First impressions review: Where the Wild Ladies are, by Aoko Matsuda
After ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles’, I needed a palate cleanser, and remembered that I had recently bought this book1. This set of interconnected short stories, based on traditional Japanese folklore and ghost stories but emphasizing the feminine perspective, was perfect! It reminds me a little of Neil Gaiman’s short story ‘Snow, glass, apples’, in which he uses key features of ‘Snow White’ to tell a story about a vampire. It would still be enjoyable if you’d never heard the original fairy-tale, but much cooler if you have…which is why I was happy this book included a synopsis of the tales inspiring it at the back, for those of us who didn’t grow up with them.
1. This is also exactly how I ended up discovering ‘Revolutionary Girl Utena’: “Let’s try this ‘JoJos Bizarre Adventure’ thing everyone is raving about. [Half a season later]. I…don’t think I’m the target audience for this. These unsettlingly muscular guys yelling and punching are giving me a headache. I need a dose of femininity, plus maybe some actual gay. Oh, wait - Didn’t I see a review about some surreal show with a pink-haired girl who wants to be a prince?”
Even though many of the characters are ghosts or what might be loosely called “demons” (yokai), the vibe is more humorous than creepy. I don’t want to say too much, because most of the stories have a little twist to them, but some of my favorites included the woman who acquires a ghost girlfriend by fishing an old skeleton out the river; the sacred tree who is a little weirded out that humans compare the burs on her trunk to breasts; the young man working for an incense company who doesn’t initially realize most of his colleagues are ghosts or demons; an ad put out by the same company hoping to recruit a supremely jealous woman after her passing (“The numbers of people with the levels of passion it takes to become a ghost are decreasing every year”); and the middle aged lady who was always called fox-faced and only discovers she actually is a fox after she takes up mountain climbing – no wonder it always felt like she was so good at pretending to be the perfect little Japanese wife!
Women finding their power and accepting the parts of themselves that might seem strange or monstrous is a definite theme here. There is one who had put so much effort into controlling her hair, and then:
“My limbs, my torso, very single part of my body was covered with hair, from head to toe…To know that all along my body had contained hair this strong, this black, this magnificent was an amazing thing – I was an amazing thing!”
There’s the ghost who looks after a single mother’s child when all the living neighbors think to do is cluck their tongues. One has a pet you initially think is a cat that actually turns out to be a toad spirit. The pair of them look after women being harassed by creepy dudes – though she’s kind of burning out, since there seems to be no end to that type of man. And, of course, there’s the fox lady, who notes:
“Society had become more equal, but in a bad way. Women hadn’t risen up – rather the men had slid down. Kuzuha knew that the glass ceiling…was now visible to this young man, too… ‘It’s different from how you were told it would be, right? You know what, though? As women, we’ve grown up with that ceiling since we were tiny.’…Maybe that would make it an easier world for people to live in, Kuzuha caught herself thinking, somewhat indifferently…Such things were affairs for people, not foxes.”
Overall recommendation: If you are in the mood for some cheeky feminist fairytales that aren’t just retellings of ‘Cinderella’ or ‘Beauty and the Beast’, give this collection a try!
