Where the Wild Ladies Are

by Aoko Matsuda

  “Is that so?” A troubled look came over Mr. Tei’s face.

  “Yes. I don’t even know what osmanthus smells like.”

  “Osmanthus . . . Well, personally I feel like osmanthus is not too far removed from the taste of loquats. It’s a sweet smell, but not too sweet. Sort of fresh, with something slightly nostalgic about it,” he said earnestly, with not the slightest hint of a smile.

  The taste of loquats, I thought. For an instant, the area around my nostrils tingled, and I felt the premonition of a smell. Was this the smell of osmanthus? It was the first time anybody had ever explained a smell to me in words, and it came as something of a revelation. It turned out that you could use something you knew well as a guide to help you draw closer to something completely unknown! I stared unguardedly at Mr. Tei, but his face had resumed its usual blank expression.

  “Okay, then. Can you make it smell of osmanthus?”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Very well. As I say, if I could ask you to wait just one more week, that would be much appreciated. Goodbye.” Mr. Tei bowed politely, then vanished.

  In the days that followed, I continued to use the incense. I looked it up on the internet and discovered that just as Mr. Tei had suggested, it was a pretty standard product, so if it ever ran out, I could always buy a new box. The fact that it had been in my father’s room suggested that maybe he’d been using it to see my mother from time to time. It was endearing to think of him doing so every now and then, never once letting on to me about it.

  In two days’ time, it’ll be a week since Mr. Tei’s visit.

  A Fox’s Life

  “If you were an animal, you’d definitely be a fox,” the young man next to Kuzuha piped up out of the blue.

  Kuzuha’s eyes twinkled. “If, you say . . .”

  Since she’d been a child, Kuzuha had been told she resembled a fox. There was something decidedly vulpine about her long, lithe body, not to mention her narrow eyes and slender face. She realized early on that “You look like a fox” wasn’t intended as a compliment. Ironically, the girls held up as “foxy” at school were actually those who looked nothing like foxes.

  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.

  The fox was good at school. From the very beginning, there wasn’t a single subject that she struggled with. She excelled at sports, too.

  Whenever she approached a problem, Kuzuha spotted a shortcut. These shortcuts were always immaculately paved, without even the tiniest of pebbles littering the surface; the arrow-straight path they traced to the answer was well lit. All Kuzuha had to do was waltz her way there. When her classmates complained of finding their schoolwork hard, Kuzuha simply couldn’t understand what that was like.

  Yet for all her mental agility, Kuzuha was incapable of sitting back and enjoying her cleverness. Each time she performed well in a test and the results list stuck up in the classroom showed her name above all the boys’, she felt everybody’s eyes on her. Outshining the boys only made other people uncomfortable, and consequently, Kuzuha was troubled by a creeping feeling that something bad was going to happen to her. Sometimes she loathed that pebble-free, arrow-straight path. If only it had a few weeds, the odd twist and turn—something, Kuzuha thought. Then she could trip and fall in a cute, comical way, and other people would look and laugh, and she’d be able to laugh along with them. That was a more suitable way for a girl to be. Kuzuha loathed standing out. She couldn’t see a single benefit to it. People resented girls and women who stood out, both in her class and in the world outside it. That was how it seemed to Kuzuha.

  Kuzuha could see shortcuts, which meant she could also see what was to come. She knew that however hard she tried, the path ahead would always be blocked to her at some point. History proved it, society proved it, and various statistics proved it. As long as it was just her and her textbook, she could play with her shortcuts, but eventually Kuzuha’s route would be sealed off entirely. She would have no hope of winning.

  And if Kuzuha had to start out all over again when she came up against the blockage, she would have to take a very long way around indeed. Could anybody really blame Kuzuha for concluding that the most expedient shortcut was not to make any effort at all? That it was, in fact, wiser not to dream big and to become, instead, a person who didn’t offend anyone? When the time came for Kuzuha’s classmates to decide on their future plans, Kuzuha announced with the utmost composure that she was going to look for a job straight out of school. The teachers practically leaped from their chairs in shock. Uproar engulfed the staffroom.

  In the Career Advice Room, and during several visits to Kuzuha’s home, her teachers attempted time and time again to persuade Kuzuha and her parents that she would be better off continuing her education. “We are entering an age where women, too, will be attending university,” the teachers prophesied, “and your daughter really is exceptionally gifted.”

  One time, the deputy head himself came out to speak with them. Kuzuha was astonished that she had elicited such a violent reaction from her teachers. Even her parents, who didn’t oppose Kuzuha going to university but had intended to leave the decision up to her, seemed so stirred by the fuss being made that they began suggesting to their daughter that perhaps she really should go after all. But Kuzuha refused to listen. In the end, the lengthy discussions ended with her teachers and her parents all making the same vacuous statement:

  “Well, I guess she is a girl, after all.”

  Yes, thought Kuzuha, you’ve got that right. I’m a girl after all, and that’s just fine. From her seat beside her parents, Kuzuha observed the doleful look in her teachers’ eyes with great perplexity.

  Fast-forward, then, to Kuzuha’s welcome party at her first job. She had found herself an administrative role at a local company.

  “There’s something foxlike about this one,” said the department head at this new company, his reddened face glistening, as Kuzuha refilled his empty glass. He made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was sizing Kuzuha up, ogling her with his moist eyes. It was the first time Kuzuha had been looked at in that way. She sensed, with a feeling close to wonderment, that she had entered a new phase of her life, and vowed to remember this moment forever.

  The welcome party was being held in a tatami room they’d rented out for the occasion, on the first floor of a small Japanese restaurant. The long, narrow space was filled with sounds: sounds of men, sounds of women, sounds of tableware. Kuzuha felt astonished that a group of fully grown adults could produce such an almighty racket, but she took care not to let her astonishment show.

  “Yes, I’m often told that,” Kuzuha said with a cheerful smile. Encouraged, the department head placed his hand on Kuzuha’s stockinged knee. Kuzuha felt nothing—neither pleasure nor discomfort. She found it genuinely bizarre that he would want to touch her that much, but that was it. Huh, she thought to herself, interesting.

  The fox was good at work. Office life was just as she thought it would be. She had no complaints whatsoever with the simple tasks she was required to perform, which included making photocopies and tea. As always, Kuzuha could easily spot shortcuts and made few wasted movements. She could set cantankerous office machines right in no time, and her boss complimented her on her tea-making abilities. She also had a forte for spotting mis
takes in documents written by her male colleagues. It was such a profoundly unexceptional sort of place that there wasn’t any competition between female employees over impressing the high-earning male staff, and Kuzuha’s excellence didn’t seem to bother them. Her competence was hurled into her bosses’ mouths along with their afternoon sweets, washed down with their tea, then promptly forgotten about.

  Around the same time that the Glico-Morinaga scandal was making headlines, the Equal Employment Opportunity Law came into force. Ostensibly, the law set out to “secure equality of opportunity and treatment between men and women within the field of employment,” but in reality, it was a bunch of empty promises. A few of the female employees complained about it in the staff kitchen or the locker rooms, but Kuzuha only thought, Well, there you have it. After all, she was a girl. For some reason, Kuzuha found the sound of the word girl most pleasant. Yep, she liked to say to herself, I’m a girl. I’m just a girl, after all.

  When she saw men struggling with their work, Kuzuha would sometimes be overcome by pity, and would long to step in to help them. I could do that in a flash, Kuzuha would think. How unfair society was! Male employees had to pretend to be capable of doing things they couldn’t do, while female employees had to pretend to be incapable of doing things they actually could do. Over the years, how many women had seen their talents magically disappear in that way? How many men had seen talents they didn’t possess magically summoned into existence? Kuzuha let such thoughts float through her mind. Then she figured that this stuff didn’t really have anything to do with her, and she promptly forgot all about it.

  One winter’s night in a lonely corner of the office, when most of the other employees had gone home, Kuzuha brought a cup of tea to Mr. Abe, the company’s least competent worker, who was always getting in trouble for some mistake he’d made. His paper-strewn desk was a total shambles, and his suit was riddled with creases. Why does this man have to strive like this when he’s so clearly incapable? Kuzuha wondered. I could’ve done this in five minutes.

  “Looks like you’re having a hard time of it, Mr. Abe,” she said with genuine sympathy. He really was a poor soul.

  Abe looked down at the cup of white, cloudy liquid that Kuzuha placed on his desk, and an expression of astonishment spread across his simple, benign face.

  “W-what is this?”

  “It’s kuzu-yu. Ground arrowroot and hot water. It’ll warm your body.”

  A plume of steam floated up between the two of them.

  After marrying Mr. Abe in her mid-twenties, Kuzuha left the company and not long afterward gave birth to a baby boy. She did not veer off the shortcut that she had chosen for herself.

  Mr. Abe may have been hopeless at his job, but as a permanent employee of the company he had a stable salary, and, above all, he was a kindhearted man. Kuzuha found it touching to see him trying so desperately to appear manly, doing all he could to conceal from her his exhaustion and his frustration. Poor soul! Kuzuha, for her part, always did her best to reward her husband for his hard work, and as a couple they got on well. Getting on well with one’s husband was a part of the shortcut she had mapped out, so it came extremely naturally to her.

  Kuzuha had no complaints with her new life. She found the child-rearing, the housework, and other matters of home economics a piece of cake. In no time at all, her son was in high school and Kuzuha’s work-load dropped off substantially. Both her husband and her son were truly good sorts. Good genes, Kuzuha figured. They were considerate, and on Mother’s Day each year, they would present her with a bouquet of red carnations. Huh, Kuzuha would think to herself every year, interesting.

  Throughout her life, Kuzuha had always had the feeling that she was just pretending to be a regular woman. Of course, that was the path she had selected as a shortcut, and she had never once doubted that her decision had been the right one. But one day as she studied her aging face in the mirror, a face whose eyes seemed more vulpine than ever, a face that the years had made even narrower, it occurred to Kuzuha that maybe she really was a fox—a fox who had totally forgotten that she had transformed into a person at some point along the line. No sooner had the thought formulated itself than Kuzuha realized how ridiculous it was. She put it out of her mind and set about wiping the dust off the mirror with a tissue.

  When Kuzuha’s son moved out to attend university, Kuzuha found herself with even more time on her hands. She tried attending tanka-composition classes at the local community center, but they didn’t do very much for her. Reading about the ecstasies and tragedies of love, and the various resentments that people of bygone days had felt, immortalized in the form of tanka, the only thought that crossed Kuzuha’s mind was Huh. It wasn’t as if people’s emotions ever really evolved, for better or for worse. There were no particular feelings stashed away inside Kuzuha for which she was desperately seeking an outlet.

  It’s time to escape.

  Kuzuha began to hear a voice.

  It’s time to get out, the voice would say, and then fall silent.

  Escape what, though? Kuzuha didn’t really get it.

  She was perfectly content with her life as it was.

  In her fifties, Kuzuha developed a passion for mountain climbing. A neighbor invited her to climb Mount Takao, and Kuzuha accepted. Why not? she thought, and in no time at all, she was hooked. It was more or less the first hobby Kuzuha had ever had. She breathed the fresh air into her lungs, felt the pulse of the mountains with her whole body. I bloody love the mountains! she wanted to scream at the top of her lungs, but as a demure Japanese woman, of course she didn’t. Everybody praised the formidable power she had in her legs. It was as if she’d been born to climb, a few people suggested, and Kuzuha thought that maybe they were right. Why hadn’t she encountered mountain climbing earlier on in life? It seemed like a bit of a shame.

  At first, Kuzuha climbed as part of a group, but no one else could keep up with the pace she set, so at some point she began climbing alone. She’d load rice balls and slices of rolled omelette into her rucksack, fill her flask with tea, tie tight the shoelaces of her chunky climbing shoes, and head determinedly into the mountains.

  The mountains always welcomed her. She liked the feeling of post-climb fatigue, too. It was the first tiredness she’d felt in her life. Who would ever have thought it was so pleasurable? Impressed, Kuzuha vowed to remember this lesson life had taught her.

  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!

  Kuzuha let out a long howl, which went echoing out along the foot of the cliff. Damn, that felt good! And she could hear better, too. Before, the rustling of the trees had been just a far-off presence, a mere block of sound, but now she could make out the cadence of each individual leaf blowing against the wind. Neat, Kuzuha thought to her
self.

  Kuzuha the beautiful white fox began to run. Like a tightly wound spring suddenly released, the power in her body unfurled itself and Kuzuha went shooting through the green-shrouded forest. The soil she kicked up flew out on either side of her, adding to her momentum.

  Gosh, thought Kuzuha as she darted forward, how tedious human life was! The way she’d become used to continually paring down her strength—all that time, she’d been betraying herself! Being unable to fully exert herself had been unbearably dull. Oh, what a stupid situation to have landed myself in! Kuzuha found it all so ridiculous. Feeling a pang of hunger, she ripped off a few wild grapes from their tangled vines, chomping them with great gnashes of her jaw. Purple juice dribbled down the sides of her crimson mouth, but that didn’t bother her. Then Kuzuha’s glinting eyes fell on a field mouse. The last thing the ill-fated creature saw was the film of saliva spreading across the red insides of the white fox’s mouth.

  Then Kuzuha ran up the cliff she’d fallen off. When she reached the top, she spun around once and, hey presto, she was a person again. How very convenient! Kuzuha smiled, retied her shoelaces, and trotted home on her human limbs.

  “If you were an animal, you’d definitely be a fox,” the young man next to Kuzuha had piped up out of the blue.

  Kuzuha’s eyes twinkled. “If, you say . . .”

  When he’d first joined the company earlier that year, the young man had worn a permanently glum expression and was forever gazing down at his shoes. The other people in the company referred to him as “that depressed-looking boy” and “the miserable kid.” Recently, though, he’d started to lighten up a bit. Even this ridiculously bad conversation opener was kind of cute, Kuzuha thought. At any rate, it was a hundred times better than that creepy old guy who’d told her at their first meeting that she looked like a fox before placing his hand on her knee. What a horrible, senseless age it had been, Kuzuha thought, when that kind of sexual harassment was so rife that nobody batted an eyelid when it happened.