Where the Wild Ladies Are
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this witty and exuberant collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese folktales, humans live side by side with spirits who provide a variety of useful services--from truth-telling to babysitting, from protecting castles to fighting crime.
A busybody aunt who disapproves of hair removal; a pair of door-to-door saleswomen hawking portable lanterns; a cheerful lover who visits every night to take a luxurious bath; a silent house-caller who babysits and cleans while a single mother is out working. Where the Wild Ladies Are is populated by these and many other spirited women—who also happen to be ghosts. This is a realm in which jealousy, stubbornness, and other excessive “feminine” passions are not to be feared or suppressed, but rather cultivated; and, chances are, a man named Mr. Tei will notice your talents and recruit you, dead or alive (preferably dead), to join his mysterious company.
In this witty and exuberant collection of linked stories, Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millenia-old tradition of Japanese folktales—shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells—and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Matsuda's groundbreaking collection (after the novella The Girl Who Is Getting Married) turns traditional Japanese ghost and y kai stories on their heads by championing wild, complex women. In "The Peony Lanterns," recently unemployed Shinzabur gets an eerie visit from two women, Tsuyoko and Yoneko, who try to sell him peony lanterns. Yoneko, the elder of the two, tells Shinzabur of 30-something Tsuyoko's tragic life: a motherless daughter with a cruel father, she was forced to leave home before completing high school. Shinzabur refuses the lanterns, though he gains an epiphany from the women's unusual sales tactics: "nothing terrible would happen if you broke the rules." In "Quite a Catch," a young woman named Shigemi carries on a sexual relationship with the ghost of a woman who was killed by the man she refused to marry. Not all of Matsuda's stories captivate. "Team Sarashina" is about a group of women who are assigned to various departments in their company and offer their support to flailing coworkers, but it's too obtuse to get a handle on. Most of Matsuda's stories, though, hit their mark, particularly her queer, feminist fables, including "A Fox's Life," about a woman who passively internalizes sexism in her workplace ("I'm a girl. I'm just a girl, after all") until she realizes in middle age that she might be a fox. Matsuda's subversive revisionist tales are consistently exciting.
