Aoko MatsudaBesprekingen

This was an absolute delight of loosely interconnected short stories, which take Japanese folktales and ghost stories and give them modern and often feminist twists. It's also lovely that the book contains a section at the end identifying the folk legends, plays, etc. that the stories are inspired by, making it easier to dig deeper if you want to.

I tore through this book fairly quickly, loving the manic, slightly unhinged energy of many of the stories. For instance, one of my favorite stories is of a woman who goes to absurd lengths of jealousy, specially purchasing cheap bits of ceramic and crockery for smashing in fits of rage, and just when you think she is going to be embarrassed and tone it down, she recommits instead, and moments later is being recruited by someone who mourns that people these days just don't have the necessary passion to become ghosts anymore...

Compulsively enjoyable!

This is a hard one to rate because I think it might just not be my type of book? But at the same time, I thought it sounded really interesting but I found myself trudging through some of the stories and just not really getting the point of others. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t as amazing as I thought it would be.

Traditional Japanese folktales reimagined as interconnected, contemporary feminist ghost stories, this collection was odd and strangely flat reading. For readers unfamiliar with the Japanese myths and legends these stories are based on, there is an "Inspiration for the Stories" section in the back of the book which helps the reader understand what Matsuda is trying to undermine in her retellings but still doesn't give someone who doesn't know the originals enough of the cultural background and understanding to make this an entirely successful collection. There is a very strong Japanese sensibility here and the stories are all fantastical, populated by the supernatural in some way. The main characters subvert traditional Japanese gender roles, if not in life, then after death as ghosts or other creatures. Each of the stories is strange and complete from a ghostly lover recovered from her watery grave to an aunt against hair removal to a gift shop owner living in the shadow of her namesake shrine to a foxlike young woman and more. Fans of Japanese literature and those who have a working knowledge of the folktales these stories take their inspiration from are probably the best audience for this collection.½

I almost did not finish the collection - the first few stories are competent but not really special - the Japanese setting is fascinating but they were just a bit flat. Until they started connecting to each other - and the flatness made sense - they were complete stories but they missed something and that something came from a different story later on (and in some cases early on).

17 interconnected stories (in 250 pages or so) build a single picture of a supernatural Japan that lives just under the surface on real-life Japan. This world is populated by ghosts (and if you think you know what ghosts are, you have another thing coming) and mythical creatures, existing in the same spaces the real one exists but hidden by the inability of most people to see it. Aoko Matsuda did not just recreate the legends (and old plays and myths and what's not), she also shuffled them together until they fit together as a unified whole.

I did not know most of the stories which became the base for the collection and its characters - in some cases things made a lot more sense after I read the notes at the end which were discussing the original tales that became the base for the specific story. There is a shared history and culture that you get only if you are deep inside of a society and this book is deep into the Japanese version of it. The notes helped but they also made me want to know more.

When I reached the end of the last story, I wished that there were more of them. Not because it was incomplete but because it was like a glimpse into a world which is so different and large that it is impossible to fully describe it. And yet - it felt complete. It could have easily been called a novel - it is connected enough for that and there is a thread in the middle which can become the base for a novel. But the collection format allowed for a more dispersed narrative - the company at the heart of the story is there in all of them, each story adding more details but without the need to have a plot around it. In a lot of ways, the collection is a slice of life story - just set in a life which you cannot really see. Unless you can.

The writing has this peculiar Japanese sharpness and sparsity that sound almost like being too easy in English and which makes Japanese writing so distinctive. In a collection so deeply tied to the Japanese myths and beliefs, other styles would not have worked.

With all that being said, it is not a perfect collection - not all the stories worked for me and some of them could have used some more in-story explanations (as opposed to allowing things to click only after you read the notes on the sources). But if you combine the stories and the notes, the unified whole works. And I was not surprised to see it nominated for the World Fantasy Award this year.½

Where the Wild Ladies Are is a collection of linked short stories that are all modern versions of traditional Japanese legends and stories. I thought the collection was delightful. I liked how the collection evolved and how the stories were linked together. I liked how Matsuda reimagined these ancient stories to fit a 21st century world. While many of the original stories were dark (there are a large number of ghosts in Japanese folklore) these retellings brought humor and a feminist flair. I only wish that I was more familiar with the stories before reading - but the book did include a summary of the source materials at the end of the book. I think I will seek out more by Aoko Matsuda.

Feminist Japanese ghost stories based on traditional folklore. Fantastic!

'While I was alive, I made a brave effort to hide my true nature, but now that I'm dead, I behave exactly as i please.'

Aoko Matsuda's new collection of (often inter-linked) short stories, beautifully translated by Polly Barton, is a wonderful re-imagining of traditional folk tales and ghost stories. The basis for each is recounted in notes at the end of the collection, but you don't really need to know the original to enjoy the stories. Once you do, however, the originality and playfulness of the author is even more apparent.

These are, in the main, kindly ghosts - a background presence in our lives giving us a guiding hand, or watching on as we go about our lives. Characters re-appear in different stories, and the mysterious Mr Tei and his organisation gives a slight structure to the developing arc of the collection. And the author quite happily takes wipes at modern issues of feminism, social expectations and Japanese society in general.

This is a fantastic collection to dip into, and a second reading certainly rewards. I get the feeling the author had a lot of fun writing this, and this deserves a wide audience to appreciate the stories. A definite recommend.

For starters, I know almost nothing about Japanese folk tales. I wasn’t certain what to expect from this short story collection, but all the rave reviews made me curious. It was a pleasure to read this book!

The short stories are just the right length to read over a coffee break. I read the book in small doses, one or two each evening for a few days. That way I got the full impact of each story as an individual work of art.

Yet taken as a whole book, there’s an interesting structure to the collection, too. The characters are linked through a strange company run by the even-stranger Mr Tei, though it’s not always apparent how the individual stories relate until later stories. Matsuda’s inventiveness is astounding, especially when I compared her stories to the original tales. (Those are included at the end of the book.)

Certain aspects of the stories are unique to Japanese culture: the myths, for example, aren’t ones that I was familiar with. But Matsuda’s insights into humans in general and women’s societal roles in particular are universal. A lot of her observations hit home for me as a female. Her characters show how subtly and unconsciously societal ideas worm their way into our minds and shape our sense of self-worth.

If all of this sounds like feminist theory, it is. But don’t worry: Matsuda’s stories are anything but dry academic theory. They are lively, witty, and odd in the best possible way.

Babysitting ghosts. Pushy saleswomen ghosts. Guilt-tripping ghosts. Fox ghosts . . . The list goes on. The characters–the live humans, not the dead ones!–benefit from the sometimes counter-intuitive motivation of the ghosts. Whether it’s pushy sales tactics or guilt trips, the human protagonists need these ghosts to push them into action or to protect them.

Occasionally the stories don’t come to the conclusions or resolutions that I expected. As a novel reader, I like all story threads tied, all loose ends snipped, and the story washed, pressed, and neatly hung up in the closet. But short stories–and folk tales in particular–tend to be more unruly than that. And Matsuda’s stories do resolve in the ways most fitting for their characters. There’s a sense of life beyond this story.

One favorite thing . . .
The first story might be my favorite. A pushy guilt-tripping dead aunt returns to scold her niece for her devotion to hair removal. Plucking, waxing, electrolysis, you name it, the niece believes that hairlessness increases her romantically desirability. And yet it hasn’t. The aunt’s witty, sarcastic, and unnervingly honest opinions and the niece’s response (and the ultimate outcome of the story) made me laugh and look at my own razor in a different way.

Overall, do I recommend this book? Absolutely. It was a delight. Anyone who enjoys folk tale retellings, inventive and unusual stories, or friendly ghost stories will enjoy this.

I received a complimentary copy of this book, thanks to Soft Skull Press and Netgalley. Opinions expressed in this review are my own, and I was not required to write a positive review.

Interconnected Ghost Stories
Review of the Tilted Axis Press English translation eBook edition (Feb 2020) of the Japanese language original :おばちゃんたちのいるところ Obachantachi no Iru Tokoro (2016)

I read Where the Wild Ladies Are as part of the Translated Fiction Online Book Club which has been organized by Tilted Axis Press and 5 other UK independent publishers for a 6 week period (March 26 to April 30, 2020) during this current world pandemic situation.

The title of Where the Wild Ladies Are is an obvious nod to Maurice Sendak's illustrated children's book Where the Wild Things Are (1963), and the latter book actually makes a cameo appearance in the title story where the recurring character Shigeru receives it as a present when he is a child. That connection also signals the underlying theme of Matsuda's ghost stories as, just like Sendak's monsters, Matsuda's ghosts are benign and exist in somewhat of a symbiotic relationship with the living.

The first story, The Peony Lanterns, actually had the most underlying current of a threatening nature, when two seemingly persistent door-to-door saleswomen confront a stay-at-home man with their odd manner of sales pitch. At this point in the book you don't know what to expect so the mysterious nature of the encounter creates more of an aura of fear. Gradually in later stories you learn of the "Company" and the "Factory" of Mr. Tei and his associates and you learn that there is a much more benign nature to the coexistence of ghosts and humans. There are admittedly some frightening and disturbing parts of the book though, mostly in the introductory explanations which tie the new stories back to the original Japanese folk tale versions.

The publicity and synopsis of Where the Wild Ladies Are refer to it as being a "feminist re-telling" of Japanese ghost stories. Possibly in my ignorance, I didn't read this thinking it was particularly feminist. The women characters were as compelling and as strong as the male characters. Perhaps that makes it feminist in context, but to me that just seemed natural and the real-life way of things.

My extra thanks to Theodora Danek and Simon Collinson of Tilted Axis Press who went out of their way to assist me with my eBook edition of Where the Wild Ladies Are when my lack of knowledge about epub readers was hampering my reading.

Trivia and Links
Some of Aoko Matsuda's short stories in translation are available online at various literary journals. You can read some from Where the Wild Ladies Are at Granta, specifically Smartening Up and Enoki.

Enjoyably dark and twisty collection, Yoko Ogawa meets Shirley Jackson! Loses momentum a bit toward the end, though,.

This book was a short novella (39 pages) and takes place within the time it takes a person to walk up five flights of stairs. An unknown narrator reminisces about their relationship with the girl that is getting married (never referred to as anything else). The further up the stairs she goes the more the story falls apart! Very clever! This novella was part of the collection of Eight New Voices of Japan.