One of my favorite pieces of writing by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton, is a story called “The Woman Dies,” which appeared in a 2018 issue of Granta. “The woman dies,” it begins. “She dies to provide a plot twist. She dies to develop the narrative. She dies for cathartic effect. She dies because no one could think of what else to do with her.” The first half of the story is divided up into corresponding sections: “The woman gets married”; “The woman gets pregnant”; “The woman miscarries”; “The woman is raped.” Matsuda’s argument echoes that of many American feminist critics, like Laura Mulvey and Alice Bolin, but the story’s formal inventiveness and fierce narration distinguishes “The Woman Dies.” With piercing precision, she takes to task that most insidious and ubiquitous narrative crutch, where women are nothing more than receptacles for pain and trauma.
Matsuda’s short story collection, Where the Wild Ladies Are, recently published by Soft Skull Press and translated again by Barton, offers a sort of corrective for the female suffering that has always pervaded storytelling. Through a series of interlinked stories, Matsuda blends existing legends with new stories to give women the agency and power that they often lack in our traditional narratives. In revisiting and reimagining centuries-old tales, she draws connections between the past and present, emphasizing the ways in which history is never really over.
The stories of Where the Wild Ladies Are have an explicitly feminist bent; against the backdrop of Japanese ghost stories, Matsuda tackles issues like glass ceilings and workplace discrimination, as well as patriarchal expectations for women: that they be hairless, that they don’t outshine their male counterparts, that they contain their rage (even when it’s merited). She is just as outspoken a feminist in conversation as she is on the page. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Matsuda, who is both a writer and literary translator (she’s translated work by Carmen Maria Machado and Karen Russell). Polly Barton also joined us and shed light on her work as Matsuda’s frequent collaborator. The three of us talked about Starbucks lattes, translating “Britishisms,” and the wonderful friendship that has blossomed between Matsuda and Barton.
—Sophia Stewart, Assistant Interviews Editor
Sophia Stewart (SS): The stories in Where the Wild Ladies Are draw inspiration from traditional Japanese ghost and yōkai tales, and the book includes a complete list of references and outlines of these original works in a section called “inspiration for the stories.” Aoko, how did you choose these specific tales as inspiration, and why did you want to bring these traditional narratives and contemporary stories into conversation with each other?
Aoko Matsuda (AM): Most of them are stories I’ve known since childhood. My favorite at that time was the ghost story of Okiku, because I also am from Himeji, where Okiku’s Well actually exists on the grounds of Himeji Castle. Summer is the season for kaidan—Japanese horror stories—and I used to watch the story of Okiku, along with other kaidan stories, on TV over and over. While watching her story, I found myself shouting to Okiku inside of my head: “Die Okiku, die quick, so that you can become a ghost with superpowers and have your revenge!” In my eyes, female ghosts in the kaidan stories looked so much livelier than living people, and were so much more fun to watch.
As I became an adult, I also realized how these old stories reflected and encouraged people to internalize misogynic views towards women, since most of the time those stories were written and told by men. So although I loved them very much, I’ve always had mixed feelings about them, and in writing Where the Wild Ladies Are, I wanted to create a space where all the female ghosts can enjoy themselves and find new lives. After I started to write the book, I did some research to find new stories I didn’t know of. One of the stories I was fascinated by was “Neko no Tadanobu,” which I rewrote as “The Jealous Type,” in which a jealous woman appears. The woman doesn’t have a big part to play in the story, and nobody feels sorry for her even though her husband is cheating on her. So in my story, I made her a main character and let her be as jealous as she wants.
SS: This story collection bucks not only against patriarchal pressures, but also the Western pressures that Japanese women face, like Eurocentric beauty standards. In one story, a woman wishes for a look and life more aligned with Western convention: “In my next life, I decided, I would be blonde. Then I would meet a gorgeous man with blond hair to match mine, and we would fall in love, and talk in English.” (Without spoiling anything, she certainly has a change of heart.) As a Japanese writer and woman, how do you understand these kinds of pressures?
AM: Japanese culture has been hugely influenced by Western culture, that’s for sure. For instance, we have become so used to seeing ads for beauty products or fashion brands that use beautiful white women as models to make the ads look “cooler.” Many Japanese people don’t feel weird about it, but I think it’s disrespectful to both Japanese women and white women. I absolutely oppose stereotypical beauty standards, since they are a big reason that women around the world feel like they are under intense pressure and therefore unable to feel confident in themselves. However, my main intention in these stories is not to criticize westernization in Japan. In this book, I intentionally included a lot of proper nouns originally from Western culture—Starbucks, Dean and Deluca, and so on—because that’s how our daily lives are now, and I needed to show how our lives now are different from the era of the old ghost stories. But mostly, I just wanted the ghosts to enjoy the taste of Starbucks lattes.
SS: Polly, being a translator often requires you to be fluent not only in the language you’re translating but also in the culture of the author you’re translating. Reading Where the Wild Ladies Are, I learned so much about Japanese culture that I didn’t know before, like the existence of 100-yen shops and the Glico Morinaga scandal. In your translations, how do you bring both language and culture to life?
Polly Barton (PB): Translating Japanese fiction, there’s almost always something that the average Western reader won’t know, so I think over the years I’ve gradually built up a toolkit of different ways for dealing with those references. There’s a variety of ways to insert the information that the reader needs to make sense of the references into the text, sometimes with a direct explanatory gloss and sometimes just by tweaking the context a little so that it becomes self-explanatory. (Incidentally, the translator’s footnote that people seem to assume is the go-to choice actually rarely appears in contemporary fiction.) What’s interesting about translating Aoko’s work is how, as you point out, those kinds of Japan-specific references rub shoulders with a lot of Western ones, or Japanese equivalents of things that exist in the West, which I think really helps with the introduction of new concepts—having a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar is easier on the stomach for most readers.
SS: At the heart of many of these stories is the idea of metamorphosis—we see women transform into animals, ghosts, and other curious creatures. Prior to their transformations, these women may doubt their own power, or have their power underestimated by male peers. But through their transformations, they find a freedom that eluded them when they were (perceived as) human women. Aoko, what was your thought process behind this motif and what it reveals about how society constrains women’s power?
AM: As you may perhaps know, Japanese is still an insanely male-centric society, and women in Japan have never been encouraged to be confident in themselves. Growing up, I saw so many women externally hiding their true selves so that they don’t stand out. I thought that the female ghosts and monsters in these older stories have something in common with modern women in Japan—they can share the same pain and feel empathy for each other—so I wanted to connect them in a timeless way. I’ve always loved metamorphosis stories. Metamorphosis is about possibility. I wanted to show the possibility of change in ourselves, and in society, through these stories of transformation.
SS: Polly, you were born and raised in West London, and based in the UK. As an American English speaker, I’ve always been interested in the distinctions between British and American English when it comes to translation. There are many moments throughout Where the Wild Ladies Are, particularly the dialogue, that I read in a British dialect because of its grammar and diction: for instance, one character exclaims, “Goodness gracious, what’s happened to you? You look dreadful!” An American English-speaker might say, “Oh my god, what happened to you? You look awful!” There is obviously not one variety of English. Can you talk about how issues of dialect play into your work as a literary translator?
PB: This is something that I think about a lot, actually. I think in the world of translation there’s an impression, sometimes articulated explicitly but more often left unsaid, that English translators should aspire for some kind of “mid-Atlantic” English, which is to say English that is comprehensible to all Anglophone readers without substantial editing. I can see the rationale behind that, but I disagree with the principle quite strongly, just because in my own case, I think it impedes my ability to produce my best work—work that has the life of the original—if I can’t work into my natural idiom. Of course, if there are two alternative translations I’m considering that seem of equal merit and one is British idiomatic and the other is one I believe to be universally understandable then of course I’ll go with the latter, but for the most part that doesn’t happen.
In terms of this book, though, I think there’s a couple of factors that have meant that the translation you’re reading reads as particularly British. The first is that Aoko’s style is so entertaining and conversational, and the dialogue is such a key part, that it felt extra clear to me that some vague mid-Atlantic English wouldn’t cut the mustard—that if I was to do it justice I needed to be using everything I had in my arsenal, as it were. And the second is that my US editor, Yuka Igarashi at Soft Skull, was really clear from the get-go that she wanted to do the bare minimum in terms of Americanizing for a US market. So we got rid of the Britishisms that we thought would impede comprehensibility, but we kept things that we thought would be understandable—things like “I bloody love the mountains,” which I’m sure many other editors would have asked to be changed. I’m really grateful to Yuka for that.
SS: Aoko and Polly, you are both translators—what are the hardest part and the most enjoyable part of translating English into Japanese and Japanese into English, respectively?
AM: Polly is such a talented translator that she can do both, but I only can translate from English to Japanese. I think the enjoyable part is that as you go through the same stories over and over while translating, you really can deepen your understanding of them; it’s a rich experience. The hardest part is when you can’t find a right answer. When translating Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado, there were some sections I almost found impossible to translate, so I asked some of my friends who are native English speakers, including Polly, and their answers were all different. Sometimes they said they didn’t understand either, which I found very fascinating and made me love the process of translation more. I want to add that I’ve been really enjoying working with Polly. I’m beyond happy that now we have the English version of Where the Wild Ladies Are as the extension of our friendship.
PB: For the record, I absolutely can’t do both! I guess the hardest or scariest part for me is the things you don’t know that you don’t know. If I know I don’t understand something then at least I can ask someone, but I worry about missing references or second layers to things that, because I don’t know are there in the first place, fail to adequately reflect.
I think the most enjoyable part for me is finally finding the voice for a particular work. Until that happens, in the first draft, translating can feel a bit like forcing your way through a very tight Styrofoam tunnel, and then suddenly, it happens, and you break through into a more spacious place where you can move, and the words echo in the way they should. That’s really nice. And I think once you’ve established that, it doesn’t easily disappear: it’s a kind of a muscle memory. For example, I might not translate any Aoko for a while, and then go back a few months later and translate something that she’s written, and find that I can tap back into that voice almost immediately. That’s a really great feeling. Although obviously I’m not trying to imply that her tone is the same throughout all her work, because it definitely isn’t.
And then, of course, the kind of connections that translation can foster as well. What Aoko said about the book being an extension of our friendship is so lovely; it really does feel like that, and it’s been just so great to work with her. Sometimes it can feel quite intimidating to reach out to an author about some issue you’re having, and so having Aoko being incredibly supportive and accommodating from the beginning has meant so much to me.
SS: Aoko, you interlace many of these stories, so that characters resurface multiple times and encounter each other. Did you plan this interconnectedness from the get-go? How did you map out the interrelation between stories and characters?
AM: The first story that I wrote was “Smartening Up.” I enjoyed writing it so much that I decided to write more. As I was writing, I found myself liking the characters so much that I thought, “Oh, they should meet or interact in some way.” Also, throughout the stories, I kind of wanted to make a loose community where socially vulnerable people are always watched over by someone and can get help whenever they need. So in the book I created a mysterious company that is very fluid and humane, because in reality, companies—and therefore societies—don’t work the way they are supposed to.
SS: Where the Wild Ladies Are is packed with references to American cinema—you allude to Carrie, The Avengers, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Ring, and The Sixth Sense, just to name a few examples—and many of the stories mention the importance of television in characters’ lives. Aoko, what role do film and television play in your life and work, and how do you think visual media might shape us as a culture in ways that are different from literature?
AM: For me, films and television programs, as well as books and comics, have always been the places where I can meet outsider women, weirdo women, rebel women, sometimes scary women. When I was a child, I didn’t care if these women were human beings or ghosts or monsters, and I didn’t care if they were from Japan or other countries. I was just drawn to them, encouraged by their existence. Of course, this applies to a certain extent to literature too, but I think visual media have a greater responsibility, because they reach a wider audience, and especially the younger generation. Most of the media services in Japan disregard the influence they have on younger viewers and air programs or commercials with sexist perspectives on a daily basis. It’s just frustrating.
SS: One of my favorite lines from Where the Wild Ladies Are is, “I want a skill, a special power into which I can throw my whole self.” Polly and Aoko, for you both this power is writing and translation. Can you talk a bit about your own relationships to writing and translation? Do you “throw [your] whole self” into these skills of yours?
AM: It’s always been my dream to combine writing and translating, so I’m definitely trying to “throw my whole self” into that. Writing is a very challenging part of my work, seeking something which doesn’t yet exist, but translating literature gives me a pure kind of pleasure, giving me opportunities to devote myself to wonderful stories written by my favorite writers. Although I feel more responsibility when I’m translating.
PB: I agree entirely with everything Aoko said! I’m very new to the world of writing, and my first book is coming out at the beginning of next year, so I can’t really say much with authority about that, but I certainly feel like combining those two activities of writing and translating has always been the dream for me. I think in terms of pleasure, the more practiced I get at translation, the more it becomes a pleasure for me. Which is not to say that I didn’t always enjoy it, because I definitely did, or that I don’t feel a sense of responsibility now, because I certainly do, but I think that it’s gradually gotten less crushing, and I have a more innate sense of what creative liberties I can take and which I can’t. I’d say I do throw my whole self into translation, but it’s a different kind of self that I’m throwing in when I’m writing, and for me it’s good to experience a combination of those two different kinds of throwings!
Aoko Matsuda is a writer and translator. In 2013, her debut book, Stackable, was nominated for the Yukio Mishima Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize. Her novella The Girl Who Is Getting Married was published by Strangers Press in the UK in 2016. In 2019, her short story “The Woman Dies” was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. She has translated work by Karen Russell, Amelia Gray, and Carmen Maria Machado into Japanese.
Polly Barton is a translator of Japanese literature and non-fiction, currently based in Bristol. She has translated short stories for Words Without Borders, The White Review and Granta. Her full-length translations include Friendship for Grown-ups by Naocola Yamazaki, Mikumari by Misumi Kubo (both Strangers Press), and Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki (Pushkin Press). After being awarded the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, she is currently working on a non-fiction book entitled Fifty Sounds.
Sophia Stewart is an editor, writer, and critic from Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Asymptote Journal, and other venues. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
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