Praise for Where the Wild Ladies Are
One of BBC Culture’s Best Books of the Year
“Where the Wild Ladies Are immediately became one of my favorite story collections. The ghosts have got the numbers on us, as Matsuda knows, and it’s a joy to see the living and the dead by the light of her radiant imagination. At once playful, joyful, and radically subversive.”
—KAREN RUSSELL, author of Orange World and Other Stories
“Aoko Matsuda’s feverish mashups of the civilized and the wild, the mythological and the modern, are daringly strange and hauntingly funny. Her stories burrow into a subterranean place in the psyche where dreams, fairy tales, and ghost stories mingle in a raucous, beguiling party that I wished I never had to leave.”
—ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN, author of Intimations
“Aoko Matsuda’s delightful ghosts have all the characteristics of people you know: they could be your dear friends, judgmental relatives, casually encountered busybodies who seem to have too much time on their hands. As you progress through the stories in Where the Wild Ladies Are, Matsuda ties together strands and characters so that the book as a whole feels even richer and deeper than you first thought.”
—KELLY LINK, author of Get in Trouble
“In these absorbing stories, Matsuda animates ancient tales with a humor and resonance that will be thrilling to the modern reader. But she goes beyond even that; she suffuses them with heart, making them her very own. For fans of fabulist fiction, this is as good as it gets.”
—AMELIA GRAY, author of Gutshot
“In death, Matsuda’s wild ladies are able to doff society’s shit to get up to mirthful hi-jinks. Hanging the grotesque next to the quotidian, fun next to fable, this is a book of startling beauty and insight. You will want to read these stories again and again.”
—MARIE-HELENE BERTINO, author of Parakeet
“Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are is a collection of interconnected, slightly spooky feminist retellings of Japanese folktales . . . Matsuda punctures the folktale serenity and brings us into the now through references to the cruelties of global capitalism and western cultural hegemony.”
—JULIA IRION MARTINS, Full Stop
“[Matsuda] has a light but lasting touch . . . A delightful, daring collection.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“These ghosts are not the monstrous, vengeful spirits of the original stories; they are real people with agency and personalities, finally freed from the restraints placed on living women. Funny, beautiful, surreal and relatable, this is a phenomenal book.”
—The Guardian
“In this enjoyable and enigmatic collection of short stories, Aoko Matsuda retells traditional Japanese ghost stories with a contemporary, feminist slant. The many female ghosts that crop up so often in old Japanese tales appear in many guises here—as forceful saleswomen, or a cynical aunt lecturing her niece about slavishly following fads. They’re smart and formally inventive: one story is a self-help column, while a series of stories revolve around the strange goings on at Mr Tei’s incense factory. Beauty, jealousy and women’s place in Japanese society are all explored in stories which are funny, strange and intriguing.”
—Tatler
“Taking a collection of traditional Japanese ghost stories and crafting them into often humorous yet painfully relevant tales is a move of pure genius by Aoko Matsuda. Taking place in a contemporary setting, with a decidedly feminist bend, Where the Wild Ladies Are takes classic Japanese ghost stories—which make up some of the best in the world—and rewrites them to make them relevant to the current gender climate of modern-day Japan. Witty, biting, and poignant, Matsuda’s collection is a pleasantly haunting surprise.”
—JESSICA ESA, Metropolis
“This was an amazing read. A troupe of women are sent in from another world in order to help relieve the angst of the people in this world.”
—HIROKO KITAMURA, Hon no zasshi sha
“Turning one’s back on despair and instead channeling all one’s energy into living as one’s true self is what gives one the strength to take on spectral form. This is a call to power to live with sufficient conviction to become ghosts.”
—AKIKO OHTAKE, Asahi Shimbun
“An enjoyable and satisfying read, coming out of a sense of discomfort and unease around gender inequality. This is a short story collection where classic works from rakugo and kabuki are developed in the author’s unique style.”
—ASAYO TAKII, Nami
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2016 by Aoko Matsuda
Translation copyright © 2020 by Polly Barton
All rights reserved
First Soft Skull edition: 2020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Matsuda, Aoko, 1979– author. | Barton, Polly (Translator), translator.
Title: Where the wild ladies are / Aoko Matsuda ; translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton.
Other titles: Obachantachi no iru tokoro. English
Description: First Soft Skull edition. | New York : Soft Skull Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020017381 | ISBN 9781593766900 (paperback) | ISBN 9781593766917 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Matsuda, Aoko, 1979– —Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PL873.A86 O3313 2020 | DDC 895.63/6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017381
Cover design & Soft Skull art direction by salu.io
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
Published by Soft Skull Press
1140 Broadway, Suite 704
New York, NY 10001
www.softskull.com
Printed in the United States of America
13579108642
Contents
Note
Smartening Up
The Peony Lanterns
My Superpower
Quite a Catch
The Jealous Type
Where the Wild Ladies Are
Loved One
A Fox’s Life
What She Can Do
Enoki
Silently Burning
A New Recruit
Team Sarashina
A Day Off
Having a Blast
The Missing One
On High
Inspiration for the Stories
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Note
The stories in this collection draw inspiration from traditional Japanese ghost and yōkai tales, many of which have been immortalized as kabuki or rakugo performances. A complete list of references and brief outlines of the original works can be found on page 255.
Smartening Up
I am a beautiful woman.
I am a beautiful, intelligent woman.
I am a beautiful, intelligent, sexy
woman.
I am a beautiful, intelligent, sexy,
caring woman. I am—
“Okay, that’s the right side done. I’ll start on the left now.” From just beside my ear, the beautician’s
