The Night of Baba Yaga
By Otani Akira
Translated by Sam Bett
Faber & Faber (2024)
ISBN-13: 978-0571391073
Review by Alex Russell
Otani Akira’s explosive The Night of Baba Yaga, released in translation in 2024, reflects the author’s atypical route into the literary world. Her first published work was in the video game industry, a tie-in novel with the 2010 PlayStation 2 game The Beastmaster and the Princess, a far cry from the usual rigidity of the Japanese literary establishment and its accolades, and possibly a reflection of its diminishing influence. Otani herself is very open about her queerness, writing articles about her experience as a lesbian in Japan. In a 2018 article for i-D Japan, she highlighted how attitudes had shifted towards the LGBTQ+ community in Japan in the acceptance she faced from her friends and family, whilst also demonstrating that there remained discrimination, exemplified by LDP MP Sugita Mio’s comments labelling gay people as “unproductive”. Just as its author defies the norm, The Night of Baba Yaga proves to be an undeniably original work that still provides the action and intensity one would expect from a yakuza thriller.
The Night of Baba Yaga switches between the perspectives of Shindo and Yoshiko. Shindo, the primary narrator, is a young woman who has been captured by the yakuza, following an escalating brawl with several low-ranking members. She is given the choice between being killed and working for them. She is ultimately set to work as a chauffeur and bodyguard for Shoko, the daughter of ruthless boss Naiki, who employs legions of private detectives to hunt for Shoko’s mother, who fled years previously with his right-hand man. Shindo is blunt, confrontational, and used to being shunned by others, on account of her mixed ethnicity, which remains a rarity in Japanese fiction. Yoshiko by contrast is an older woman, living frugally with her partner Masaoka, on the run from some unknown pursuer. They do their best to avoid attracting attention to themselves, moving to a new town every few years. Their anonymous existence is thrown into jeopardy however when they selflessly rush to save the lives of the victims of a car crash, causing their faces to become plastered on local and national news.
Inevitably, these narratives intertwine over the course of the book, though Otani does well to keep the reader guessing how they will do so until the very last moment. It is an undeniably clever conclusion, though it felt a little contrived and underdeveloped, as though Otani decided on the initial predicaments of both Shindo and Yoshiko and the conclusion, and worked out how to connect the two, rather than it developing sequentially.
Even amongst works focusing on the violent world of the yakuza, The Night of Baba Yaga is not a work for the faint hearted, with Otani providing viscerally unpleasant descriptions of blood-soaked bone-crunching fights, sadistically cruel yakuza punishments, and sexual assault. While this works to raise the stakes and emphasise the ever-present threat posed by the world Shindo now finds her self thrust into, at times it veers into the excessive and can become quite sickly.
Otani’s narrative feels more cinematic than literary, reminiscent of films such as the John Wick series or The Man from Nowhere and one can easily imagine how this could be turned into an action film. The action sequences are swift and precise, as if choreographing them on screen, while the narrative and exposition is predominantly driven by succinct conversations Shindo has with Shoko and other members of the yakuza. Shindo’s reflections on her harsh upbringing by her grandparents and how it shaped her into the solitary fighter she is are the brief flashbacks we see to understand the motivations of our hero, and we are shown a few key incidents to further this understanding, as opposed to building it up through the reader’s persistent view into her thoughts. Characters feel fairly one dimensional and flat, and one is never in any doubt over who is good and who is evil. In this respect, The Night of Baba Yaga does not tread new ground in the genre, instead sticking to a consistent intensity and uncomplicatedly formulaic structure.
Where The Night of Baba Yaga does innovate is in its representation of minority characters. Japan’s literature, much like its society more broadly, has consistently been dominated by homogenous characters, with important but limited pockets of representation for queer literature and Zainichi Korean authors and stories. Otani’s work, with its ethnically ambiguous protagonist who defies the expectations of women’s appearances in Japan, is an important contribution to the increasing diversification of what is published and celebrated in Japan. Shindo’s imposed isolation due to her differences from those around her provides a clever foil for Shoko, whose isolation is impressed upon her by her father, despite appearing to be a perfect Showa era (1926-1989) woman. The relationship between the two characters only develops once they dispose of their presuppositions about each other and understand their similarities. In a hypermasculine genre in which women are frequently sidelined or defined in relation to men, it is refreshing to have the relationship between Shindo and Shoko take a central role in the narrative.
The Night of Baba Yaga is a compelling and entertaining work that any reader will race through, its easy reading and uncomplicated style coupled with its short length making it a book that will likely be finished in a day or two. The innovation in the characters and conclusion will ensure it lives longer in memory than the simplistic and formulaic structure would otherwise suggest, and demonstrate the opportunities to bring new perspectives to the homogenous genre of the yakuza thriller and the expectations we have of it, for better or worse.