Hooked by Asako Yuzuki (4th Estate and William Collins | Fourth Estate)

Eriko’s life looks flawless; her career, her immaculate apartment, everything on the surface gleams. But inside, she’s empty. She can’t hold on to a single real friendship, no matter how hard she tries. So she turns her attention to Shoko, a lifestyle blogger whose messy home and easy happiness start to fascinate her. At first, Eriko tries to connect in a calculated, careful way. Then things slide into obsession, and suddenly it’s not about friendship at all. This isn’t a story about violence; it’s sharper than that. It’s about how loneliness makes us hungry for other people’s lives, how we try to fill our own emptiness by consuming someone else’s world.

Yuzuki's primary character is difficult to like, which is intentional. Eriko exemplifies the psychopathology of a modern overachiever; she has mastered everything but being human. Shoko, on the other hand, is all chaos and authenticity. She’s the mirror Eriko can’t look away from, the life Eriko envies and eventually threatens to disrupt. The story isn’t really about growing into better people. It’s about stripping away the masks we wear, even when it hurts. Shoko’s husband and the other supporting characters stand in the background, quiet but steady, highlighting just how frantic Eriko’s fixation becomes.

The book explores what friendship looks like in the modern era, when everything is staged for viewers. It emphasizes how much we crave attention, even if it means that no one truly knows us. We shape ourselves into products, then wonder why our relationships feel so thin and brittle. There’s real anxiety here about what happens when intimacy turns into a transaction. If you treat someone as a project, everyone loses. It made me think about how much of our own happiness is just built on silent, constant comparison with strangers online.

The writing and Polly Barton’s translation match Eriko’s cold precision. There’s no sugarcoating, no softness. The tone stays cool and watchful, never drifting into sentimentality. The story doesn’t rush. It tightens slowly, like a knot you can’t undo. There’s no jump-scare moment, just a creeping realization that things have gone too far. It fits right in with the works of Sayaka Murata or Mieko Kawakami, finding the weirdness in everyday life, that uncanny feeling under the mundane.

The novel doesn’t pretend that envy and loneliness are pretty or easily fixed. There’s no neat ending, no easy moral. You just watch as a life unravels, thread by thread, because it’s built on copying someone else. It’s a sharp warning: sometimes the most dangerous obsessions hide behind the search for friendship. 

I finished it feeling unsettled, honestly; a little too aware of how thin that line is between interest and obsession, especially in the routines we barely notice.

4/5