by Matsuda Aoko
Where the Wild Ladies Are
The stories in this collection draw inspiration from traditional Japanese ghost and yōkai tales, many of which have been immortalised as kabuki plays or rakugo performances. A complete list of the original references can be found on page 283.
The Peony Lanterns
The Buddhist festival of Obon is celebrated in mid-August – when it is believed the spirits of the deceased return to wander the earth – and it occupies a special place in the Japanese supernatural calendar. The tradition of telling ghost stories in summer owes much to Obon, as spooky tales were found to pack more punch when one believed one was literally sharing a room with the spirits. Perhaps there’s also some credence in the practical explanation that this tradition evolved as a way of alleviating the blistering summer heat through the chilling effect of fear on the body.
These days, whether or not they partake in the telling of ghost stories, most people use the national Obon holidays as a time to return to their hometown, clean the graves of loved ones and generally honour the spirits of their ancestors.
Besides providing an atmospheric backdrop, Obon also plays a key role in a number of ghost stories. One of Japan’s most well-known ghost stories, the tale of Otsuyu, is a perennially pertinent reminder of the dangers of having sex with ghosts. As with many classic tales, the story has many variations. The rakugo version of Botan Dōrō [The Peony Lantern], from which Matsuda’s version draws its inspiration, runs roughly as follows: Otsuyu meets Shinzaburō Hagiwara, a rōnin or masterless samurai, and the two fall hopelessly in love, but are forbidden from being together because they come from different social classes. So deep is Otsuyu’s yearning that she eventually dies of lovesickness. Come Obon, however, Otsuyu appears at Shinzaburō’s door and the lovers enjoy a passionate reunion. Soon she is visiting him every night, bearing a peony lantern. Noticing that Shinzaburō is growing more haggard and believing him to be possessed, his tenant hangs a talisman outside the door, preventing the entry of Otsuyu’s ghost. Those passing the house at nightfall now see a lantern floating sadly around the vicinity of Shinzaburō’s house.
Eventually, though, the promise of financial compensation conspires to persuade the tenant and his wife to sell Shinzaburō’s soul. They remove the talisman, and the lantern bobs joyfully inside. The next morning, Shinzaburō’s corpse is found embracing a skeleton.
‘Good evening to you, sir!’
He’d ignored the doorbell three times already when he heard the woman’s voice carrying through the thick steel door. Sitting on his sofa, Shinzaburō froze in alarm, hardly breathing. His body felt terribly heavy, and the thought of getting up was unbearable. Usually in this situation, Shinzaburō would have relied on his wife to answer the door, but with it being Obon, she was away visiting her parents. Besides, it was ten o’clock at night. Shinzaburō had no idea who his visitor was, but he believed that ringing people’s doorbells at this hour was unreasonable behaviour – and Shinzaburō disliked people who behaved unreasonably. From a young age, he had been instilled with a firm grasp on what was and wasn’t reasonable. In his adult life, throughout his career as a salesperson, his professional conduct had always been eminently reasonable. Even when he’d been laid off as part of the company’s post-recession restructure, he had retained his sense of reason and walked away without a fuss.
That had been over six months ago. Shinzaburō’s wife had begun dropping gentle hints that he should find himself another job. He knew she was right – but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Both his mind and body felt leaden. Whenever he browsed job adverts online he was hit by the unshakeable sense that he was being made a fool of, and he couldn’t stand the idea of visiting the job centre either. Had he really become the sort of man who had to rely on a job centre? The very idea seemed too wretched to bear. And there he’d been, believing that he was talented and had something to offer to the world. He’d gone about his life not being a nuisance to anyone, playing by the rules, acting reasonably at all times. How had it come to this?
While his wife was at work, Shinzaburō would undertake a token offering of housework, but that was as far as it went. The truth of the matter was this: spending all his time in his marl-grey tracksuit, shabby from constant wear, Shinzaburō had morphed into a big grey sloth. In the afternoon, he would lounge about on the sofa, watching reruns of period dramas and mulling over questions of no particular significance, like whether, back in the Edo period, his lack of fixed employment would have made him a rōnin. How much better that sounded than simply unemployed.
‘Good evening to you, sir!’
The same voice again. From the light filtering through the living room curtain, it must have been obvious to whoever was outside that there was someone at home.
‘Oh, damn it all!’
Shinzaburō got up from the sofa, slowly crept towards the door to avoid his presence being discovered – though he knew from long years of experience that such a thing was impossible – and peered through the spyhole.
Outside the gate stood two women. They were dressed in practically identical outfits: black suits, white shirts, sheer tights, and black pumps. One was somewhere between forty and fifty, and the other looked to be in her early thirties. The elder was staring with terrifying intensity at the spyhole, while the younger was shyly inspecting her feet. They made for an altogether peculiar pair. Immediately, alarm bells went off in Shinzaburō’s head. No one in their right mind would involve themselves in situations which they knew would be troublesome from the outset. In this particular period of his life, Shinzaburō did not have the mental energy to spare on that kind of nonsense.
The women seemed to immediately sense Shinzaburō’s presence in his cramped entranceway, and the elder one piped up again, ‘Good evening to you, sir!’
Shinzaburō guessed she must be the one who had done all the speaking so far. The younger one kept her head down, not moving a muscle. Something about the way she held one cheek angled towards the door suggested she was invested in what the person on the other side thought of her. Indeed, the way she carried herself was common among highly self-conscious women, thought Shinzaburō. The observational eye he had cultivated during his years as a sales representative, which enabled him to pick up on these little details about people, was a source of great pride to him.
Very cautiously, Shinzaburō opened his mouth. ‘Yes, what is it?’
‘Oh, good evening, sir,’ began the elder woman with an affected smile on her face. ‘We are door-to-door sales representatives, visiting the homes in this area in the best of faith. We are terribly sorry to disturb you at this hour, but we were wondering if you might be able to spare us a couple of minutes of your time.’
Something about the woman’s voice filled Shinzaburō with instantaneous exhaustion. He felt nothing but loathing for these stupid women who’d invaded his precious relaxation time and forced him to walk all the way to the front door. Don’t you know that I’m exhausted? he wanted to say. For six whole months now, I’ve been totally and utterly exhausted.
‘No thanks, I’m afraid not. It’s late.’
No sooner had Shinzaburō delivered his curt answer, which he had hoped would send them packing, than the younger one, who had been examining the floor so intently, raised her head to look towards the spyhole, and said in a weak, sinuous voice, ‘Come now, don’t be so inhospitable! O–pen up!’
If a willow tree could speak, Shinzaburō thought, this is the kind of voice it would have. He blinked and found himself in the living room, the two women facing him across the coffee table. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they were sat on the sofa, while Shinzaburō had b
een relegated to one of the more uncomfortable kitchen chairs he and his wife had bought online. He had no memory of carrying it into this room. Sandwiched beneath his buttocks was one of the Marimekko cushions his wife loved so much. Shinzaburō still had no idea what its pattern was supposed to represent, although right now that was hardly his most pressing concern.
While Shinzaburō was still wondering how on earth he had wound up here, the women sat looking at him, their four stockinged kneecaps arranged into a perfect row of iridescent silver. Seeing that they had his attention, they both pulled the same inscrutable expression and handed him business cards as white as their papery faces.
‘Allow us to introduce ourselves.’
Flummoxed by being handed two cards at exactly the same time, Shinzaburō somehow managed to accept both and examined the names printed on them. The elder woman was Mochizuki Yoneko, the younger Iijima Tsuyuko.
Just then, Shinzaburō’s eyes fell on three steaming cups of green tea placed on the coffee table. Did I go and make tea without realising it? he thought. Surely these two didn’t sneak in to the kitchen and make it themselves? What’s more, he noticed that the yōkan he’d been saving for a special occasion was there too, cut into neat slices. As Shinzaburō was trying to wrap his head around all this, Yoneko spoke.
‘We took the liberty of examining the nameplate outside your door. It’s Mr Hagiwara, is that right? Oh, good. Forgive our impertinence, but may we ask your first name?’
Why did they need to know? ‘It’s Shinzaburō,’ he found himself saying, though he’d had no inclination to answer the question. It was as if his mouth was moving of its own accord.
‘Shin–za–bu–ro,’ Tsuyuko pronounced slowly. Having his first name spoken like that by someone he’d only just met made him shudder. It was much too intimate.
‘It’s an absolute pleasure to make your acquaintance, Shinzaburō.’
Between this woman’s honeyed tone and her flirtatious manner, there was definitely something overfamiliar about her. Shinzaburō averted his eyes. Did she think her looks would allow her to get away with such behaviour? Sure, with her alabaster skin, her hair lustrous as a raven’s coat and all those coquettish sideways glances, she was undoubtedly beautiful. And yet, despite all these gifts, the epithet that seemed to fit Tsuyuko like no other was misfortunate.
Without waiting for an invitation, Tsuyuko took a sip of tea from her cup, leaving a sticky red lipstick mark on its rim. It came to Shinzaburō in a flash that as far as work was concerned, this woman was probably utterly incompetent. The same went for her companion, too.
‘Well, if you don’t mind, we’ll get down to business,’ said Yoneko, projecting her grey-haired head forward like a tortoise emerging from its shell. Shinzaburō nodded reluctantly, resolving to hear out their patter and then get them to leave. Changing the key of her already gloomy expression so it was positively funereal, Yoneko began to speak.
‘Miss Tsuyuko here has had the most lamentable of lives, Mr Hagiwara. She was born into a family of great repute and prestige, and yet here she is now, as you see, working all day long as a mere saleswoman. The cause of this tragic downfall was that her beloved mother passed away at a young age, leaving poor little Tsuyuko behind. Her father was a kind man, but rather weak of character, and it wasn’t long before he developed an intimate relationship with the maidservant. As sad as it is to admit, it would appear that there are a great many weak-willed men out there. As for the maidservant, well! I know that of late people take leaks of personal information and so forth awfully seriously, but we do so much wish you to hear this story in its entirety, so I will on this occasion divulge that her name is Kuniko. Now, Mr Hagiwara, we do most earnestly beseech you to exercise the utmost caution around women going by the name of Kuniko. For the thing is, you see, this Kuniko utilised her feminine wiles to claw her way to the stature of second wife. As if that wasn’t enough, she then resolved to gain sole possession of Tsuyuko’s father’s fortune, and began spoon-feeding him all kinds of groundless fabrications about Tsuyuko, morning and night… As I believe I mentioned, Tsuyuko’s father was not a man of strong character. Honestly, men like that really are the worst, aren’t they, Mr Hagiwara? Anyhow, predictably enough, he foolishly believed every word that Kuniko spouted, and began to look coldly upon his daughter. Unable to bear this cruel treatment, Tsuyuko left home without even finishing high school. Her life from that point on has been one tear-inducing episode after another. To start…’
‘Sorry, but why are you telling me all this?’ Shinzaburō finally broke in on her lament. For a long time, he had been stunned into silence by Yoneko’s phenomenal pace of speaking, which would have rivalled that of any rakugo performer, but eventually he managed to find his opening. ‘What does any of this have to do with me?’
At this obviously unexpected interruption, a look of unbridled annoyance flashed across Yoneko’s face, but she continued with a cool expression, ‘It has nothing to do with you personally, Mr Hagiwara, but the fact that we have met in this way implies some kind of indelible connection between us. It’s Miss Tsuyuko’s heartfelt wish that you hear her story.’
Tsuyuko nodded in agreement, dabbing her tears with a white handkerchief that had miraculously appeared in her hand.
‘You came barging in here! Does that qualify as an “indelible connection”? Besides, you’re acting very oddly, if you don’t mind me saying so! First, you said you were here as sales representatives, and now you’re here telling me your life story! Don’t you think that’s a bit inappropriate?’
As Shinzaburō began to lay down the laws of reason to these two utterly unreasonable women, they met him with expressions of genuine incomprehension.
‘What exactly is wrong with that?’
‘Now look here,’ said Shinzaburō. ‘Don’t feign ignorance with me. I used to be a salesman too, so I know the score. Forcing your way into people’s houses and then acting like this is just not how it’s done.’
‘Oh, Mr Hagiwara! So you were in the sales industry too! Well, that only proves our indelible connection. Isn’t that just wonderful, Tsuyuko?’
‘Oh yes, Yoneko!’
Shinzaburō looked on in horror as the two beamed at each other.
‘But Mr Hagiwara, your use of the past tense suggests you’ve given the profession up. Forgive my impertinence, but why is that? Would it be anything to do with restructuring, which has become so common in the public world of late?’ Yoneko cocked her head and stared pointedly at Shinzaburō. This person was utterly unsuited to sales, Shinzaburō thought. Most likely she hadn’t even been through training. In his incredulity, he found himself answering her question without ever having meant to.
‘Yes, that’s right. I lost my job when my company was restructured.’
As Shinzaburō spoke, he was all too aware that his head hung in embarrassment, as if of its own volition. He realised that this was the first time he’d spoken about what had happened to him to anybody other than his wife.
‘Oh, Shinzaburō! What a terrible shame!’ Tsuyuko said in a shrill voice, a hint of a smile perhaps meant to signify compassion hovering around her mouth. She leaned her slender body over the table towards him and rested her thin fingers gently on Shinzaburō’s forearm. Startled by the coldness of her touch, Shinzaburō hurriedly crossed his arms so as to shrug off any contact. Tsuyuko shot him a look that seemed to say, Well, fine, be like that. She turned away coyly for a moment, then looked back at him, more brazen than ever. Once again, Shinzaburō averted his gaze.
‘Oh, Tsuyuko! How kind-hearted you are! And what frostiness you are shown in return! Mr Hagiwara, why is it that you feel no sympathy for Miss Tsuyuko?’
‘Of course I feel bad for her, but that’s not the issue here! Besides, from what I’ve heard so far, it hardly sounds like the most unusual of tales. Every life has its dose of misfortune.’
At Shinzaburō’s word
s, the two widened their eyes into a charade of disbelief.
In a tone of utter astonishment Yoneko said, ‘My, what a horrendous age we are living in! In days of yore, anyone who beheld Tsuyuko’s great beauty and heard even a snippet of her tragic tale would be overwhelmed by sympathy and agree to commit lovers’ suicide with her on the spot! Isn’t that right, Miss Tsuyuko?’
Tsuyuko pressed her handkerchief to her eyes again and nodded with even greater fervour than before, then dissolved into gasping, theatrical sobs. She had to be faking it, Shinzaburō thought. He was getting more and more irritated with the duo’s outrageous behaviour, and before he knew it, he was saying, ‘Okay then, what about you two? Are you not going to say anything about my redundancy? That seems pretty heartless to me! If you think I should be feeling sympathy for you, then I expect the same in return.’
Yet as Shinzaburō ended his frustrated outpouring, he saw that Tsuyuko and Yoneko wore expressions of total indifference. As he sat there unnerved by this sudden transformation, Yoneko said with insouciance, ‘Well, men are the stronger sex. You are the blessed ones. Everything will turn out right for you in the end, I’m sure. I’ve not the least concern about you. What worries me is Miss Tsuyuko. Women are so utterly powerless. Can Miss Tsuyuko really go through her life as a single woman, I ask myself. Can she endure this way? Hmm, what’s that? The same goes for me, you’re thinking? Oh, you really need not worry about me. Please concern yourself solely with Miss Tsuyuko. And just to be clear, I’m not ordering you to commit lovers’ suicide. We have no wish to place that kind of burden on your shoulders. What we would like is for you to purchase our product.’
Shinzaburō had not been conscious of any ongoing preparations, but now, with timing that seemed almost too impeccable, Tsuyuko set something down on the table with a thump.
It was some kind of lantern thing. Didn’t those have some special name?
‘It’s a tōrō, Mr Hagiwara,’ said Yoneko with a triumphant grin, as if she’d read his thoughts. These two were really too much to take.
