Where the Wild Ladies Are

by Aoko Matsuda

  “Well then, maybe you should try fishing too!” I said. “Although I mean, what happened with me and Hina-chan was pure fate. I really can’t imagine that happening very often.”

  “So you see, I was boasting about you,” I tell Hina-chan now. “But imagine if Yoshi has actually taken up fishing after that! That would make him a prize idiot.”

  Hina-chan smirks and nods, then makes a start on my left foot. She’s humming what sounds like Beyoncé—who knows where she picked that one up. She has quite a sense of rhythm! Hina-chan has smashed all the preconceptions I ever had about ghosts. In fact, she somehow manages to surprise me every single day.

  “If your life story was made into a book, it’d be a hard-boiled detective novel, don’t you think?” I say to her. “It’s got elements of science fiction, too. And horror, come to think of it, and fantasy . . . It’s like the best story ever.”

  “Whereas yours would be like the biography of a withered old carrot. Yawns from beginning to end.”

  “Hahaha.”

  “Hehehehe.”

  Our laughs echo around the bathroom, wrapping around us and turning the bathroom into a surround-sound amphitheater.

  “Okay, that’s your massage done.”

  Hina-chan claps her hands together. We press our noses together and smile at each other.

  Fresh out of the bath, dressed in an Adidas tracksuit, Hina-chan smells amazing. I’ve lectured her so many times by now that she has started to apply toner and lotion to her skin of her own accord. The look of intense concentration on her face as she dabs them on is pretty amusing. I think of it as my duty to ensure that Hina-chan’s skin stays beautiful and pristine. Although having said that, the only time Hina-chan can move about at the moment is at night, so the chance of her suffering any kind of sun damage is pretty slim.

  “I’m genuinely happy to wash you every day, you know?”

  “Thanks, Shigemi-chan. I’m really sorry to be like this.”

  For some reason, Hina-chan’s body is rebooted to its original form every day, so when she turns up at night, she’s covered in muck again. Of late, she’s taken to occasionally making her entrance with her arms dangling in front of her in a ghostly way, moaning, “I’ve come for youuuuuu!” I’ve no idea where she picked up that trick. When she sees me falling about laughing, though, Hina-chan looks very pleased with herself, and flashes me a grin.

  My project at the moment is to somehow find a way of breaking into that vault in the research institute nobody’s heard of, and smuggling out Hina-chan’s skeleton so we can give it a proper memorial service. Hina-chan says that it doesn’t bother her and I shouldn’t worry about it, but it’s something I’d really like to do for her. When I think about Hina-chan’s skeleton cooped up all alone in some dark vault, I feel awful. I do worry that if I give the skeleton a proper memorial service, then Hina-chan will end up resting in peace forever and never visit again, but I guess if that happens, I can always just dig her up. There’s no way I’d escape a haunting then. Hina-chan is totally cool with that plan too. “Lying there in the ground is too tedious,” she says. “That’s not my style.”

  At this moment, Hina-chan is lying on the sofa, her head resting on my knees and her eyes glued to the TV, munching away mindlessly at a bowl of avocado-flavored tortilla chips. I stroke her fine, silken hair, and think how deeply I adore her.

  The Jealous Type

  You are what they call “the possessive type.” You’re jealous in the extreme. The moment you sense something the slightest bit off in your husband’s behavior, jealousy takes hold of you. When those green flames rage through your body, no one in this world can hold you back.

  Your go-to strategy when seized by the feeling is to throw things. For the objects in your vicinity, it’s an unmitigated disaster. You throw, and you throw, and you keep throwing.

  If jealousy happens to strike in the bedroom, then you start with the pillows. First, your husband’s. As you pick it up and cradle it in your arms, you find your chest flooded unexpectedly with a sweet memory from many moons ago: a school trip—you must have been fifteen or so, and you and the other girls in your class shared a big room at an inn, and when night fell, the great pillow fight got under way . . .

  You lob your husband’s pillow. That bedroom of yours has little space in it for anything other than the double bed, but still you swing your arm back and hurl it. It sails into the side of your husband’s face, then plummets to the carpet. He doesn’t retaliate like the girls at school. It’s no fun for you at all. You try again with your own pillow, but your husband doesn’t even attempt to catch it as it strikes his midsection, and then it, too, falls forsakenly to the floor.

  The sight of those two pillows lying there on the carpet prompts you to the painful realization that the best years of your life were decades ago. Stuffed full with azuki beans, the pillows back at that inn had real heft to them and commanded quite some destructive force when thrown. You and the other girls had picked up those bean-filled pillows, their cases trimmed with lace and covered in little flowers, and hurled them at one another like bombs. You had rolled across the futons that covered the room’s entire floor space with barely a crack in between, laughing until you had difficulty breathing. Strands of your hair found their way into your mouth, and your PE outfit got in a terrible tangle. Someone landed a direct hit to your face with a pillow, and you toppled over backward as the blood streamed from your nose, staining the offending pillowcase a vivid red.

  These two pillows, though, utterly stationary on the floor, seem fundamentally different to those pillows of your adolescence. These two, stuffed with the perfect quantity of top-quality goose down, are as soft and fluffy as heaven itself. They were given to you as wedding presents and have your and your husband’s initials embroidered in red and blue thread. When you throw them, they feel light and airy, as if they might just spread their wings and take off into the skies. In other words, you realize, they are no good for throwing at all!

  Stupid old pillows. You have the same realization about them each time jealousy sends you on a throwing jag. You even get as far as thinking that tomorrow, you really must go out and buy some more solid pillows that can be weaponized, but as soon as your jealousy abates, you forget all about it.

  Still disappointed by the pillows’ lack of clout, you kick up each of your legs in turn, firing the slippers from your feet like two missiles, aimed right at your husband. As slipper toes go, these are on the more pointed end of the spectrum, so their landing isn’t without effect. “Ow!” your husband says as one of the missiles strikes his shin. I’ll give you “ow,” you bastard! You are crazed, ablaze with jealousy, and your husband’s little exclamation only stokes your fire further. You reach for the paperback on the bedside table and toss that in his direction. It’s a flimsy little book, miserly in its lack of substance, and its impact is practically negligible—except it succeeds in informing your husband that you are still very much a resident of the green-eyed kingdom. You would be well advised to prepare for your next attack by keeping a hardcover tome by your bed at all times. Preferably some kind of encyclopedia. Two of them, even. Then you could pick up one in each hand and hurl them one after the other.

  You swing back your arm and, with all the strength you possess, swipe at the row of photograph frames lining the top of the chest. Your wedding photo, the shot of the pair of you holding koalas on your honeymoon, along with all the other silver-framed special moments, skid along the wood, cascading off the side. A hard parquet floor would have produced a more audible crash, sure, but at least the plastic backs break and skitter dramatically across the carpet in fragments. Just look at the fear in your husband’s eyes as he takes in those tiny shards.

  With formidable determination, you cast an eye around the room in search of your next weapon of attack, but the bedroom really doesn’t offer itself up as a plentiful arsenal. When lucid you’re the tidy sort, and there’s little that irks you more than a messy room. Plus, you rea
d in a magazine article titled “How to Put Your Husband in the Mood” that getting rid of extraneous clutter helps men maintain focus in the bedroom, and since then you’ve been even more militant about keeping the room spick and span.

  With no other options available to you, you make a lunge for your made-to-order curtains, howling like a wild beast—GYAAAAAH! You yank them down with all your might, ripping them from their rails. The light-resistant lining happens also to be flame-resistant, so there’s no risk that your blazing jealousy will set them on fire. No sooner has curtain number one fallen with a muffled flop to the floor than you set upon the other. Your motions are exactly the same for curtain number two.

  When it’s all over, you stand there like Moses, a lone figure parting a sea of curtain. Your husband, who is cowering in the corner of the room, looks at you in astonishment. When you turn to meet his gaze, he looks away. The force of your jealousy hasn’t dimmed in the slightest—and quite honestly, you’d like to keep going—but there’s nothing here left for you to do; so from your curtain sea you let out a great wail. Resentful words spill out of you, and you sob and sob. When there are no suitable objects available, you have to make do by venting your emotions instead. The bedroom is not a prime location to be stricken by jealousy.

  Unequivocally, the kitchen is the best place for jealousy to strike. When you are fortunate enough to be consumed there, you assume a look of positive radiance.

  You start with the crockery you bought at the hundred-yen shop: the little white dishes with badly painted fish in royal blue, those ramen bowls everyone has seen at least once in their lives with the dragons encircling their circumference, the large plates decorated with eggplants and tomatoes. A mug whose sole distinguishing feature is its bright yellow hue. A voluptuous sake flask with a rough-textured glaze. Each time you go to the hundred-yen shop, you stock up on ceramics. They’re all destined to end up in pieces anyway, so you don’t even look at them, just sling them into your basket. Well-stocked is well-armed, after all.

  You throw and you pitch and you chuck. You smash things to bits. Tiny particles of porcelain dance around you like a dust cloud. Sometimes they cut your arms and your legs, but what does that matter? You don’t pay heed to such things, choosing to focus single-mindedly on your destructive activities. For you, such scars are the honorable wounds of a warrior. If anything, the scarlet blood adds a streak of color to your destruction, heightens the sense of drama.

  When you’ve hurled the last of the hundred-yen crockery, it’s time to take your bombardment to the next level. You dive into your medium-range selection: the dusky powder-blue stuff from IKEA, the items from MUJI’s functional white series. Plates, tiny bowls, big bowls, teacups—you fling them all without distinction. You send them smashing down to the floor, regardless of whether or not they break. The lacquered wooden bowl bounces off the linoleum and rolls down the corridor, spinning around and around like a top.

  Only your set of rapturously exquisite Noritake teacups will you not throw, not for anything. Those cost the earth, those cups. The ornate Arabian china is out of bounds, too. You collected those beauties one by one. They are your treasures, secreted away in the depths of your kitchen shelves. However potent the jealousy that overcomes you, you always retain at least that much presence of mind. In this world, there are things that are okay to throw and those that are not. On this point, your judgment is infallible. Your husband has curled himself into a ball under the table, shielding his head.

  When you run out of things to throw, you tear off your polka-dotted apron and trample it. You plunge your fists down into the sink full of dishes with all your might, so the water goes splashing about you like great splatters of blood. You take some ice from the freezer, toss it into your mouth, and crunch down on it.

  The kitchen’s resources can always keep pace with the blazing fire of your jealousy.

  You take up a large daikon and whirl it around you like a baseball bat. When you bring it crashing down on the table, the daikon—which must have been softer than you thought—breaks into pieces, like a slow-motion video. Doubtless you will use some of these in tonight’s dinner—they’re the perfect size for simmering. As you squeeze out every last drop of ink from a raw squid, you even have time to think that you’ll combine the two, make ika-daikon.

  Next, your eyes land on the cardboard box of apples that your parents sent over from their garden. You take them out and wrench them apart with your bare hands. Later you can make them into jam, or bake them in a pie, or mix them into macaroni salad—apples are surprisingly varied in their uses. You focus on channeling all your power into your fingers as they tear through the glossy skins.

  Having destroyed the kitchen to the best of your ability, you begin to tidy up the mess strewn across the floor. When you tread on the miscellaneous shards, you can hear them screaming out in agony beneath your feet. You can empathize. The feelings of those little fragments are far easier to understand than those of your husband. Just because you’re clearing up doesn’t mean that it’s over, mind. Your jealousy is still blazing wild and free, like the huge pyramid pyres at fire festivals.

  You tidy like an incensed person, not missing a single piece. You clear up every last particle, however small. When you pick up your apron, you smooth out every crease. You refill the ice-cube tray so that the water in each hole is at exactly the right level, then put it back in the special compartment in the freezer. You compress the trash bag full of all the mess you created, then look again around the newly cleaned kitchen and breathe a sigh of relief. By this time, the lump of jealousy inside you has finally dissolved. The day you thought would never end has drawn to a close. You glance at your husband, still cowering under the kitchen table, and say with incredulity, “What on earth are you doing down there?” Then you start to hum a little tune.

  The roots of your jealousy can be traced all the way back to your time at nursery school. At that early stage of life, your possessive nature was already in bud.

  The first person you ever had a crush on was a male teacher, back in the days when it was still a rarity for men to have such a profession. That was a tough time for you. Whenever you saw this teacher picking up another child, a piercing grief would reverberate through your tiny body—the smaller the body, the quicker grief can race through it—and you would scream and cry. Needless to say, the teacher was more or less constantly cuddling other children and holding their hands, so you were more or less constantly in tears. By the end of the day, you were shattered.

  When your mother came to pick you up, your teacher would report on the day, explaining that it seemed as if you were still missing your mommy. Hearing this, your mother was not altogether displeased. She’d stroke your hair and say, “Oh dear, oh dear!” As you looked up at the adults and listened to their conversation, the whole thing felt utterly unjust. Why couldn’t they see you were genuinely in love?

  At snack time, when your beloved would help other children eat, you would clench your fists so hard that the cookie in your hand was pulverized to a crumby mess. The verdict was that you “still lacked grip control.”

  At playtime, when your beloved erected magnificent building-block castles with the other children, you would let out a wail and charge straight into them, knocking them to the ground like a merciless god. As you lay there motionless on the floor, you could feel the scattered blocks lumpy beneath your body. It occurred to you that they were a bit like vegetable chunks, and the image of a bowl of vegetable-laden curry floated to your mind for a second, then disappeared.

  At every stage of your development, your jealousy was remarkable. In grade school, you cast endless love spells from a book full of glitter-encrusted illustrations. When it dawned on you that they weren’t working, you ripped the book to shreds. You tried your hand at black magic. You were never without a stock of voodoo dolls in your room. You visited a nearby shrine a hundred times to pray that the boy you were in love with would break up with his girlfriend. You stood naked u
nder a waterfall and prayed with even more fervor.

  When you fell for a boy in middle school, you stole his diary and kept it on your person at all times until you graduated. The heat of your body caused its cover to fade. You were assiduous in placing a curse on each and every girl you saw speaking to him. You worked with astonishing dedication in the hopes of getting into the same high school as him, so that in the end, you were admitted while he wasn’t. Even once you were in your new school, the thought of all the girls he might be meeting was enough to make your blood boil over black. Ducking out after your last class, it was your daily afternoon ritual to walk over to his school and spy on him.

  As a university student, your jealousy blossomed further still. When your boyfriend left a text of yours unanswered for five hours, the shock you endured made you come down with a fever. When the same boyfriend didn’t pick up the phone, you would leave him voice mail after voice mail at two-minute intervals. That was no easy task, either—as soon as you put down the phone from recording one message, you’d redial to start recording the next. You were driven to such wild curiosity about his ex that you took an overnight bus to his hometown. When you approached and questioned the various people you met, you were mistaken for a private detective, and before long rumors were flying around that your boyfriend was mixed up in some bad business.

  Your bible was The Tale of Genji. Every man you fell in love with, every man you went out with, caught a glimpse of hell. All of them, without exception. For the man that you married, every day was a living hell. Why’d he marry you, anyway? It was clear from the start what kind of person you were. When he casually checked the messages on his phone in your presence, hadn’t he sensed your murderous gaze bearing down on him?