If you are have already read Układ(a)ne and you want more Aoko Matsuda, reach for Where the Wild Ladies Are. The book was published in the English translation of Polly Barton in the British publishing house Tilted Axis in March this year (only two months before our premiere of Układ(a)ne). And here we have it!
In Where the Wild Ladies Are, the author takes on legends and tales of ghosts and demons straight from the kaidans, kabuki theatre and rakugo and transforms them into funny stories set in the modern world. Her spirits keep their traditional names, but are not very different from us. They work, take care of their appearance, fall in love, envy, dramatize. It often turns out that these “wild ladies” just after reaching the afterlife can finally say and do what they want, not caring about what people say. And they are starting to take advantage of it. Matsuda writes lightly and as always with a pinch of salt, but under this cover of good entertainment there is a lot of universal content and a strong feminist twist.
Subsequent stories in the English edition have a short introduction that tell us what story they are built on. Interestingly, some characters and plots come back to us in different stories, so the whole story creates a closed narrative.
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