcast is how Asako Yuzuki’s narrative skills remain sharp, without meandering into long descriptive paragraphs that do little to push the story forward. Given that Shoko is a blogger who loves visiting cafes and restaurants, the author could’ve easily gone on a descriptive spiral in several chapters, but she doesn’t. She writes just enough to give readers a clear view of the settings, and then keeps the action moving along.
Generational trauma, familial traits, and how our personalities are strongly shaped by our upbringing are strong themes of ‘Hooked’. Eriko is someone who struggles to make friends right since she was a child, and that failure haunts her into adulthood. Her desperation to find a lasting platonic connection could undoubtedly be very relatable to all kinds of readers, regardless of their gender.
Overall, ‘Hooked’ is an interesting story, just one that doesn’t cast women in a favorable light. The author often makes some of her characters criticize Japanese men for insulting female friendships and casting women as ‘scary’ and then does the exact same thing – makes both her primary characters seem like women you’d never want to be friends with.
Rating for Hooked: 3 stars on 5.
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