skygiants

I saw a bunch of recommendations for Aoka Matsuda's Where the Wild Ladies Are (translated by Polly Barton) over the course of this year, so I kept checking it out during periods of time when I was traveling and wanted to read things on ebook, and then accidentally not getting to it before it expired.

But I have just come back from a week with

genarti's family in Vermont and I did in fact manage to remember that I had checked it out just in time to read it before it disappeared again (and before I broke my Kobo, for that matter, so nice save for me on both those points) and: surprise! it's extremely good and I would like to recommend it!!

This is a collection of affectionately weird slice-of-life stories translated from the Japanese, mostly involving a supernatural creature of some sort just kind of generally going about its business. Some favorites include:

- the one in which a man is briefly inconvenienced by two haunted door-to-door saleswomen
- the one in which a tree explains that it is uncomfortable with the extremely gendered folklore that has grown up around it as a result of the fact that it happens to have some growths that look sort of like boobs
- the one in which several ghost ex-spouses all end up working in the same ghost office building and it's mildly awkward but they're all just doing their best to be chill about it
- several ones in which women with unusual talents are enthusiastically pursued by supernatural job recruitment agencies
- the INCREDIBLY cute one about the woman with a ghost girlfriend!!!

As the collection goes along, it becomes increasingly clear that many of the stories are interlinked -- a character briefly referenced in one will become the protagonist of another, or vice versa -- and the ways in which they resonate against each other and create interstitial spaces between each other makes for a narrative that's greater than the sum of its parts, but also all the parts are individually a delight.

I also want to take a moment to shout out the translation work, because the voice of the narrative is really charming in a way that I imagine is not easy to reflect in literary translation! Here's a passage I really enjoyed from a story about a ghost who visits her husband after death and then discovers punk:

I thought he might get a fright seeing me there with my bald head and all, but he just burst out laughing.

‘Man, it really suits you!’

(Of course, my husband is from a different era, so he didn’t actually use these words. Translated into modern parlance, though, this is what he meant.)

I rubbed my head bashfully – bald heads feel great to rub – and smiled. ‘You saw it at the funeral too, though.’

‘Yeah, but I wasn’t really in a position to notice that kind of thing. I just felt so awful.’

‘Aww, thanks. That’s sweet of you. Well as you can see, I’m not doing bad at all, so I want you to enjoy yourself as well, okay?’

‘Okay, that’s cool.’

‘See you, then.’

‘Bye for now.’

And with that, we parted again. I think that was a better parting than our first one. First time round, I’d been at death’s door, and then I died, and between all the caring for me and the grief and so on, my husband was a total mess. Come to think of it, I think we were both intoxicated by the tragedy that had befallen us. From where I’m standing now, that seems totally uncool.

So many of the ghosts in this collection are genuinely living their best lives and it's very inspiring to me! One of my most enjoyable reads of 2021, I think, which is always pleasant to stumble over in the last few weeks of the year.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

osprey_archer

YES I'm so glad that you enjoyed this book and liked it! I read this book earlier this year and its playful approach to its folktale sources just blew me away. Loved the interlocking stories about the supernatural workplace, loved the super-cute story about the ghost girlfriend, loved the bright and charming voice. The translation is so wonderful I actually followed the translator Polly Barton to another book (There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job, which I also enjoyed but it's probably not as germane to your interests as this one)... and then got distracted by other books. But I should swing back around and see what else she's translated.

skygiants

I think it must have been your post where I originally saw it recced and determined that I absolutely had to read it, so thank you very much again!! I'd absolutely follow this translator around to other books tbh, both her work and her taste seem impeccable. There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job now also going on my list!

whimsyful

This sounds delightful, and my library has the ebook available, hurrah!

yessss DIRECT ACTION, I hope you enjoy it!

rushthatspeaks

This sounds a lot like Banana Yoshimoto, which means I will go read it immediately. (Have you read any Yoshimoto? I don't recall. I rec anything of her except the most famous one, Kitchen, which I think only became famous because it is her most conventional book, and which is the only one of hers I have only read once.)

I've only read Hard-Boiled and Hard Luck, which I very much liked and have been meaning to get around to more since [checks notes] 2011; time to actively put more on the list. Any in particular that you would recommend as other starters?

I love Hard-Boiled and Hard Luck, especially the bit with the stone. My other top-tier Yoshimoto are Asleep, which is several short stories focused on sleep and dreaming, and which sounds kind of banal when described but in practice is fascinating; The Lake, which is a fascinating examination of the ways trauma can break some people and almost, in some ways, help others; Goodbye Tsugumi, which should be a terribly depressing novel about grief and is instead a sweetly melancholic novel about ambition; and Moshi-Moshi, which takes a plot straight out of John Updike or, more to the point, Haruki Murakami, and makes me like it and find it plausible.

I'm less fond of Amrita, where I think something may have slipped in translation-- it is clearly working with extremely delicate philosophy-- or NP or Lizard, which I just consistently don't find memorable even though I have read them and enjoyed them several times. Kitchen... okay, it's from 1988. It's really early as a sympathetic portrayal of a trans woman in mainstream Japanese lit, and it's really early for that subject matter to be translated from Japanese into English, and it is a major place where a lot of pop culture trans narrative cliches come from as far as I can tell, and so nowadays it reads offensively. But it was legitimately radical for the time. I would absolutely teach it in a class about trans people in literature, but I just can't with the reading it for pleasure at this point.

I desperately wish more of her later work would get translated.