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Where the Wild Ladies Are
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01/2021 Where the Wild Ladies Are, by Aoko Matsuda
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I'm looking forward to (re)reading this. *Cough*A very happy NY to all of you and all the best for a much better 2021!!
Alan wrote: "I'm looking forward to (re)reading this. *Cough*A very happy NY to all of you and all the best for a much better 2021!!"
You scalawag, you. Happy new year, Alan.
Carol wrote: "Don't let the door hit you on your way out, 2020. This is our discussion thread for our January 2021 group read, Where the Wild Ladies Are, a collection of 16 feminist retellings ..."
I still really, really, really love "Smartening Up." It's the opening story and it's just... perfect.
Carol wrote: "Whether you've read it already (*cough* Tim and Alison *cough*),"I was trying to be good and wait for the new year. "One story" I said. Well, one story became two and two became... the entire book.
I'll write my full thoughts on the book here in a few days. I want everyone to have a chance to read some before I say too much. That said, overall, I personally gave the collection a full 5/5 and I don't hand those out very easily.
Alison wrote: "I still really, really, really love "Smartening Up." It's the opening story and it's just... perfect."
Oh! I would love to hear your opinion on this. I actually read that one and was at first a little concerned. I found it a middle ground story in the book personally, and my initial reaction was to wonder if the book was really going to be my cup of tea (view spoiler) In contrast the second story hit and I was near tears from the comedy (view spoiler) Admittedly that could be because I was more familiar with the original tale from the second story, and liked the alternate take/parody of it.
Tim wrote: "Oh! I would love to hear your opinion on this. I actually read that one and was at first a little concerned. I found it a middle ground story in the book personally, and my initial reaction was to wonder if the book was really going to be my cup of tea (view spoiler) In contrast the second story hit and I was near tears from the comedy (view spoiler) Admittedly that could be because I was more familiar with the original tale from the second story, and liked the alternate take/parody of it."I wasn't that familiar with most of the original stories going into the volume. (Highly recommend reading Japanese Ghost Stories first.) Maybe that's part of the reason I enjoyed "Smartening Up" so much--it makes good sense disconnected from the traditional story.
As a woman, I found the commentary on women's body issues profound. I also loved the ironically underplayed tone of the whole thing.
Feminist literary theory talks about women's depiction as both angels and monsters. "Smartening Up" set the tone for all the stories in Where the Wild Ladies Are, women owning their own narratives.
I wrote about Where the Wild Ladies Are on my blog and for the Asian Review of Books, if you're interested. The article on my blog focuses especially on "Smartening Up" and how it touches on Japanese bathing culture.
Thank you for your take on the first story. While I agree with your assessment, and see much to examine in it, I personally find it a bit lacking from a narrative perspective. Not a bad story, just doesn’t seem as strong from a narrative perspective in my opinion. While it fits the tone in some ways, it is one of the more disconnected from the original tale when I did more research (only one I can think of was actually less so, but more on that later), so in that regard I found it an awkward start. Alison wrote: "it makes good sense disconnected from the traditional story"
I agree in the sense that we should not expect a direct retelling, but I find a good portion of the fun of something like this is keeping the original story in mind the entire time. Much like The Bloody Chamber (another interesting book retelling classic stories) the stories mostly work due to their parallels to the originals, making you re-examine classic tales and see an alternate take. (view spoiler)
Examining these stories to my eyes, is seeing a classic narrative reinvented through a modern outlook, but still with a sense of loving homage rather than mockery for their older ideas.
Tim wrote: "Thank you for your take on the first story. While I agree with your assessment, and see much to examine in it, I personally find it a bit lacking from a narrative perspective. Not a bad story, just..."Certainly a lot of the stories are more enjoyable if you know the background. I'm still not sure what exactly Matsuda was trying to say in "The Peony Lanterns," but it was a lot of fun comparing it to the original story.
ironically underplayed tone of the whole thing.That is a great way to put it. I am about halfway through, and while some stories I enjoyed, the at-times Teen Beat style of writing wasn't always working for me. The above description is far more useful !
Started on the book today and haven't finished the first story yet.Our Japanese title translates to "Where the Aunties Are", which is a bit more apropos to the first story.
I appreciate the inclusion of summaries of the works these stories are derived from! If only all translations were so considerate!
Does anyone know if this volume was released all at once in 2016, or if the individual stories were published some years earlier and then collected together? One clue I find in the first story is "DVD", which as far as I know went out of fashion in Japan well before 2016. Our hip MC shouldn't be caught dead without a blueray player.
Smartening Up is definitely a feminist take on body hair. It made me recall the time we were watching the German film The White Rose in German class, and most of the class went 'eww' when the female lead had visible armpit hair. And body hair fixation has gotten a lot worse since. But there are problems with this story unrelated to the point it's trying to make: the opening is needlessly long, and the aunt's tale is dropped halfway.I thought The Peony Lanterns was a cute modern retelling of an old tale, centering on the clever wordplay between the three main characters. It's a well-crafted piece.
My Superpower has little to do with the tale in the index, except that the MC mentions it. I would comment more on Oiwa and Okon themselves and contrast them with how the MC sees them, but that's probably outside the scope of this discussion.
I really enjoyed Quite a Catch. It's a modernized follow-up to it's classic folk tale, and sometimes considering what happens after a folk tale can be quite strange.
I'm not sure what point I'm supposed to take from The Jealous Type. It's a story of domestic abuse, told from the perspective of the abuser. I can't consider this feminist.
Bill, I agree with your assessments almost entirely. My Superpower was honestly the biggest disappointment for me in the set as when Yotsuya Kaidan was mentioned I was extremely excited. I love adaptations of that story and was wondering how the author would twist it. The Jealous Type was another one that I didn’t really care for but it grew on me the farther I went along in the collection. It does present an issue, but I can discuss that after more people have finished.
The Peony Lanterns Is by far my favorite though. I loved the comedy and how it twisted the original story.
I just finished "The Jealous Type" and had some thoughts. Does anybody know anything about the rakugo story it's based on? A quick Google didn't bring up anything at all...(view spoiler)
I've just started this and instantly got confused with the comments here. Turns out the Tilted Axis Press (UK) version of the book starts with The Peony Lanterns, instead of Smartening Up. The TAP version also gives the summaries of the original stories before each new version, rather than at the back of the book.
Jeshika wrote: "I've just started this and instantly got confused with the comments here. Turns out the Tilted Axis Press (UK) version of the book starts with The Peony Lanterns, instead of Smartening Up. The TAP ..."that's just odd - to take such a different approach. I understand different covers on each side of the pond, but changing the story order and putting those summaries at the back is annoying. The Brits got it right, no surprise.
That is fascinating. I read the American edition (because, well, that’s the one with easy availability for me) but it’s very strange to see this was changed, particularly the first story aspect. Honestly I would have liked the British edition better as that was that story that immediately sold me on the collection and seeing it first would have been an instant winner. I wonder which story was written first and if the author has a preference?
Looking at a review on a Japanese site, I see the following stories listed:みがきをかける [Smartening Up]
牡丹柄の灯籠 [Peony Lanterns]
ひなちゃん [Quite a Catch]
悋気しい [The Jealous Type]
おばちゃんたちのいるところ [Where the Wild Ladies Are]
愛してた [Loved One]
クズハの一生 [A Fox's Life]
彼女ができること [What She Can Do]
燃えているのは心 [Silently Burning]
私のスーパーパワー [My Superpower]
最後のお迎え [A New Recruit]
『チーム・更科』[Team Sarashina]
休戦日 [A Day Off]
楽しそう [Having a Blast]
エノキの一生 [Enoki]
菊枝の青春 [The Missing One]
下りない [On High]
Not all of these titles are translations. Matsuda named some of these stories for their main characters. In the end, 'A New Recruit' was the only title I couldn't place, so it must be the English name for the story 'The Final Visit'.
I've only read the first 3 stories in the book (after the first 2 they're all the same order, I checked with Bill). But so far The Peony Lanterns is my favourite, so I'm glad it was the first story in the collection for me.Also, I thought the story was familiar. It's in my collection of Lafcadio Hearn's Oriental Ghost Stories.
I read this collection (the TAP edition) in October, but it was easily one of my favourite books of 2020. I really enjoyed most of the stories in it, and the translation seemed so seamless. I also very much appreciated the insertion of the background on the original stories they were based on, since not all of them were familiar and it was nice to see how Matsuda transformed them.Also, I found this podcast for whoever's interested. Some indie UK publishers had created a Translated Fiction Online Book Club when covid had first confined everyone inside, and Where The Wild Ladies Are was their second book. In the podcast episode they invited the translator and the UK publisher to discuss the stories: https://open.spotify.com/episode/634o...
Why is the Japanese order completely different? How odd... Good find on the podcast.
Re. the order of the stories - I had the US edition, so the 1st story was Smartening Up and then Peony Lanterns. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I've just had a quick check and in Smartening Up the aunt mentions that Shigeru still visits her grave 'each month'. In the later (title) story Where the Wild Ladies Are, Shigeru is the main focus and we see him cutting his visits down from every week to every other week, so do we assume that this story 'happens' before Smartening Up? Anyhoo.... timeframes, I think, aren't important, in the sense that this is a collection of stories which form layers, rather than a linear story.Like Tim, I wonder in what order the stories were written, but more importantly what order Matsuda intended them to be read. It's clearly an editorial choice by someone.
I read the ebook version and was surprised to find the source stories at the back after I had already finished the book. They would've been useful earlier, although they were pretty sketchy. I enjoyed the book very much but it would've been even more enjoyable if I'd been familiar with the source tales.
The title story Where the Wild Ladies Are is one of the better stories in the collection, because it's given space to develop before reaching its climax. One could say it's coincidence that brought Shigeru together with the supernatural, but then, just about anyone who took that factory job would have fallen into a similar situation.Loved One just doesn't go far enough to have a resolution. I feel that way about a number of later stories in this volume. Developed into longer works they could have had complete plots, but Matsuda only sketched out the introductions for us.
The point of A Fox's Life starts as a standard feminist piece: the woman who knows society won't let her exercise her full talents in a man's world, and so settles for less. But in the end the moral is a more depressing one: society now grinds down men and women the way it once only ground down women. We've all ended up in the same lousy boat.
What She Can Do is another strongly feminist story. Everyone around the MC blames her for leaving her husband and taking her child with her, without stopping to consider that it might have been worse for them to stay. She ends up in the same situation as uncounted women throughout history having to raise children by themselves, working long hours and not able to spend enough time with their children.
Enoki isn't a feminist story. It's about humanity anthropomorphizing nature and at times in desperation reaching for something that probably won't help because it's all they've got. The desperate ones here aren't all women, but many of them are.
Silently Burning is another that reads like an excellent introduction to a story that was never finished. It's a day in the life of our MC when no inciting incident occurs.
It's hard to comment on A New Recruit without spoiling it. It's a very visual piece rather than a character piece. But I would like to say that it could have been merged with several other stories in this volume to create something more complete and satisfying.
Now to see if I can match up some more of those Japanese titles. I'll edit the post above.
Bill wrote: "Silently Burning is another that reads like an excellent introduction to a story that was never finished. It's a day in the life of our MC when no inciting incident occurs.."I actually really enjoyed this one even though absolutely nothing happened. I like the narrative of her being underestimated for being young and female, easy to relate to.
I guess I got tired of these not-quite-stories, so I took a break and read a couple of other books before getting back to this.I find nothing particularly remarkable about any of these last five, except for 'The Missing One'. The Missing One has some very nice imagery and even contains a plot. But then, it is one of the longer stories in the collection.
Overall, I enjoyed the following (4/17):
The Peony Lanterns
Quite a Catch
Where the Wild Ladies Are
The Missing One
My biggest criticism would be that the stories are too short to contain stories. It could be improved by merging those stories that overlap with each other and using that to develop plots.
Matsuda has a very visual, relaxing prose style and I'd like to see more of her work. But a novel next time, please.
I edited the post above where I lined up the Japanese and English titles to show the ordering in the Japanese edition. The differences are minor, but one has to wonder why the order was tinkered with. Surely Matsuda had reasons for presenting the linked stories in the order she originally chose.
If I remember correctly, in the podcast I posted above, they asked the translator about the order of the stories (that was when the US version was still in the making) and she said that Smartening Up had already been published as a short story in the UK, so they wanted to start the collection with a story that readers wouldn't have already read.
I appreciate the concept, and also that the author took a somewhat light touch to executing it, while also establishing and stay within certain "rules." For instance, deciding that a business is the closest association in modern times to the "belief system" that existed when the ghost stories originated was an elegant solution to re-telling the tales. I do think, however, that some of the uneasy feelings about that belief system that appeared here and there could have been worked up more psychologically. At times the connective aspect of the business itself was a bit tenuous -- just dropping Mr. Tei's name in here and there to make the architecture seem more fully formed and integral.Bill captured some of the same feelings I had: that the stories are often really just sketches -- seemingly the work of weaving the narrative into the modern framework was left in a fairly loose form.
I certainly enjoyed the female viewpoints and references, especially all the body bits. From my light knowledge of Japanese folklore, women suffer and suffer, so this focus was not so much "feminist" for me as simply appropriate to the material.
Japanese Literature
Books mentioned in this topic
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (other topics)Japanese Ghost Stories (other topics)
Where the Wild Ladies Are (other topics)
Where the Wild Ladies Are (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Aoko Matsuda (other topics)Polly Barton (other topics)
This is our discussion thread for our January 2021 group read, Where the Wild Ladies Are, a collection of 16 feminist retellings of traditional stories of yōkai, ghosts and monsters - set in modern times - by Aoko Matsuda. Translated by Polly Barton. Published by Soft Skull Press in the US and Tilted Axis in the UK.
From NPR's review: "Like the subject matter of the book, Matsuda's writing, and Polly Barton's masterful translation, seems to exist on a higher plane — the author seems to see things the rest of us can't (or won't), and writes with a subtle self-assuredness mixed with a sly, unexpected sense of humor."
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/20/924709...
Matsuda is a translator as well as an author. In 2013, her debut novel, Stackable, was nominated for the Yukio Mishima Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize. Her novella The Girl Who Is Getting Married was published by Strangers Press in the UK in 2016. In 2019, her short story “The Woman Dies” was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. She has translated work by Karen Russell, Amelia Gray, and Carmen Maria Machado into Japanese.
A review from The Japan Society - UK:
https://www.japansociety.org.uk/revie...
A profile of Polly Barton in the Japan Times:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/...
Asymptote Journal's interview with both Barton and Matsuda:
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog...
Whether you've read it already (*cough* Tim and Alison *cough*), or plan to read it this month, let us know you're joining and what you think of it and which stories you think are standouts.