Where the Wild Ladies Are

by Matsuda Aoko

  But – and here we reveal our real reason for getting in touch with you on this occasion – why on earth did you have to go and do something as banal as to repent, for heaven’s sake? If your husband ignites the flames of your jealousy with the suspicious messages he receives on his mobile, or the matchboxes he keeps in his pockets from dodgy-looking establishments, and the posh chocolates he brings home on Valentine’s Day, then it’s him that’s in the wrong. If he makes you imagine he might have been unfaithful – leaving aside the question of whether he really is occasionally being unfaithful – then it is entirely his fault.

  Why should you have to go and show benevolent forgiveness towards a husband like that? You made your dissatisfaction clear. You expressed your feelings of jealousy. Where’s the problem with that? You’ve done nothing wrong. The misguided one here is your cheating husband. That’s why, from now on, you should let yourself go wild with jealousy. We implore you not to part so readily with your defining asset.

  Maybe you haven’t realised it yet, but your jealousy is a talent. You mustn’t go listening to the nonsense spouted by all the drudges surrounding you. They know nothing. There is no need for you to divest yourself of your own fangs. It would be the world’s loss if you were to do so.

  So long as your husband keeps up this flighty behaviour of his, you should continue to show him hell. If he starts wittering on about divorce again, then find a chink in his armour and blackmail him. If necessary, we are happy to help you out in that regard by locating some kind of chink on your behalf. We don’t think it will take long.

  It is also testament to the singularity of your gift that your jealousy retains a youthful intensity even into your fifties. Ordinarily, individuals find their personalities softening at the edges as they get older. After living with someone for years on end, they develop a sense of resignation. Plainly put, they stop caring. Many women end up looking not to their husbands, but to the male stars of their favourite TV programmes to trigger their most passionate feelings. This is because such stars facilitate beautiful fantasies. There is nothing wrong with that, either.

  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 that 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.

  In today’s world, there’s a tendency for jealousy and obsession to be portrayed in a negative light. Those with talents in these areas are often criticised and viewed negatively, as if they were lacking in some way. This only serves to ensure that people with extraordinary talent like yours shrink in number. This is the vicious cycle we find ourselves in. The situation is truly grave.

  On that account, as embarrassing as it is to admit, we find ourselves chronically understaffed, and nothing would please us more than if you were to join our team. For a person of your gifts, we don’t feel any training will be necessary and hope to welcome you into our team immediately. Recognising your capabilities at this stage, we have extremely high expectations for what you could accomplish with us into the future. In terms of arrangements for your appearance on the spectral stage, rest assured that we have a wide variety of options available, and we feel confident that we’ll be able to find something you will be satisfied with.

  Accordingly, when you do pass away, please be sure to get in touch.

  Where The Wild Ladies Are

  It was hands down the worst spring ever. Trudging wearily into the changing room, Shigeru wedged his shoulder bag inside his locker and, with a heavy heart, began to put on his boiler suit. With no one else around, the room was totally silent.

  Glancing up at the Seiko clock on the wall, Shigeru realised his shift was about to start any moment. He’d been sure that he still had a good ten minutes to play with, but of late, time seemed to be wreaking havoc on him. Either that, or he was just zoning out too much. Shigeru kicked off his navy Converse and put on the black plimsolls provided by the company. He left the room with his cap in hand, transferring it to his head as he navigated the dark corridors and the stairs as quickly as he could, finally turning into the room labelled Manufacturing Room Number Six. When he reached his workstation, his manager Mr Tei nodded at him in greeting. He had made it just in time.

  Fresh out of university, Shigeru had quickly become what was colloquially termed a ‘flitter’: someone who bunny-hopped from one fixed-term contract to another, without ever becoming a permanent employee. These days, with permanent positions becoming something of a rarity and companies taking on equal numbers of female employees, being a flitter had become more or less the norm, and the word was losing its original significance. Nonetheless, Shigeru still found the term appropriate for his current state. Both materially and spiritually speaking, he was a flitter.

  Switching places with the morning-shift worker, Shigeru took up position at the end of the assembly line and commenced inspection. His work here was supremely easy. He simply had to watch the sticks of dried, compressed incense that went sailing past him down the conveyor belt, and check that they weren’t misshapen or broken. The incense had a peculiar aroma, like nothing he’d ever smelled before. In the beginning, that weird smell pervading the entire working space got to him, but now he was pretty much used to it. More importantly, a job where he didn’t have to use his brain was ideal for Shigeru in his present mental state.

  One day last year, every last drop of Shigeru’s motivation had evaporated all at once. It was the day his mum had killed herself. Shigeru had been the one to find her body after she’d hung herself with a bath towel. His first reaction wasn’t one of sadness, but perplexity – it was as if his mum was playing some kind of practical joke on him. She just wasn’t the kind of person to go and do something like that. She was a hearty old thing; a ball of energy; a living, breathing stereotype of The Middle-Aged Woman Who Wouldn’t Shut Up. But it wasn’t a joke. His mum really and truly was dead.

  At the wake before the funeral, Shigeru had seen Okumura for the first time in what seemed like ages. Okumura had been his mum’s lover for years, and, biologically speaking, was Shigeru’s father. Shigeru had seen a fair bit of Okumura while he’d been in primary school, but by the time he reached his mid-teens, the two no longer had anything in common. In any case, Shigeru had never really thought of Okumura as his dad – he was just some guy who came around a lot, and who seemed to like spending time with his mum. His mum was cheerful as it was, but when Okumura came over, she grew even brighter, so Shigeru supposed he couldn’t be a bad sort. Instead of looking at Okumura directly, Shigeru would look at the way that his mum looked at Okumura. That captured his attention more profoundly.

  When Shigeru was little, Okumura would always show up at the house with a present for him: plastic models of planes and tanks, or baseball gloves and balls or what have you. He never played catch with Shigeru, though – he merely presented him with the gear. Okumura didn’t look like the type to play baseball, anyway.

  One time, when Shigeru opened up the flat
rigid parcel that Okumura handed him, he found a picture book inside. The title read Where the Wild Things Are, and the cover illustration showed a horned monster fast asleep in a seated posture, with a yacht sailing in the background.

  Okumura and his mum were sitting together, drinking and chatting. Shigeru flopped down on the floor in a spot where he could be seen and began to leaf through the book. He thought that doing so would make his mum happy. The TV was blasting out a popular variety show. The summery evening breeze that slipped in through the open window was musty and warm. Shigeru’s feet were bare, just like the monster’s on the cover of the book.

  The main character in Where the Wild Things Are was called Max, a boy of about Shigeru’s age. Max got in a yacht and sailed for a year and a day, until he reached the place where the wild things were. Then Max got to dance and play with the wild things. The wild things in this book hadn’t been made kid-friendly or cute. They were huge, and they looked properly scary. Shigeru liked that. They had pointy fangs and claws, and staring, goggly eyes. They were pretty cool.

  At the end, when Max made to go home, the wild things said to him, ‘Oh, please don’t go – we’ll eat you up – we love you so!’

  Aghast, Shigeru looked up from the page towards his mum. Her cheeks were flushed, and she was laughing at something Okumura had said. Her expression somehow became one in Shigeru’s mind with the words of the picture book he’d just read: ‘I’ll eat you up – I love you so!’ Then Shigeru looked at Okumura’s face. ‘I’ll eat you up – I love you so!’ He looked every bit as happy as Shigeru’s mum did.

  At the wake, the now-grey-haired Okumura made no attempt to conceal his grief. Raising his head from Shigeru’s mum’s coffin, he came right up to his son, tears and snot coursing down his face. Before stopping to think it might be rude to do so, Shigeru found himself backing away in fear until his shoulders brushed up against the traditional black-and-white striped banners hung on the wall, and he could go no further. With no hesitation, Okumura took both of Shigeru’s dry hands in his and squeezed them tight.

  If one were to give a summary of the incoherent, sob-punctuated rambling that ensued for the next five minutes, it would go something like: ‘I’m sorry’, ‘I’m truly sorry’, ‘I’ll make sure you’re taken care of until you graduate’, ‘I’m sorry from the very bottom of my heart’. Last of all, Okumura said, ‘There are times when something that is more important to you than you ever knew, more meaningful than you ever thought, is torn out of your hands and carried so far away that you can never get it back.’ He let his shoulders slump, patted Shigeru’s hand a few times, patted Shigeru’s shoulders a few times, and then shuffled away with little tiny steps, like a man who’d lost all hope. Watching Okumura as he walked away, it struck Shigeru that people could just burn out. They got old and they burned out. But then, Shigeru was in his early twenties and he was just as burned out as Okumura was. He didn’t feel any particular desire to shout at Okumura. Shigeru stood in the corner of the room all night, watching the adults as they cried and shouted and blew off steam whenever they felt like it.

  The timing was unfortunate, to say the least: all of this took place in Shigeru’s third year of university when he was supposed to be venturing out into the turbulent sea of job-hunting. Shigeru felt barely capable of surviving a gentle wave lapping up on shore, let alone a turbulent sea. Between him and a sandcastle built by a kid with a plastic spade, Shigeru suspected he’d be the first to collapse.

  He had gone along with his cohorts to a job-hunting seminar held in one of those big lecture halls, but as he listened to the speakers going on about how to keep up one’s motivation and fill in ‘winning’ application forms, he realised that all this was impossible for him, and left the room. Just being around all that positivity left him mentally drained.

  Shigeru had sat down on a sun-bleached wooden bench in the courtyard and drunk a can of coffee as he waited for his friends to emerge from the lecture theatre. He had no motivation, no energy, and no desire to apply himself. The idea of presenting his ‘achievements’ in the best possible light on an application form seemed like the greatest torment imaginable. Why did you have to sell yourself, to fill out a stupid application form, to start working? There was just no way he could do that…

  Now, watching the convoy of little sticks gliding past in the factory where he worked, Shigeru thought about the incense holders that stood both at his mum’s altar and beside her grave. Since his mum had died, Shigeru would light a stick of incense at their home altar every day without fail, and he visited her grave with great regularity. In the graveyard, Shigeru felt calm. As long as he was there, he could believe that his mum, who had vanished so abruptly, was actually with him, beneath that stone slab.

  Sometimes, when Shigeru was standing in front of his mum’s grave, he would hear the faint strains of a song. He would all look around him, but invariably he was the only one there. He found it a bit spooky, for sure, but he figured it must be some big, elaborate family tomb with a built-in stereo. Who needed a feature like that in a gravestone, though? It irritated Shigeru to have his few moments of peace interrupted in that way.

  Before his mum’s death, Shigeru had been seeing a girl from his year, but after the event, she immediately began to distance herself from him, as if his despondency might be infectious. Such a thing couldn’t be helped, Shigeru thought. He understood as well as anybody that if you fell prey to a negative state of mind, you became incapable of believing in a future where you could thrive. In place of the requisite hope, Shigeru now felt only despair.

  In fact, the only person who wanted anything to do with him since his mum’s death was his cousin. She had suddenly begun calling and emailing, telling him that she didn’t think his frequent grave visits were making his mum happy. When Shigeru asked her what her reasoning was, the cousin would fall silent, and then come out with some idiotic response like, ‘I dunno, I just kind of get that vibe, you know?’ He sensed that she’d changed considerably of late. Previously she’d lacked confidence and was forever putting out feelers to the people around her to gauge what they were thinking, but these days she gave out an almost authoritative aura, as if to signal that she didn’t give a toss what other people made of her. It was like she’d suddenly become invincible.

  From where he stood behind Shigeru, Mr Tei reached out and plucked a single stick of incense from the production line. Shigeru couldn’t see any problems with its shape or colour. Noticing Shigeru peering at him with curiosity, Mr Tei gave him a blank nod, then walked off to assess the next production stage. Mr Tei, who wore black-framed glasses and appeared to be in his early thirties, seemed utterly inscrutable to Shigeru. Even his nods failed to reassure Shigeru. There was something far too cryptic about them.

  —

  Despite Shigeru’s perennially vacant state of mind, it had begun to dawn on him that there were some slightly odd aspects to the incense production process. For starters, the first stage, where fragrant oils were blended with plant materials, took place in the adjoining room and was kept secret from other employees. In-house secrets were not a rarity, but the few times Shigeru had stolen a glimpse of what was going on in there, it had looked genuinely weird. There were always two elderly women standing there, and on occasion he had heard them chanting, as if reciting a spell. Initially he assumed they were just chatting with one another, albeit in a rather strange fashion, but the longer he looked, the more certain he was that they really were addressing the large pot in which the ingredients were mixed together. However long he stayed out there listening, he couldn’t understand a single word of what they were saying. Also, why were the women in that room always in kimonos? The sashes wound around their shoulders to hoist up their sleeves and prevent them from getting in the way gave them an air of intense dedication – a far cry from the slapdash impression of Shigeru in his boiler suit.

  The thoroughly blended incense mix was then carried from th
e secret room to Manufacturing Room Number Six where Shigeru and his colleagues worked, and fed into a machine that resembled a noodle-maker, and which shaped and cut the wet mix into small rod-shaped pieces. By the time these reached Shigeru’s section of the line, the sticks would be completely dry. That he found quite mysterious, too. Surely incense should, in theory, take a good twenty-four hours to dry out? Sometimes, he’d catch the person overseeing the post-cutting production stage waving a hand over the slender sticks. Was there some kind of secret to be revealed there, too?

  Truth be told, this whole company was something of a mystery to Shigeru. He’d applied for the job after seeing it advertised in a free local employment paper he’d picked up at the convenience store. Some of the words cramped in the tiny square advert had been so blurred that he could barely make them out, so it was hard to tell what kind of company it was, or the exact nature of the work. The only thing he could see for certain was that the hourly rate was on the higher side. Shigeru had assumed his vision must be deteriorating. Not only that, but as he headed to the interview, he was seized by panic upon realising he couldn’t for the life of him recall the company’s name.

  There were three people interviewing him that day. On the left sat Mr Tei, dressed in a suit rather than his usual work gear. The person in the middle, the eldest on the panel, told Shigeru that the company manufactured a wide variety of products and offered a range of different services, explaining that he may need to move frequently between departments. Would he mind that? ‘No, not at all,’ Shigeru had answered. In his heart, of course, he was saying, Whatever, I really couldn’t care less!

  Mr Tei had called to inform him he’d got the job.