Casting Light on Gender Inequality: Matsuda Aoko / Novelist

"Direct Talk"

Our guest today is novelist Matsuda Aoko.

In 2021, her book "Where the Wild Ladies Are"

won Best Collection at the World Fantasy Awards, presented annually in the U.S.

The Awards are considered one of the three most prestigious international prizes

recognizing works of fantasy and science fiction.

"Where the Wild Ladies Are" is a collection of short stories

inspired by traditional Japanese folktales and ghost stories.

Matsuda's work deals with gender issues and feminist themes.

She spoke to us about what she hopes to convey through her stories,

and how she wants to challenge her readers.

As I go through life, my thinking process is always

"How can I take the things that I find peculiar and put them into words?"

That's the most important thing.

"Where the Wild Ladies Are" is comprised of 17 short stories.

Many of them feature women from old Japanese folktales who have suffered tragic fates,

and whose jealousy and resentment have turned them into ghosts.

In a variety of offbeat scenarios,

those ghosts manifest in the lives of contemporary women

who feel suffocated or trapped by the mores of Japanese society.

Receiving the World Fantasy Award made me very happy.

Initially, when it was going to be translated into English,

I had some doubts that it would resonate with those readers.

But when the book was released in Japan, many people said that they enjoyed it

even though they weren't familiar with the original tales.

And it was the same in the U.K. and the U.S.

Through social media, I can see that more readers are picking up the book.

That makes me really happy.

In a scene from the story "Smartening Up,"

a woman splurges on ready-made food from a deli as she works through her heartbreak.

As she sits down to eat, she receives an unexpected visitor.

"'Huh?' I stared in confusion at my aunt's face,

which was etched with deep lines."

"Don't pretend you don't understand me. What do you think you're up to, eh?

I know you've been deliberately weakening the power of your hair."

"The power of my hair?"

"I was so concerned I came rushing straight over.

And what do I find? Everything's all swish and swanky. It's horrible.

And what's with all this pink tat you've got strewn around the place?

It sticks out like a sore thumb in this room, you know."

The protagonist's aunt chides her for her recent visit to a hair removal salon.

In Japan, women are expected to remove

so-called "unwanted" body hair from their arms and legs.

Eventually, the reader finds out that the aunt committed suicide a year ago,

and the protagonist is talking to her ghost.

"Smartening Up" was the first story I wrote for the book.

It's inspired by the Kabuki dance-drama "The Maid of Dojo Temple."

And I just really enjoyed the process of writing it all in all.

So I used old classics as the basis for all of the short stories.

And then I decided to make the whole book a short story cycle.

I did that because I've always been really into ghost stories and the like.

In "The Maid of Dojo Temple,"

a woman named Kiyohime falls in love with a young monk.

But when he betrays her, she transforms into a serpent and burns him alive.

In "Smartening Up,"

we find out that the aunt was betrayed by her married longtime lover.

"I should've done the same thing, you know.

I should've stuck in there, like she did, become a snake, done whatever it took.

Thirty years we were together!

I don't know what I was thinking, trying to act cool and composed when I'd just been dumped.

Playing the grown-up, then going home and hanging myself.

I mean, really! It was pathetic.

I'd have been far better off placing a deadly curse on him."

Inspired by Kiyohime, she resolves to work on her "haunting" skills.

She also lights a fire under her niece.

"Your hair is the only wild thing you have left,

the one precious crop of wildness remaining to you.

I want you to think long and hard about what you could do with it."

Often the women in these stories become ghosts and monsters because of a grudge.

It's frequently because they've been wronged by society,

or abused, or even killed.

I began to wonder how I could give these stories a more uplifting resolution.

So I thought, "What if I wrote about the ill-fated ladies from these old tales

joining forces with modern-day women?"

"Where the Wild Ladies Are" was published in the U.K. in March 2021,

then in the U.S. that October.

To date, translations have been published in ten countries,

including Thailand, Italy, and Spain.

Many readers in the U.K. and the U.S. seemed to appreciate the critical nature of my work.

For example, my commentary on the patriarchy.

They understood that my stories were about social systems.

Most Japanese book reviews didn't really pick up on that.

Japanese society is completely patriarchal.

But it's been obscured.

And people think that we've achieved gender equality,

that discrimination is a thing of the past.

Some people even say there's reverse discrimination,

like how movie theaters offer discounts for ladies on certain days.

I'm trying to show that's not the case.

Pretty much all of my books are about this theme.

I want to write about Japanese society and its systems,

and the way people live within those confines.

So I never want to lose sight of the social structure.

Matsuda was an avid reader from a young age.

For an elementary school assignment,

she wrote that her dream was to become a translator or author.

I really love children's literature. I read it to this day.

Children's books and Japanese manga written for adolescent girls

are my two biggest influences as a writer.

As a kid, I was especially fond of "Mary Poppins" and "Pippi Longstocking."

When I got older, I realized that both "Mary Poppins"

and "Pippi Longstocking" were written by women.

These women of the past had something to say about the society they lived in.

So they channeled that message into their characters and their stories.

And their stories lived on and eventually reached me.

I realized the power of books is really amazing.

Matsuda's first book, "Stackable," was published in 2013.

The title story takes place across the different floors of an office building.

It's about men who go out drinking and talking about women,

and women who dress up in their cutest clothes in order to survive the office environment.

Their struggles and discomfort overlap, and blur together.

In my writing, I want to depict the things that feel peculiar to me,

the things that I have trouble making sense of.

To me, the act of writing is an act of resistance.

I want my work to be like pebbles I leave behind in my wake.

In my first book, I really wanted to depict how strange our society is.

It's difficult for one person to leave a boulder-sized mark all on their own.

So I don't think that way.

My approach is simply to leave behind small stones with my work.

If more people leave behind more small stones, we can change society.

That's what I believe.

So I want to continue doing that.

Matsuda says she grew up reading traditional Japanese ghost stories,

which often revolve around betrayal and revenge.

One of the tales in "Where the Wild Ladies Are"

is a queer love story between two young women from different times.

I'd say I'm especially fond of "Quite a Catch."

With that one, I knew I wanted to write a feel-good story about a lesbian couple.

Growing up, the stories I read about lesbian couples were mostly tragedies.

They didn't have happy endings.

So I wanted to write a nice, happy tale.

It's based on a classic Japanese story,

and I came across a version where the punchline is a bit homophobic.

So that made me want to write a queer love story that was different

and ended with a happy ending.

I'm pleased with how all of the stories turned out.

Matsuda grew up in the city of Himeji in Hyogo Prefecture.

Nearby Himeji Castle is the setting of an old ghost story called "Plate Mansion."

It's the tale of a maid named Okiku,

who is accused by her master of breaking one of ten precious heirloom plates.

As punishment, he ties her up and throws her down a well.

She returns as a vengeful spirit,

emerging from the well every night to count the plates.

"One, two, three, four..."

"Five, six, seven, eight, nine..."

"Kikue took her hands off the plates and stretched them above her head.

This was her third attempt to count the plates.

'Nope, there really is one missing here,' she murmured to herself.

She checked the stock sheet just to be sure,

but it was marked with an unambiguous '10.'"

In Matsuda's retelling, the protagonist is Kikue,

a woman who has quit her office job to open up a store selling homewares.

"'Unfortunately, the shipment we received today is missing an item.'

As she hit the send button, Kikue let out a deep sigh.

Writing these kinds of emails always made her a bit tense."

The Okiku Well actually exists inside the Himeji Castle grounds.

As a teen, I loved visiting it even more than the castle itself.

And then in the summer, they'd air TV adaptations of ghost stories,

and the "Plate Mansion" was one of them.

Seeing the Okiku Well that I knew

being shown on TV was a very strange experience for me.

It was like the line between fiction and reality was being blurred.

That's when I started to see the overlap between reality and fiction.

I knew that I had to write about the Okiku Well.

So the last couple of stories in the book involve Himeji Castle.

In 2019, Matsuda gave birth to a son.

She now divides her time between writing and raising her child.

You'd think having a kid would change you in a profound way,

but I'm the same as before.

The things I think about have remained constant.

Having a kid hasn't changed that.

I still find that I write about the same kinds of things.

That being said, I've gone through pregnancy, childbirth, and now child-rearing.

It's opened my eyes to a whole new set of questions about our society.

I want to write about that.

And writing is my way of putting up resistance, taking a stand.

When I eventually put that out into the world,

I hope that it becomes a small stone that I leave in my wake.

(Do you have any words to live by?)

"The personal is political."

I believe that the act of writing is a very personal thing, a personal act.

But I want to write about things that connect to our larger society as a whole.

This phrase was a rallying slogan of the feminist movement.

And it's not just writing.

I think all of us encounter things in our daily lives

that feel wrong or give us pause.

Sometimes when we least expect it.

That personal feeling connects us to our larger society.

So we should keep this in mind.