Scan barcode
A review by erboe501
Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda
3.0
The description of this collection--feminist Japanese folktale retellings by a writer who's translated Carmen Maria Machado and Karen Russell, and who's won the Shirley Jackson Award--had me super excited. I read a novel, Breasts and Eggs, from a female Japanese writer earlier this year, and it made me want to explore more Japanese fiction. This didn't live up to the hype, but I enjoyed this enough to watch out for future work from Matsuda.
It took me awhile to get into this collection. The conversational, sometimes clunky or informal, style of writing took getting used to. But once I realized how the stories were interconnected, I became more invested. I loved finding the connections across the stories and characters. It means you have to pay close attention!
A few standouts: a woman who finds power by not shaving or waxing her hair and letting it grow to epic lengths, a woman with raging jealousy addressed by ghosts telling her to keep up the emotional charge, and a tree who is uncomfortable with the objectification of two knobs on her trunk shaped like breasts as a pilgrimage site for women unable to breastfeed.
It took me awhile to get into this collection. The conversational, sometimes clunky or informal, style of writing took getting used to. But once I realized how the stories were interconnected, I became more invested. I loved finding the connections across the stories and characters. It means you have to pay close attention!
A few standouts: a woman who finds power by not shaving or waxing her hair and letting it grow to epic lengths, a woman with raging jealousy addressed by ghosts telling her to keep up the emotional charge, and a tree who is uncomfortable with the objectification of two knobs on her trunk shaped like breasts as a pilgrimage site for women unable to breastfeed.