Abstract

Thelma & Louise meets Yakuza thriller! Nominated for 2021's Mystery Writers of Japan Awards!

In a different story, Yoriko Shindo and Shoko Naiki may have been rivals or lovers, perhaps even embattled siblings, but in Akira Otani’s lithe and compact novel The Night of Baba Yaga, the circumstances that bring them together set their repelling forces in alignment, like opposing magnets, creating a dynamic safe zone that allows them to rebuff the perils and abuses of the world around them.

Living on her own in early-80s Tokyo, Shindo works as a driver for a florist, running deliveries. She was raised by her grandparents in the forests of Hokkaido, where her stoic woodsman grandfather taught her how to fight. Ten years later, she remains in peak physical condition, no hobbies save a taste for violence she indulges at the slightest provocation.

Shindo’s swiftness and tenacity are mirrored by the style of the surefooted third-person narration, which is characterized by arresting imagery and an efficient interchange of focus. Through figurative language she is described as bearing a resemblance to such powerhouses as the alligator and tiger, though these comparisons never rely on masculine imagery. Hers is the stark vitality of someone living to survive, often furious and even cruel but rarely stuck for long, since violence is her universal answer to antagonism.

Abducted in the opening pages by a local group of yakuza, Shindo is forced into service as the chauffeur and bodyguard of Shoko Naiki, sheltered daughter of the despicable family boss. At her father’s beck and call, Shoko, though nearly the same age as Shindo, comes across as childlike and even lifeless, as demonstrated by Shindo’s first reaction to the sight of her: “Is that a doll?” Shoko lives the life of an elite prisoner of war, provided with the best of everything but with no voice, barred from speaking her mind or leaving the Naiki compound unaccompanied. In a political alliance, she has been arranged to marry Tsuyoshi Udagawa, a sadistic associate her father taps when he wants to teach someone a lesson. Udagawa has his own taste for violence, though his interest is recreational and savage, and is notorious for the way he sexually violates his victims while beating them to an inch of their lives, for the fun of it.

In a gesture he believes to be magnanimous, Udagawa has permitted Shoko to attend a two-year college. Perforce, Shindo is tasked with carting Shoko to and from the campus, as well as to a packed schedule of classes and private lessons in everything from Japanese archery and flower arrangement to English conversation and French pastry. At first the two women butt heads, resenting being paired off, but they find shared ground when it comes to light that Shoko’s composed presentation, from her cultured speech down to the old-fashioned clothes she wears, is the product of her father’s twisted attempt to clone her into a replacement for her mother, the wife that fled his clutches with her lover, once his protégé.

Men in the story frequently use sexual assault to punish and subordinate the women who displease them. When Shindo stands up to the harassment of a yakuza named Nishi, he drugs her dinner and attempts to rape her with five underlings, one of whom he tasks with filming the event, though Nishi is unable himself to maintain an erection. Shoko stumbles on them in the act and tells her father, who responds by having the six men castrated and disposed of. He goes so far as to present their penises to Shindo in a lacquer box, which she promptly empties into the compost bin.

If Naiki has any sense of justice, it is corrupted by his own heinous acts. One day when the house is empty, Shindo hears strange sounds and discovers Naiki holding Shoko to her bedroom floor, in the process of stripping off her clothes. His disgusting claim that he has the “right to lay” his daughter casts a wave of ghastly light over the playacting Shoko has been forced to undertake, but Shindo cuts Naiki short by driving a ballpoint pen into his carotid artery, so that the yakuza boss chokes to death on his own words and blood. Shindo frees Shoko from his vile grasp and together, they begin a flight that kicks the narrative into overdrive. As decades pass before our eyes, the two women modify their gender presentation, both to feel more comfortable in their own skin and in the hopes of living their lives in some semblance of peace.

The title of the book references a Slavic folk tale of an omnipotent sorceress who lives in a house on chicken legs, deep in the forest. As a child growing up in frigid Hokkaido, Shindo often heard a version of this story from her grandmother, a gifted storyteller with blond hair and gray eyes. The use of a European folk tale for the title of a Japanese novel may come as a surprise, but this dissonance is only the first of many cues that serve to establish Shindo as an other, physically and behaviorally anomalous. Her hair is naturally a reddish-brown, while her eyes are a light amber. In the abusive language of the yakuza with whom she is forced to share her meals, her otherness is sexualized through comments about her ample hips and stature. In this context, even her most violent impulses can be understood as a reflex prompted by the violence that she suffers as an outsider.

The only man with whom Shindo maintains something of a rapport is Yanagi, a higher-up in the Naiki family who we later find has been concealing his own outsider identity, as a Zainichi Korean. After Shindo kills Naiki, Yanagi chases her and Shoko as the two hurry to the car they use to make their getaway. His feelings of affinity bleed through when he asks them to escape with him to Korea, posing as his wife and daughter, but Shindo has no room in her mind for such alliances. The death of Naiki dissolves her compulsory service while recasting the two women, now fugitives, on equal footing. The bond they discover is a natural communion of souls, each seeing in the other something which they lack and finding traction and resilience in their sisterhood. The strength of their bond ultimately saves them from the sick captivity in which they found each other, though forcing them to live life on the run.

The Night of Baba Yaga is a bracing counterpoint to the bounty of strong writing by Japanese female authors finding its way into English translation in the 2020s. Unlike Hiroko Oyamada, Yumiko Kurahashi, or the speculative fictions of Sayaka Murata, this is not a novel where the surreal or the absurd mingle with the everyday, but a vivid confrontation of the absurdity of patriarchy and the walls which must be scaled or blown apart to get beyond it; while in noted contrast to the work of Mieko Kawakami, this is not a story of independent women finding their own way in spite of frustrating, misogynistic circumstances, but of women rejecting patriarchal systems wholesale as they embrace interdependence.

This is a novel that accomplishes the work of a book twice its size while maintaining the breezy equipoise of a well-crafted short story. Otani dares to be entertaining, even hilarious, while also sensitive and compassionate. Even the villains at their worst exist in three dimensions, despicable as humans but human nonetheless. Though unflinching in its depiction of manipulative behavior and sexual assault, the book is focused primarily on how transgressions rob victims of their power, and ultimately on what happens when victims take their power back.

In her introduction, Otani recalls telling her editor that her goal for the novel was to “hurl a literary bottle bomb into society.” Atmospherically, the experience of reading The Night of Baba Yaga is almost like watching the snaking fuse of a lit stick of dynamite, pinched out midway only to be draped over an obstacle and lit again, though in due time blowing a hole in the wall that stands between us and the future. In the end, it is the explosion and its aftermath that help us to make sense of the sheer energy and met potential of the story.

We all feel our lives are bigger than a summary of events. Though engaged with such theatrical material as organized crime and retribution, The Night of Baba Yaga uses violence and entertainment as tools for wrangling the everyday, capturing a familiar and relatable enormity through agile, adamantine prose. The result is not a flashy fantasy or thriller, but a masterful expression of the energy and tension felt, beneath the skin, by anyone concerned with their survival.

Author’s Information

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