Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton (Soft Skull)

Aoko Matsuda’s book Where the Wild Ladies Are, translated by Polly Barton, won the 2021 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. It contains seventeen short stories inspired by Japanese folk legends, kabuki theater, and rakugo, a type of comic storytelling art. At the end of the book is a short summary of the inspiration for each story. Originally published in the Japanese language as Obachan-tachi ga iru tokoro by Chuokoron Shinsha in 2016. All the stories have a common theme. The obachan-tachi or “wild ladies” are all ghosts. 

Smartening Up was inspired by the Kabuki play Musume Dojoji (The Maid of Dojo Temple) about a woman named Kiyohime who falls in love with a temple priest. After being rejected a number of times, Kiyohime’s love turns to hatred and she becomes a fire-breathing dragon. The priest runs to Dojo Temple and hides in the temple bell. The dragon coils itself around the bell, breathing out fire until the bell melted and the priest burned to death. 

After coming home from a beauty salon, a young woman is visited by her aunt who hanged herself the previous year after being spurned by a lover. Instead of seeing her son who was the one who found her, she turns up at her niece’s house to prevent her niece from following in the same footsteps as her and the niece discovers she has a dark power of her own.

The title story, Where the Wild Ladies Are was inspired by a rakugo story titled Hankonko (Soul Summoning Incense). The original story is about a ronin who rings a bell every night much to the consternation of the neighbors. They send a steward to complain to him but he informs the steward that he is saying the rites for his dead wife who gave him the “soul-summoning” incense. Whenever he uses it and rings the bell, she appears before him. The steward asks for some of the incense so he can see his dead wife as well, but the ronin refuses. The steward buys incense with a similar name but when he puts it on the fire, the neighbors only come to complain about the smoke. 

Shigeru, the son of the woman who hanged herself, has started a new job at an incense making company. His job is really simple. All he has to do is “watch the sticks of dried compressed incense that went streaming past him down the conveyor belt, and check that they weren’t misshapen or broken.” But he lost all motivation for work after discovering his mother had hanged herself with a bath towel. After that, he notices that all the employees he works with are middle-aged women. He senses something strange about the company but can’t put a finger to it. He even hears a song from his youth that his mother used to sing to him. As he listens closely, he also realizes it’s his mother’s voice. 

The best description of the entire book can be summed up in one word - quirky! The title of the book seems to be a play on the Maurice Sendak children’s book Where the Wild Things Are which also makes an appearance in one of the stories. There are fifteen other tales which are also linked to each other. Matsuda’s use of well-established stories and interpreting them in her own style makes for a unique reading experience. The stories can be enjoyed even more by reading where the inspiration for each story originated. ~Ernie Hoyt