2024/058: Where the Wild Ladies Are — Aoko Matsuda (translated by Polly Barton)

I want a special skill, a power that I can wield with all my force when the time comes. I don’t mind what kind of creature I am. It doesn’t bother me if I stay as a nameless monster. [loc. 91]

A collection of feminist, or at least female-centred, short stories by Japanese author Aoko Matsuda, fluently translated by Polly Barton: the stories are interlinked by references to a company run by a Mr Tei. This company remains nameless, but seems to employ both the living and the dead, ghosts and non-human supernatural creatures. One of their products is an incense which allows a bereaved human to see their lost loved one as they were in life: this incense is the focus of one of my favourite stories in the collection, 'Loved One', in which Mr Tei visits a customer to find out if there is 'some issue preventing [the incense] taking effect'. The narrator has no sense of smell, and the only creature she mourns is her cat Tortie. Mr Tei promises that the technical team will adjust the incense so that it's not limited to human beings -- 'a truly embarrassing oversight on our part, a bug in our system that we've been too short-sighted to recognise'.

Elsewhere we find fox-spirits, vengeful ghosts (and a pathologically jealous wife who learns that she'd be perfect as a vengeful ghost, and would it be all right for the company to approach her once she's dead?), as well as a giant toad that protects women; a young lady whose aunt advises her to reject the beauty industry's blandishments and focus on her own power; and a number of women who find, or bestow, peace and kindness after their deaths. And a delightful sapphic romance between a skeleton and a living woman. There are definitely feminist themes here, but perhaps the major theme is of finding a place to be oneself, and to belong -- whether that's in this life or the next.

Many of the stories are drawn from Japanese folklore and ghost stories: references to the original stories are provided, and the Introduction provides context for the telling of ghost stories in summer, during the Buddhist festival of Obon, when the deceased return to wander the earth (and when the chill of a well-told spooky story can offset the summer heat). 

You can read a couple of the stories on the Granta site: here is 'Smartening Up'.

Fulfils the ‘a yellow spine’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.

Fulfils the ‘A short story collection in translation’ rubric of the Something Bookish Reading Challenge.