Every night, those women would clean out the toxins that had built up in their partners’ bodies and souls over the course of the day – toxins that, if left untouched for too long, would eat a person away. The elder male colleague of hers who had died unexpectedly at home last month had been single and lived alone. An image rose up in Rika’s mind of her own cold apartment which she hadn’t cleaned in some time – his had probably looked a lot like that. The apartment also closely resembled the one her father had inhabited by himself after his divorce.

— Rika in Asako Yuzuki’s, Butter, Harper Collins, Ch. 1, p. 8, 2023