Metafiction? Inanimate objects as narrators? Micro stories? Sign me up!
That’s just a tiny part of Aoko Matsuda’s newest collection of short stories in The Woman Dies, which collects 52 of her short and micro stories. Some stories span several pages, while others are only a few sentences long. The thread that pulls through these short stories is an indictment of the misogyny of popular culture and society.
 The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly BartonI really loved her past story collection Where the Wild Ladies Are where she retold Japanese folktales with a feminist lens. Here she draws on advertising, slogans, turns of phrase, and even artwork in haunting and sometimes very cheeky ways. I tend to have a high threshold for short stories and Matsuda always manages to find really unexpected ways to surprise me. I never quite know how any of the stories are going to end, even if they start off more conventionally. And this story collection is even more twisty and turny than those in her prior collection. |
Bengali (Bangladesh) · 
English (United States) ·