The Woman Dies
By Matsuda Aoko
Translated by Polly Barton
Europa Editions (2025)
ISBN-13: 978-1787705876
Review by Laurence Green
Bold, electrifying, and wickedly funny, Matsuda Aoko’s The Woman Dies slices with razor-sharp deftness through the everyday sexism woven into modern Japanese life. Across fifty-two dazzling stories, Matsuda exposes the quiet and not-so-quiet ways women are silenced, sidelined, and spectacularly underestimated. You feel their pain, their anguish, but also their sarcasm, venom and lop-sided humour at a world that seems forever skewed against them.
In the title story, Matsuda needles the casual glamorisation of female suffering on screen and in the media. The woman dies so the man can be sad, so she can be a plot twist, so someone can have a destiny. By forcibly unmasking the tired trope of women sacrificed or harmed simply to serve someone else’s narrative, she invites the reader to take a second glance at our favourite streams of popular media and consider whether alternatives can exist. Elsewhere, she gives voice to objects, toys with technology’s aesthetics, and twists language into absurd, glittering shapes; every tale a rebellion against the ordinary.
In one of the most explicit, yet hilarious of the tales – ‘The Masculine Touch’ - Matsuda imagines a world where male genitalia are scrutinised and objectified to the same degree women face daily. In other stories, the tone veers across a wider spectrum of political hot-points; the Japanese national anthem, Japan’s position within Asia, and the rote learning of English typical to the Japanese education system. And then there are some tales that are just outright bizarre: Hollywood actor Nick Cage confined to an actual cage by an obsessed fan, only to explode out of it and speed away on his motorcycle.
The book is all at once both a short story collection, but also more than that. You can dip into it a tale at a time, or power on through in a single sitting or two. It’s a rip-roaring rollercoaster ride through surrealism, satire, and feminist fury: a full on pick-n-mix of ideas from one of Japan’s most fearless and inventive storytellers.
The Woman Dies is also a spot-on meeting of minds - translator Polly Barton is on a roll right now. Fresh from the success of her translation of Yuzuki Asako’s Butter - which literally everyone seemed to be reading on the morning commute at one point - her handling of Matsuda’s short stories is a perfect fit for her continued handling of quirky, engaging writing by Japan’s foremost contemporary female writers. Barton’s translations have a winning aptitude for a witty, conversational tone that not only feels utterly natural, but manages the difficult job of making you believe the protagonists are real - even when all around them, things are getting distinctly weird. These characters could be right there, walking the streets beside you, working in the same office as you, and it’s testament to both Matsuda and Barton that the tone hits right every time.
And if anything, it’s the tone that serves as the most memorable aspect to The Woman Dies - while certain tales in this volume rise to the fore more than others, the title story not least among them, it’s the body of work as a whole that proves to be the real winner. There’s the meticulous sense of pacing that sees longer works interspersed by the palette cleansing one liners, the tilting between the all-out feminist powerhouse manifestos vs. the light, airy pop-cultural references, and everything in between. Taken as a whole, Matsuda’s authorial voice is convivial to the extreme, a friend letting loose over a glass of wine at all society’s ills, yet always loaded with bite and humour. You’ll laugh a lot here, but it’ll give you plenty to think about too.