"Where the Wild Ladies Are" by Aoko Matsuda (short fiction; 2020)

 **Modern, feminist stories inspired by traditional Japanese folk tales, kabuki plays, and general myths and legends.  Yeah, it's fantastic**

"Updated fairy tales" has actually been a pretty robust genre, which I enjoy (I'll probably get around to reviewing Naomi Novik's forays at some point).  It's pretty easy to understand how delightful it can be to have the stories we know by heart, the ones that formed us as children, the ones that have stood the test of centuries, and then try to bring them to "literature" or whatever.  Pretty clear rationale behind that trend

So how does Matsuda set this collection apart?  So many ways.  But I'd say the best part is rather simple:  If you want to tell fairy tale stories in the modern world, sure you need to understand the fairy tales, but that's not the hard part--the hard part is understanding and portraying our modern world.  And that's something that Matsuda does perfectly

Rather than being the same tales re-told in contemporary times, most of the stories in this collection actually serve as epilogues, in a way.  They take these characters, these ghosts and yokai that figured in ancient stories, and wonder what kind of mischief they'd get up to today.  What would they be doing, what would they think of us these days?  How would they help or hinder us?

Oh, and of course, let's be real:  A lot of those traditional stories, let's just say that women don't always come out of them the best.  That, that's not something uniquely Japanese, a lot of human societies have stumbled on that.  Many of the women in these traditional stories are either victims or villains, and it's unfortunately rare (not totally absent, but rare) for more depth to be given there.  Well, Matsuda very deliberately changes that, giving depth and meaning to these two-dimensional female characters.  This whole book is very much written from a feminist perspective, and that's a lot of fun:

When she saw men struggling with their work, Kuzuha would sometimes be overcome by pity, and would long to step in to help them. I could do that in a flash, Kuzuha would think. How unfair society was! Male employees had to pretend to be capable of doing things they couldn’t do, while female employees had to pretend to be incapable of doing things they actually could do.

I loved this book because of the care that Matsuda takes in talking about how modern Japanese women view these traditional tales.  Her portrait of today's society, and Japanese women's place within it, is fully realized and makes for some truly great reading.

One of the stories concerns the tale of Yaoya Oschichi--unlike some of the other stories that inspired these tales, this is actually based on a historical figure, whose story was later immortalized in a number of traditional .  In the story, Oshichi's family is forced to shelter at a local temple when her neighborhood is destroyed by a fire, where she meets a young apprentice and they fall in love.  Once her family's home is rebuilt, she is forced to leave the temple and be separated from her love who must remain cloistered.  A year later, lovesick and forlorn, she sets her home on fire again as a desperate way to be reunited with her love

The legendary scene of this play (which, again, does appear to be based on historical record) comes when she is tried for arson.  The judge pointedly asks her if she is fifteen years old.  The significance of that would have been clear to the audiences, as the punishment for arson was death (when your construction materials are wood and paper, I mean . . . yeah, ok, I can see that).  However, offenders under sixteen were not sentenced to death, so this question was clearly the magistrate trying to give her a way out.  She replies that she is sixteen, and when the magistrate asks her again, "are you sure you're not fifteen?" she insists.  In the end, the magistrate has no choice to sentence her to be burned at the stake

This image, of a young woman will to stand by her actions done out of love, unwilling to duck the consequences, resonated with audiences then and still resonates now (woodblock prints of Oshichi, usually with fire in the background and her wearing a furisode traditional young woman's kimono, are quite popular).  In one of the stories in this collection, a young woman working at Oschichi's temple muses on the story from a modern perspective:

I get the feeling that Japanese women have a peculiar capacity for obsession. When they are truly into something, they are absolutely single-minded in their fixation. They give it all they have. They throw heaps of money at it, research it endlessly, and do whatever seems necessary to draw closer to it. You sense real passion there. Imagine if someone like that fell for, say, a work colleague, with the same passion. As a full-grown adult, she can hardly let those roaring flames in her chest govern her behavior, and so some of her passion is left unspent. Maybe that’s why such women visit Oshichi’s grave. They want to pay their respects to the woman who allowed the flames of her passion to blaze to their fullest, and who was herself burned at the stake as a result.

I loved this book

"Surely it has not escaped your notice how many married couples walk around with long-suffering expressions on their faces? Times change, but the path trodden by your standard married couple remains the same. You, on the other hand? You’ve never given up, not once. Your jealousy remains as fresh as a daisy. Even consulting our statistics, it’s clear that your trajectory makes you a true outlier. 

"Barring any significant changes, we predict that the energy your jealousy generates will enable you to keep going strong until you are at least a hundred, but given that we are somewhat short of hands, we would prefer if you were to make your way here before then. The sooner the better, as far as we are concerned. The numbers of people with the levels of passion it takes to become a ghost are decreasing every year. Contrary to common presumption, it’s not just anyone who can assume spectral form. Without the requisite degree of jealousy or obsession, people just float straight to heaven. Between you and us, everyone is so blessedly sensible that we sometimes find ourselves tempted to give them a good talking-to. Are you really going to settle for that? we want to ask. Quite frankly, watching over lives as dull as theirs, we are bored witless."