Raven Leilani, Luster, and Aoko Matsuda, Where the Wild Ladies Are
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Over the winter break, I fell madly in love with a couple of bold, fierce, delicious books, each of which kept interrupting my expectations while remaining compulsively addictive, as in, everyone-go-away-no-I-don’t-want-to-eat-or-work-or-do-anything-but-read-this-book. I would fall into them and leave behind, for a brief blissful time, the fragile, enraging political (and medical and economic) situation. Fiction so relentless, so surprising that it becomes its own world. Some of that is the subject matter, but some of it is the sentences. As I read, I thought, vaguely, that they were interrupting linearity, poetically, but now that I look at them more closely, that doesn’t seem to be what they’re up to at all.
Raven Leilani, Luster
Here are a pair of paragraphs from three-quarters of the way through Luster. Edie, the narrator, an artist in her twenties who has lost her hilariously infuriating job in publishing, is wandering around the house of her twenty-three-years-older lover, Eric. Most reviews have mentioned that she winds up living with Eric, his wife, Rebecca, an autopsist, and their adopted daughter Akila, and that Eric and Rebecca are white, Edie and Akila black. Initially against her inclinations, Edie slowly takes on a kind of mentor role with Akila, though not in any traditional way. Mostly, at this point in the book, she’s hanging out and playing with the younger girl, “who favors console-based fighting where women disembowel each other with their bare hands.”
Leilani, who’s brilliant at subtext, is big on having Edie appear to give us accountings of events that explain nothing at all:
I am relieved to find that there are no family dinners. It reminds me of home, how everyone eats in a different room. Akila downstairs in front of the TV. Rebecca in the kitchen, standing up. A few times I see Eric make his plate and disappear into the basement, which is the only place in the house that is locked. Rebecca joins me for coffee in the morning but doesn’t talk. Most of the time she is either sleeping or in the morgue. With Eric in the house she is dimmer, more exact, her circuit brief and preordained, this clockwork so particular it feels precarious, vulnerable to a single, badly chosen word. I want to talk about how things were before Eric came back. How it has been two weeks since I rinsed the dye from her hair, and there are still traces of it between the bathroom tiles.
When the house is empty I take more photos of her things. With the last thirty dollars in my account I buy a twelve-count tin of Prismacolors and thick vellum bristol board. At night I open my window and work from the pictures, from the procession of glass and alloy and silk, textures defined principally by their fickle relationship to light and so as difficult to render as digital joints, her perfume a cold, narrow palette, her jewelry warm and wide, her clothes a little bit of both, the expression of weft and grain not dissimilar to hair. In between these sketches, there is a house. Clapboard and brass and turf, and even in this I see them, but I cannot see myself. For the first time I can capture knuckles and plastic, but there is the issue of my face. I still can’t manage a self-portrait. When I try, there is a miscommunication, some synaptic failure between my brain and my hand. I try to find another way toward the self-portrait. I close my door and destroy my room and take a picture of the mess. I approach the drawing optimistically, but I am not there. The next time the house is clear, I take an opposite tack and clean. I take out the garbage and then I take a picture of the bags on the curb. I clean the bathroom and take a picture of the tongue of hair I pull from the drain, and at night I render these pictures, hoping to see myself. When I don’t, when I have completed a series on folded laundry and grout and still am not there, I keep cleaning. And then one morning while I am shining the faucets, Rebecca tells me she is planning a party and she would like me to help. It is a party for Akila that Akila does not want. Akila says this explicitly as we are making our way through a new game, a turn-based RPG where the protagonist is an army mail clerk with amnesia. His only memory is of a boy from a small mountain town. As we draw closer to the first conflict of the war, the base is flanked by a long, alpine shadow. The non-playable characters are not subtle about it. A colonel whose pockets we emptied earlier in the game points to the shadow and says, Was that there before? As we climb the mountain, Akila says that Rebecca is throwing her a birthday party. She says that she would rather spend it alone. The controller vibrates in her hand. The vibration indicates the genesis of a new memory, a woman who is trying to put out a fire.
Leilani writes precise, electric dialogue. But also she creates these densely packed paragraphs, a few of which go on for many pages. They cross time spans and a range of emotional turns, often, though not always, tacitly.
At the beginning of the second paragraph, Edie is photographing and then painting the objects belonging to her lover’s wife, to the family. She tries to find herself in various ways. She ends the paragraph with Akila also creating a self-portrait, in a way, through the violence and also subtext of her video game. There’s a looming shadow in the game, as in Luster: “As we draw closer to the first conflict of the war, the base is flanked by a long, alpine shadow. The non-playable characters are not subtle about it.”
The voice, the present-tense incredibly observant narration, creates a young woman both lost and knowing. The first of these two paragraphs sets up the conditions. It lets us know where everyone is physically, revealing the separations that express where they all are emotionally. This novel is full of waiting for the inexpressible to come to light, but when it does, it’s not revealed in the way we thought it might be, and there’s no relief on the narrative pressure.
The writing in these paragraphs feels nonlinear because the explanations are missing, but when I look at it closely, it’s not out of order, sentence to sentence, in time, and when Edie moves forwards and backwards in time, the pathways feel orderly: we go into a sequence of memory and return without dislocation. “I still can’t manage a self-portrait. When I try, there is a miscommunication, some synaptic failure between my brain and my hand” moves across a walkway to the next thought: “I try to find another way toward the self-portrait.” But then on the other side of that thought comes an entirely unexpected small turn: “I close my door and destroy my room and take a picture of the mess.” Edie is so lost, and knows she is lost, but she has a set of strange projects aimed at finding herself.
Leilani makes these moves throughout, and it’s not until I try to describe how the prose is nonlinear that I realize that’s not it at all. Her writing’s full of accretions and small turns, every paragraph something of a prose poem. Here Edie has no ability to create a self-portrait and seems not to know who she is.
Throughout the book, though, her portraits of the others around her are fierce, bravura performances, crackling with emotion held in place by the precise details. So, though I was often worried about her specifically, and very curious about what blow-ups might be coming, I always felt she would be all right. She has such acute perceptions and an ability to go forward into impossible situations. She doesn’t give up no matter what, like one of Akila’s fighters. The book invites us to read this story as a tale of her learning.
Aoko Matsuda, Where the Wild Ladies Are
Matsuda’s sly, compelling ghost stories—feminist reimaginings of traditional tales—sometimes have an almost off-hand quality, meticulously written and translated but with an apparent informality, stories you hear around the fire at night.
In the straightforwardly allegorical “A Fox’s Life,” a woman who has a fox nature takes “short-cuts” through her life to fit in at the office, to marry one of the many men around her pretending to be capable, just as the women pretend to be incapable. But she always has intimations of her fox nature:
In her twenties, when Kuzuha was working in an office, the nation was rocked by the Glico-Morinaga scandal, an extortion case that targeted several major confectionary companies through blackmail campaigns and kidnapping. The only known suspect from the mystery group calling itself “The Monster with 21 Faces” was identified in the papers as “the fox-eyed man.” As his antics wreaked havoc on Japanese society, Kuzuha cursed him internally for giving foxes an even worse reputation than they already had. With their round eyes and tubby bodies, Kuzuha’s parents were built more after the model of another shape-shifting animal, the tanuki, and Kuzuha’s sister, older than her by five years, had been born one too. Kuzuha grew up as a lone fox surrounded by cuddly raccoon dogs.
It’s only when she reaches her fifties that she begins mountain climbing:
When Kuzuha was in the mountains, the shortcuts disappeared from her head. She understood that mountains were dangerous places, so she was not permitted to stray off course—she had learned as much during her initiation phase. And yet, as she grew more experienced, she began to cave to the pull of temptation, to deviate from the path. Gradually, just a little at a time, and always so that she’d be able to find her way back, Kuzuha veered off the beaten track.
One day, after forcing her way into a forest adjoining the path, Kuzuha stepped off the edge of a cliff. The branch she tried to grab on to slipped from her fingers, and she found herself free-falling through the air.
I’m going to die, Kuzuha thought to herself. Well, never mind. It was a good life I had.
She screwed her eyes shut.
The next instant, her body curled into a perfect ball and executed fifteen perfect 360-degree rotations, landing at the bottom of the cliff on all fours. Well! Kuzuha looked down at her slender front legs covered in white fur. Swiveling her head back, she saw a body, also covered in white fur, complete with a fuzzy tail. When she squinted, she could see a damp little nose just under her eyes, twitching. So, I really was a fox all along. Suddenly a lot of things made sense to Kuzuha. No wonder she’d been so good at being a Japanese woman!
After a wild and exhilarating run through the mountains, which might with another writer be the end of the story, Kuzuha winds up back in the office. Now she’s a knowing mentor to a clueless young man, a new employee, aware that he’s finally experiencing the glass ceiling that women have known all along. She has found out who she is, what she can do, and she brings that knowledge back to ordinary life, rather than staying in the wilds.
I tore through this book of stories, engrossed. Matsuda, despite her inventiveness, preserves the sense of traditional folklore, the confiding tale-telling voice (“Kuzuha grew up as a lone fox surrounded by cuddly raccoon dogs.” “Suddenly a lot of things made sense to Kuzuha.”). She has the gift of translating stories into the present moment, adding layers of often explicitly political meaning, without losing the wonder of the original. This particular story conveys something of the quality that makes women happier in their fifties and sixties than at any other time in our lives. The exhilaration of getting older.
The narrators throughout Where the Wild Women Are, whether first or third person, move lightly from moment to moment, subject to subject. Those haunted are often happy to welcome the ghosts, and most of the ghosts take their deaths in stride.
The connections in the stories feel tangential at first, characters or ideas reappearing in new forms. For example, the following paragraphs come from the title story, two stories before “A Fox’s Life.” Shigeru, a part-time employee moving from company to company (a “flitter”) finds himself frequently visiting the grave of his mother after her suicide. His mother seems annoyed by his visits, and he’s thrown off as he carries out his current job, inspecting “SOUL SUMMONER” incense. He gets involved in a conversation with the women of the company, but they won’t tell him what the incense is for or why it’s so popular:
By now, Shigeru had recovered enough of his mental equilibrium to be able to perceive when something was a bit off. He’d cut back on his graveyard visits, going only every other week. However much he strained his ears, he couldn’t hear the singing anymore these days. He got the sense that maybe, if he greatly increased the number of his visits, he might be able to hear it again—but he also knew that doing so would upset his mom.
“Well, companies are weird, aren’t they,” one of the ladies said after a pause, as she gobbled up the broad strip of deep-fried tofu sitting on top of her kitsune udon. Her slanted eyes and narrow face had a vulpine quality to them, Shigeru noted. And come to think of it, weren’t the kitsune—the fox spirits capable of transforming themselves into humans—supposed to love deep-fried tofu above all other foods? Wasn’t that, in fact, where the dish had got its name? But he brushed off these thoughts as quickly as they had come to him.
“No, that’s not what I mean,” he continued hesitantly, but the women tittered and quickly steered the conversation to the new bakery that had opened up by the station, and whose head pastry chef had allegedly trained in France.
It’s not so much nonlinear as digressive, hopping from subject to subject, characters guessing at each other’s real lives, the rhythms of conversation, gossip, a pleasure in life that doesn’t stop at life’s edges but spills over into death and transformation.
It’s always tricky to be clear about the voice in translated work, but Matsuda is a translator herself, and she has talked about her relationship with her own translator, Polly Barton, in an interview for Asymptote:
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.
That sense of a conversation between friends comes across in the book: a friendly accord between the languages, the old and new stories, the characters and their ghostly fates. There’s something of a self-portrait of Kuzuha here: she is not at all surprised to find herself a wild mountain fox. In fact, she’s quite delighted.