Hooked

About

Eriko is polished, high-achieving, and profoundly lonely — a corporate woman in Japan’s seafood industry whose life looks perfect from the outside and feels like nothing from within. She becomes obsessed with a popular blog written by Shoko, a housewife whose messy, convenience-store-fuelled lifestyle is everything Eriko’s curated existence is not. Eriko engineers a “chance” meeting, and the two form an intense friendship that tilts, slowly and then all at once, into something dangerous. Yuzuki won the Yamamoto Shugoro Prize for this novel, and it’s easy to see why: she maps the exact territory where loneliness becomes fixation, where the desire to be truly seen by another person crosses the line into something that threatens to consume both of them. A thriller about friendship — or what friendship becomes when one person needs it too much.