Where the Wild Ladies Are, by Matsudo Aoko

Translated by Molly Barton

(2016, translated 2020)

Soft Skull

(Interconnected Short Story Collection)

Like Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber or Anne Sexton’s Transformations, Matsudo reworks the folk and ghost stories of Japan from a feminist perspective. Unlike Carter and Sexton, Matsudo’s reinventions of old tales are clean and orderly. There are no overturned tables or bloody encounters. Matsudo sees her ghosts as the products of their time. As she shifts her specters out of the past and into the 21st century, extremes of emotion are tempered and moderated. The modern Japanese ghost is unionized: she works under the skillful management of a firm that manufactures funerary incense. She is recruited, she can be transferred, and she can retire.

“Smartening Up”

The first in the series focuses on a modern, materialistic twenty-something we catch in the middle of a costly and painful laser hair removal treatment. It seems her lover cast her aside, and she suspects that he found the black hair on her arms a turn-off and a deal-breaker. Once home, shaving in her tub, there is a knock on the door and who should it be but her deceased aunt, the one who hung herself in her apartment when her married lover ended their relationship! She has spent the first year of her death learning the skill of making herself visible; now she is back in the world to take revenge against her faithless lover and teach her niece the power of a woman’s hair. She insists that her niece immediately abandon her depilatory routines and devote herself to learning how to produce at will copious lengths of hair. Why should she do this? According to “Auntie,” “Your hair is the only wild thing you have left—the one precious crop of wildness remaining to you.” And so the young woman cancels her appointments, changes her diet, and begins to cultivate her hair. She takes inspiration from a kabuki play she attended as a child as a guest of her aunt, a production of The Maid of Dojo Temple, as well as a more recent revenant, Sadoko, the black-haired demon who emerges from cursed televisions in the international horror classic, The Ring. She becomes a mistress of her wildness. Coming home from work, she transforms, releasing the hair she has concealed all day. She glories in it each night and in the morning she draws it back within herself, prepared for the daylight world.

“The doorbell rang again. Who could it be? A pushy door-to-door salesman, somebody soliciting for some organization, a burglar, a rapist, a pair of rapists, a whole gang of armed rapists . . . and then another possibility occurred to me, appending itself to the terrifying list of options, and I found myself opening the door without having meant to. My aunt was standing outside.

‘Auntie! What are you doing here?’

‘Goodness gracious, what’s happened to you? You look dreadful.’ Examining my face with narrowed eyes, my aunt kicked off her cheap outlet-shop sandals so that they landed right on top of my Fabio Rusconi heels and Repetto ballerina pumps neatly arranged in the entrance.”

(9)

“The Peony Lanterns”

This tale is rooted in a rakugo story of a forbidden, fatal romance. Rakugo is a traditional, formal genre of Japanese storytelling. The storyteller remains seated throughout the performance, so the performer must rely on his upper body and face to bring the story to life. Only two props are allowed: a fan and a white cloth. The original story of the Peony Lanterns involves a love affair between a young maid, Otsuyu, and a samurai named Shinzaburo. The caste system forbids their marriage; in grief, Otsuyu commits suicide. Yet the next night and many nights after, she can be seen entering the room of the great samurai bearing a peony lantern. Members of Shinzaburo’s household note a marked change in their master: he is losing weight, and his face is pale and gaunt. A loyal tenant hangs a sacred talisman on Shinzaburo’s door, barring the malevolent spirit’s entry. But penury leads the tenant to sell the talisman; once removed, the light can be seen inside Shinzaburo’s home, burning all night long. Visitors later discover the samurai’s desiccated bones. Matsudo’s central figure is likewise a man named Shinzaburo, but he is no samurai. A professional salesman in a large corporation, he has recently found himself the victim of the great Japanese recession. Laid off over six months ago, he spends most of his days seated in front of his television, staring blankly and almost too depressed to move. His wife grows more impatient with him by the day, but there seems to be no cure for his near-total enervation. One day while his wife is out, he receives a call from a pair of travelling saleswomen. He has little patience for the two and finds their patter unrefined, even amateur. The two work as a team: the elder, Yoneko Mochizuki urges Shinzaburo to attend carefully to the tragic story of her partner, Tsuyuko Iijima. She is quite beautiful, but the way she speeds her way through her maudlin tale of woe irritates Shinzaburo. Are these two really trying to trade on her piteous trail? He tries several times to send them away, yet each time he does he discovers that the pair are deeper into his personal space and further along in their program of selling their new Peony Lanterns. He begins to suspect these saleswomen are otherworldly, why else would their hands be cold to the touch? And when they turn out the lights to demonstrate the charming glow of their product, their faces appear to shine with an inner light.

“Observing the farce being played out before his eyes, Shinzaburō found himself unexpectedly marveling at their teamwork. Yoneko was stunning in her supporting role. There was no way Tsuyuko alone would have garnered such impact. Their methods certainly ran against the grain of traditional sales techniques, but it had to be said there was something formidable about them.” (53)

“My Superpower”

Matsuda combines two rakugo stories, a common skin disorder, and Scarlett Johansson  to create “My Superpower.” The rakugo stories are of Okon and Oiwa. In the former, family members scheme to break up a marriage in order to arrange a more profitable match by adding corrosives to the makeup of an unsuspecting wife. In the second, an offending pimple on a beauty’s nose morphs into a growth that covers her entire face. In both, the women become monsters. “My Superpower” turns the tables on the trope of cursed beauty. As in “Smartening Up,” “My Superpower” centers on a contemporary woman assessing herself in a mirror, reflecting on her lifelong struggle with eczema. She thinks deeply about the cyclical and psychological nature of her flares, recalling both the physical and emotional pains of her illness and how she was shunned or mocked in middle and high school. A chance viewing of The Avengers with her fourteen-year-old son causes her to reconsider her self-image. Contemplating the vaunted perfection of Ms. Johansson’s physical beauty, she pauses to ask herself “What is my superpower?” In an interesting twist on the rakugo style, the story is shared through the internet as a lifestyle blog post.

“Since childhood, I’ve observed the way both Okon and Oiwa are portrayed on TV and in films as terrifying monsters. That’s the form people expect them to take. Ultimately, that’s just the way that the horror genre works, whatever world you’re living in. It’s no fun if zombies don’t rise up from the dead, if Carrie isn’t drenched in pig’s blood. Walls need to be splashed and plates need to be smashed. Without all that violence and gore, viewers simply switch off.” (59-60)

 “Quite a Catch”

The rakugo “Skeleton Fishing” is the inspiration for “Quite a Catch.” In the original, a male geisha is cajoled into a fishing trip. Comically, he lands a skeleton. Although he is eager to toss it back, he is advised to take it to a temple where it can be appropriately put to rest. As a consequence of his generous gesture, the spirit of the deceased woman visits the young man nightly; she becomes his lover. In “Quite a Catch,” a perpetually exhausted office worker, Shigemi, reels in the skeleton. Instead of taking the bones to a temple, the police become involved, historians are consulted, a newspaper article is published, and the skeleton, which is determined to have no cultural significance, is tucked away in an evidence vault. Meanwhile, the weary salary woman is surprised one night to be confronted by a mud-covered creature, Hani-chan. Removing the figure’s kimono, the back of which appears to have been sliced through by a sharp blade, Shigemi bathes the woman twice, the first time to wash off the bulk of the river mud, the second to fully reveal the brilliant whiteness of her partner’s naked skin. Hani-chan returns the favor by massaging Shigemi’s feet. In the morning, her phantom lover is gone, but she returns each night and they practice their ritual cleansing. In just a few weeks, Shigemi feels revitalized.

“When I think back now to those first hours Hina-chan and I spent together, I explained to Yoshi, I feel ticklish with self-consciousness and pleasure. How awkward and faltering it all was! Hardly knowing a thing about each other, we both tried in our own way to get acquainted—just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes. What a beautiful thing it is when love begins to blossom.”  (77)

“The Jealous Type”

The original is remarkably “meta:” it involves a teacher of joruri, another storytelling form in which the storyteller is accompanied by a samisen player.  The setup: a beautiful Joruri teacher flirts brazenly with a married man, Tsunekichi. An envious student, Jirokuchi, reports the dalliance to Tsunekichi’s wife, Otowa, who is famed for her jealous rages. Tsunekichi winds Otawa up until she is willing to shred her husband’s kimono and break all the crockery in the house, but as it happens, her husband is in the next room. In the joruri story, Jirokuchi brings Otawa to the teacher’s home, catching her husband in flagrante delicto. Then who is that man in her back room? A cat spirit. In Matsuda’s retelling, the narrator addresses a woman in her fifties who experiences jealous rages dating from a grade-school infatuation to her obsession with a series of hapless objects of her affection from high school, college, including her present husband, who only now has mustered the courage to beg for a divorce. Her epic passions and psychotic rage might seem undesirable, but the narrator craves an interview with this uncivilized harridan who seems like a dark throwback to the violent age of medieval Japan.

“So what if jealousy had occasionally driven you to punch through the car window, or to rip to shreds the yukata you were sewing for your husband when it was inches away from being finished, or to slip a GPS device into his shoe to track his whereabouts?” (96)

“Where the Wild Ladies Are”

This story features Shigeru, the adult son of the ghost known as “Auntie” in “Smartening Up.” When that woman was abandoned by her married lover, she hung herself in her apartment. Ever since discovering her body, Shigeru has been inconsolable. He visits her daily, burning incense and weeping at her memorial stone. A cousin tries to intercede and she urges him to move on. In his third year of university, he fails to find anything but temporary work. He loses his job and struggles to find the motivation to find gainful employment. Eventually, he finds work at a company that manufactures incense. It seems to be a good fit, as it is neither physically nor intellectually challenging. True, there are oddities aplenty in his workplace: he keeps discovering new rooms that he hasn’t seen before, the manufacturing process seems more shamanistic than mechanical, and the other workers, middle-aged women, remind him of fox spirits from childhood fairytales. All of it puts him in mind of the day his father brought him a copy of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

“Aghast, Shigeru looked up from the page toward his mom. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was laughing at something Okumura had said. Her expression somehow became one in Shigeru’s mind with the words in the picture book he’d just read: ‘I’ll eat you up—I love you so!’ Then Shigeru looked at Okumura’s face. ‘I’ll eat you up—I love you so!’ He looked every bit as happy as Shigeru’s mom did.” (105-106).

“Loved One”

In “Where the Wild Ladies Are,” we met Shigeru, who, while mourning the loss of his mother, found employment at an incense factory. Mr. Tei is the manager of this company, and he makes a cameo in “Loved One.” The narrator is a middle-aged woman. Her mother died when she was young, her father passed a few years back, and since her old cat died, she lives alone. She runs out of incense for the family altar, but because she came down with a cold recently, she decides that instead of going out she will search the house. To her surprise, she discovers a rich supply of boxed incense in her father’s closet. It is a fragrant Osmanthus blend, not quite appropriate for the altar, but she decides it will do. After all, it will not make a whit of a difference to her, as a lifetime struggle with rhinitis has made it impossible for her to smell anything

“When you have no sense of smell, you can rule out a lot of options in life. For example, I have zero interest in aromatherapy or incense, which are all the rage now. Magazines and commercials agree that incorporating such products into your daily routine has a healing effect and facilitates a more relaxed way of living, which makes me think that maybe I’ve missed out entirely on the experience of being healed. What does it feel like, I wonder, to be healed like that?” (120-121)

“A Fox’s Life”

From childhood, Kuzuha has felt uncomfortable in her skin. She never feels quite like she understands the moods and passions of the people around her. As a young girl, she stands out for her quick intellect; where her classmates see obstacles, she sees shortcuts. Her teachers see her as a college-bound young woman, but when she turns eighteen she takes a shortcut: she chooses to enter the workforce as a secretary/coffee maker at an incense manufacturing company. She marries an unexceptional man, raises a child, and at fifty takes up first hiking and then mountaineering. She finds herself reinvigorated by her new hobby. She continues her work at the company, witnessing the impact of Japan’s Equal Employment Opportunity. Like her female colleagues, she recognizes that the law is actually counterproductive: it doesn’t advance young women but lowers young men to their level. She knows the older generation has made these laws and she loathes them. To the younger men she gives advice: keep at it. It’s what we girls do.

“In one way, the quantity of despair that men and women were feeling would soon become more or less equal. Maybe that would make it an easier world for people to live in, Kuzuha caught herself thinking somewhat indifferently, as if it was unrelated to her. And indeed, it was unrelated to her. Such things were affairs for people, not foxes.” (147-148)

“What She Can Do”

Matsuda’s subject is a young woman who divorced her husband and is living on her own in a tiny apartment with her toddler. The women around her, family, friends, and associates shake their heads at her foolhardy and irresponsible decision. They call her selfish for leaving her husband and sentencing her innocent child to an uncertain future. They have the means and opportunity to help her, but they do not. They know the government assistance that is available to her, but they keep the knowledge to themselves. Instead, they gloat and eagerly await the inevitable end to her tragedy. In desperation, the woman takes on night work as a hostess, leaving her child alone every evening, hoping against hope that nothing terrible will befall him. Fortunately, a spirit is also on the case, and she has applied for permission to intercede.

“Not easily intimidated, the child reaches out a hand to her kimono in amazement. She seems fascinated by the feel of it, so different to the clothes that she herself is wearing. Looking down with great tenderness at the child stroking her kimono, she produces a sweet from the fold of her wide sleeve and hands it to the child. The child gladly takes the sweet and begins sucking it. Each time the sweet moves in the child’s mouth, a lump appears in one of her cheeks. Seeing this, she smiles in satisfaction.” (153)

“Enoki”

The narrator of “Enoki” is an ancient tree, a hackberry, who rants against humankind for their propensity for making symbols out of nothing and for producing not only tragedies but so many, many tragedies featuring women. Her first frustration is that the two boles on her trunk—quite naturally—have always leaked a resinous liquid. They cause her no discomfort or pain, they simply seep, continuously. For as long as Enoki can remember human women have sought her out believing that the weeping boles are lactating breasts. Mothers who cannot breastfeed, mothers who are starving, worship before her. They take the resin to massage into their breasts, hoping to start the flow of milk; some even feed the resin to their infants. Like many of the spirits in the story, Oneki is grateful that times have changed. Since the invention of formula, the crowds of women have stopped troubling her. Now she has only to contemplate the creatures who created the brutal myth that her body has come to represent.

“They did this to objects around them, and even to elements of nature. People would pick vegetables that looked like parts of the human body, then feature them in TV news items about how ‘obscene’ they were, when really the only thing making those vegetables ‘obscene’ was the gaze of the people looking at them. A firm udon noodle was, for some reason, compared to the tautness of the female body; varieties of fruits were assigned women’s names. When she put together all the information she’d accumulated over time, Enoki had no choice but to conclude that human beings derived joy from twisting things and attaching a sexual meaning to them. It was pathetic. Were they idiots?” (160)

“Silently Burning”

The narrator of “Silently Burning” is a young woman who makes her way in the world moving from temple to temple as a calligrapher. Japanese and foreigners travel great distances to these temples to visit and pray, and many bring with them albums in which they collect the work of the temple calligraphers. Calligraphy is an art that takes a lifetime to master, so it is not surprising that many visitors are disappointed to discover a young woman on duty. Yet her work is beautiful, rich, and passionate. She does not, however, see herself as passionate at all. She looks at people in love with astonishment. She feels little if anything when she composes, only a kind of empty calm. She is currently working at a temple that is reputed to contain the burial site of Oshichi,  the daughter of a greengrocer who desired the young man who worked in the temple. Her urgent desire to see him drove her to climb a ladder, ring the bell that signaled a fire, and drive him into the open. The punishment for her crime: she was tied to a stake and burned alive. Oshichi thus becomes a kind of patron saint of women who suffer from thwarted desires. As lone female pilgrims pray and weep at their idol’s grave, the lonely calligrapher shakes her head in wonder.

“There is a particular expression that most people’s faces take on when they see my calligraphy, somewhere between surprise and satisfaction. Their expressions also say, I’m glad I got this girl to write in my album. It seems like the more they doubt my abilities to begin with, the more overjoyed they are when they see the results. It’s hardly my fault if they decide to underestimate what a young woman like me is capable of, but I’m still relieved to see them looking pleased.” (167-168)

“A New Recruit”

Mr. Tei arrives at a storied grand hotel that is slated for a massive renovation. Much of the building had already undergone modernizations and improvements in the 80s and 90s, but the lobby and reception area retain all of their original charms. When it was built, it was the height of luxury and a stunning representative of Showa design, blending Asian and European elements in perfect harmony. Mr. Tei is there to meet one of the many, many elderly guests, couples, and singletons, who have gathered to get one last look at the old hotel before it is reborn as a chrome and glass tower. The woman he meets is an elegant widow who is old in years but young at heart. As Mr. Tei interviews the woman, he reflects on his own youth, allowing readers a glimpse into this recurring character’s childhood.

“I was raised in Japan, so my Japanese isn’t noticeably different from the average Japanese person’s, and yet I’m often complimented on my Japanese—I suppose because of my name, which is noticeably un-Japanese-sounding, and my appearance. In my teens, this often left me feeling ostracized, but at some point it ceased to bother me. Nonetheless, it always struck me as very strange that even if you felt yourself the same as the person you were talking to, it didn’t necessarily mean the other person saw you in that regard.” (188-189)

“Team Sarashina”

Team Sarashina is inspired by a kabuki play that is coincidentally one of the first and oldest plays ever to be recorded on film. Momijigari or Maple Viewing features a samurai who heads out into the country to enjoy the autumn foliage when he comes across a party of women enjoying a feast. The hostess invites the hero to drink, and in no time at all, he drifts off to sleep. The hostess then reveals herself as the demon Sarashina-hime. She places a curse on the warrior so that he will never wake from his sleep, but the god of the mountains intervenes. He wakes the warrior, who destroys Sarashina-hime with a magical sword. Of course, the most unexpected of Matsuda’s ghost stories is that they are so remarkably free of the blood and gore that often accompanies old Japanese folktales and contemporary “J-Horror.” In “Team Sarashina,” the employees of the incense factory engage in regular athletic intramural events—all in the spirit of raising camaraderie and competition. These modern Sarashinas seem to have redirected their animus toward men by embracing sports and pursuing athletic contests. Almost always together at work, they train as a collective as well, and they are known throughout the factory simply as the most efficient work group, the Sarashina’s.

“In a sense, Team Sarashina’s role is that of a rescue squad. If a major order comes in unexpectedly, they’ll step in and lend a hand on the production line. They are also sent out to help with external projects. Some readers may be wondering if the Sarashinas are allotted the task of entertaining clients—that is, taking clients out to meals, bars, karaoke joints, and the like to ensure that business relations run smoothly—but I am happy to say that, unlike many other firms, our company has never engaged in such brain-dead practices.” (195)

“A Day Off”

Matsudo’s origin story is the kabuki play “The Suspicious Nighttime Visitor.” A young warrior takes shelter during a rainstorm in the ruins of the castle of the warrior Taira no Masakado, and there he encounters a beautiful woman who attempts to seduce him. He suspects she may be a demon spirit, so he tests her by telling the story of how Tairo no Masakado fell defending his castle. The woman breaks out in tears. She confesses she is the daughter of the deceased warlord and begs the visitor to help her mount an attack on the clan that killed her father. The man refuses and flees, but it is too late: when he looks back, the girl is in full armor and charging toward him flying her father’s battle flag: a giant frog. The young protagonist in “A Day Off” is exhausted, both physically and emotionally. She would like to be young again, like the children playing loudly at the grade school next door. But it is hard for her to take a day off when she knows that the demand for her special services will never slow. Is she simply another of tens of thousands of almost criminally overworked Japanese office workers?

Words like love and romance make no sense at all to me. It’s a terrifying thought that for such a long time, the continuation of the human race has relied on such ill-defined, potentially illusory concepts. If you ask me, it’s everything that has happened in the past that’s abnormal. The dwindling birth rate seems to me a total inevitability. (206)

“Having a Blast”

Before she died, her husband promised her he would never remarry. He even told her that if he did, she should return to haunt him. But his dead wife discovers that her mother-in-law did not wait long to find her precious son a new wife, and when it comes right down to it, so what if he did. She appears to him anyway. She says he looks happy; he says her bald head, shaved for her funeral, is quite becoming—even fashion-forward. In time, her husband dies, too, and the two take turns narrating their busy afterlives, which, being Japanese, consist largely of office work.

“I don’t have any exceptional talents. After my death, I came to see that very clearly. It made me wonder what on earth I’d been playing at while I was still alive. People treated me well because I was a man—they treated me the way that men were treated.” (218-219).

“The Missing One”

The original rakugo is a tale of a horrible abuse of power. A samurai pressures a young maid to give herself to him. When she refuses his advances, he steals a plate from the set of ten in his own kitchen and then charges the girl with theft. He promises that he will forgive her sin if she becomes his lover. She counts and counts but always finds herself one short, screaming in agony each time she reaches the number nine. In the end, rather than surrender to her tormentor, commits suicide by throwing herself down a well. In Matsudo’s tale, the maid is replaced by a thirty-something woman who has just taken over a small shop run by her mother, who has recently retired. The shop is quaint and bright, and it is architecturally significant because one of its walls is built around a cement pylon that supported the town’s monorail. The rapid transit plan had begun with the intention of making a name for the sleepy town that was known merely as the place where determined tourists might find the old Himeji castle. The project had been abandoned and now the skeleton hangs unused above the town, while Himeji castle, recently renovated, shines in the sun. Despite the town’s dwindling prospects, Kikue is determined to make a go of it, though she has a problem: the latest shipment is one plate short.

“In order to preemptively alleviate the shock she would feel if something really terrible happened, Kikue chose to imagine the worst-case scenario. This habit of insuring herself in advance, of building a protective wall around herself, had been firmly established by the time she entered her mid-thirties.

Would this Yūta be that kind of a man? Kikue asked herself as she stared at his name on the screen. Well, even if he was, she’d already imagined the worst so she wouldn’t be surprised, and she wouldn’t be hurt.” (227)

“On High”

As in “The Missing One,” Matsuda sets “On High” in the town with the abandoned monorail, but all the action takes place in the recently restored Himeji Castle. The heroine is the ghost of Tomihime. Long ago she played a trick on the falconer Himekawa Zushonosuke. Desiring to give her sister, Kamehime, a special gift, she uses magic to draw Himekawa’s prize bird away and presents it to her cherished sibling. Later, when the falconer comes to search for the bird, he and Tomihime fall in love. Today, Tomihime haunts the castle diffidently, bored by the vacuous tourists. That is until she receives a visit from Mr. Tei, who has come to present her with an achievement award. Actually, the one bearing the white streamer is Shigeru Himekawa, Mr. Tei’s replacement. This is the same Shigeru we encounter first in “Smartening Up” and again in “Where the Wild Ladies Are.”

“From the south-facing window, she could see the honmaru and ni-no-maru—the innermost and secondary citadels. Past the moat was the main road that led to Himeji Station and, beyond that, a strip of distant sea. Tomihime knew this scene like the back of her hand. There was nothing even remotely arresting about it. Looking up at the blue sky, where the clouds and the factory smoke coexisted amicably, Tomihime let out a big yawn.” (243-244)