Aoko Matsuda and Polly Barton on prizes, patriarchy and politics.

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POLLY BARTON: What do you think of as the unifying theme or themes of your work?

AOKO MATSUDA: I want to write about the vulnerable and marginalised in society, whose voices go unheard. There are so many people out there whose stories that don’t get told, so I try to catch their voices, and tell their stories. In Japan, where I live, the literary establishment doesn’t want literature to be political. If you write about the patriarchal system, they discount it as literature. But I believe it’s really important to show how that system works, so I’m always writing about it.

So it’s important for you to be overtly political in your writing, and vocal about what you’re doing?

Yeah, because I can see so clearly how the system works. It would feel very odd for me not to write about what I saw.

Have you always been able to see things in that broader, systemic way?

Not exactly. But as a child, I read a lot of children’s literature written by female writers from Japan and overseas, most of the time not knowing they were written by women. In terms of overseas literature, I liked Astrid Lindgren and Pamela Lyndon Travers, who wrote the Mary Poppins series. I also read a lot of shōjo manga – Japanese cartoons made for young girls – by authors like Yumiko Oshima and Mariko Iwadate. When I got older, it became clear to me that the stuff I’d been reading had been protecting me all this time. In those kinds of stories, there are lots of girls and women who are funny, brave, and sometimes really bad-tempered. These kinds of characteristics are not things we’re taught in Japan, not things we’re permitted to be as women. Japan is still a deeply patriarchal society, and most women are on the receiving end of a lot of gender discrimination and misogynistic behaviour. But because I’d read lots of books by women, I could feel that it was off, that it wasn’t part of the world of the stories I liked – I feel as though that saved me in the end. Those female writers and characters have always been my guardian angels.

So I guess that, although I couldn’t see things clearly, I’ve always been attracted to people who go against the system, in a way. And then when I grew up, by experiencing that kind of discrimination and misogyny first hand, I became able to see the mechanisms of how Japanese society works more clearly. Now, as an author, I want to write the kind of work that might be able to protect people, in the way that those books by women protected me when I was younger. The female manga artists writing shōjo manga are so incredible: decades ago, when that kind of language around gender and feminism wasn’t at all commonplace in Japan, they were creating work about that stuff, coming and going freely between sci-fi/fantasy and reality. They were a really big influence on me.

Do you believe that the kind of overtly political writing that you’re doing actually effects change? Do you believe in the power of writing to improve things?

I definitely believe that there’s power in stories and writing. That’s why I’m doing the work I’m doing. But I also want to stay humble about what it is that I do. Looking back to the past, we see that change only comes gradually. If I’m too set on changing the world with what I write, I may well end up feeling frustrated by the speed of the change, or losing my confidence. I have this image of everything I write being like pebbles that I put down on the ground, one by one. Even small pebbles become impossible to ignore if there are lots of them. I’m set on this mission of mine, so all there is to do is stay calm and keep on writing. It’s like that British motto: keep calm and carry on writing.

You’ve spoken about how you were saved by reading, at an early age and even now. So if your books are making other people feel that way, rescuing them in a sense, then that’s already a change.

I’d be thrilled if that was true. People often tell me that it’s in reading my work that they first understand the nature of the discomfort they’ve been feeling all this time, or that it’s made them feel braver reading it. One essay I really love is Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, where she mentions how a single writer is never really a single writer – that, rather, ‘the experience of the mass is behind the single voice’. I really love that phrase. It brings me a lot of calm, and also gives me a great sense of humility. I want to be part of that mass of female writers, of women.

I love that as a way of visualising solidarity and sisterhood through writing in such a concrete way. Are there other writers in Japan whom you’re very close to, and draw support from?

I’m really good friends with Matsuo-san (Akiko Matsuo) who set up etcetera books, a feminist press and bookshop in Tokyo. Before founding etcetera, she was an editor at Kawade Shobo, who published my debut collection, Stackable. Actually, the story of how we met is kind of heart-warming. Stackable had come out from the publisher where Matsuo-san was working, but my editor was a man. A good man, but a man. One day I went into the office to meet with him and Matsuo-san came marching up to me out of the blue, and said, ‘I really like Stackable, and I think what you’re doing is feminist.’ She said that all of her feminist friends were really happy it’d been published. That was quite eye-opening for me, because up until that point I wasn’t particularly conceptualising what I was doing as feminist. When I was writing the book, I just knew I wanted to write about how weird Japanese society was, to talk about it in the way that other people weren’t.

So did you not think of yourself as a feminist at that point?

I think I’ve always been like this, honestly. It’s just that, before that, nobody had told me that what I was doing was feminist. I was so happy to have my work recognised by someone in that way, and so from that point on I intentionally wrote about women in Japanese society, and brought them to the very forefront of my work. I think that someone telling me that the experience of having their pain recognised had meant something to them was, in turn, very meaningful for me, and I started wanting to write the kind of stories that would help and lend support to women in Japan.

I know we’ve talked about this before, but I feel like there’s a real tendency for Japanese fiction written by women to be described, perceived and marketed in the West as feminist, when it definitely wouldn’t be seen or described that way in Japan, and when the authors wouldn’t necessarily identify as feminists either. Do you have any thoughts as why that happens?

I think in the West there’s a tendency to see reading something in translation as already doing something alternative, progressive, queer.

Right, and so then everything that’s read becomes seen through that lens.

Until recently, there’d been no obligation in the West to read Asian fiction at all. When books by Asian writers are published the West, a large proportion of them have the face of a woman with a fringed bob and red lipstick, which speaks a lot to the prejudiced views still rife, right? For so long, the canon has been made up of white Western voices. Now the tides of opinion are turning, and people are trying to read about other minority cultures. That’s a wonderful thing, but it means that, now, just the fact of reading or publishing translated stories sometimes makes people from the West feel like they’re doing something virtuous – and, by extension, feminist, anti-racist, alternative, queer, and so on – regardless of the content they’re reading or publishing.

In terms of the Japanese literature that gets translated at the moment in the West, I feel like it’s overly restricted to the works of famous authors, or the ones that win big awards like the Akutagawa Prize. Most of the books I think are amazing and interesting, whether in the canon of feminist literature or not, still haven’t been translated into English. And when you think about that in the context of the kind of books that are published in the West, that might make a lot of sense. The books that you like and think are wonderful aren’t necessarily the ones that win prizes. The books that female writers write aren’t always feminist novels, right?

There are female authors in Japan who wrote and have been writing feminist books not just now but for a long time. There are some great works out there. When I was a student, I loved Mieko Kanai, whose book Mild Vertigo you’ve just translated. It was such a joy to read all those sassy, mean, lazy girls and women in her work. There are also books that lie outside the mainstream as it exists currently. I guess this might similarly make better sense if you think about it in terms of Western society, but feminist literature is something that continues to be written by women even though it generally doesn’t get acknowledged as mainstream. In the case of Japanese literature, I find it strange for the kind of work that wins the mainstream awards to be presented as feminist over here purely because it’s written by women.

Right, so there needs to be more clarity around what things actually are. Does it make sense to you that your work has easily found a Western audience, in a way that it’s perhaps struggled to in Japan? I’m just thinking about how it’s not only very feminist but really wears that on its sleeve, and I feel the Western market is quite hungry – at least superficially, nominally – for works like that, whereas in Japan that’s not quite the case. I’m thinking of how you were saying earlier that people don’t want literature to be political in Japan – in that sense, I feel like what you’re doing is more radical within that context. I’m wondering if, in that setting, having these accolades like the Time magazine listing and the World Fantasy Award and so on makes it feel safer for people in Japan to see it as literature?

Definitely in Japan – across society, and of course in the world of literature – the way of thinking is still hugely male-centric. The male establishment hate for any kind of artform, music and art as well as literature, to be political in nature, and when the establishment judges a novel as political, it instantly ceases to be perceived as literature. But is any there any art that isn’t political? The thing is, though, that there are lots of people in Japan who are looking for that kind of political writing, for feminist writing, and their numbers are growing as society changes. If those people read my writing and get something from it, then that’s very satisfying for me. As I said before, from my first book onwards, I’ve purely been trying to write about the weirdness of Japanese society as I see it – I’m not trying to write Japanese literature per se. Sometimes I have Japanese women who tell me that they don’t like Japanese literature, and don’t read it, except for my work. Ultimately, I feel like I’m writing especially for those people.

As you know, there’s this real love in Japan for awards and any kind of accreditation, for what that signifies. Which I don’t like, but it’s there. When Where the Wild Ladies Are was published in Japan in 2016, lots of female readers and critics who loved it, but the old-fashioned vanguard didn’t take it seriously, because I write in a playful way. And the Japanese literary establishment thinks literature must be serious – or, rather, they accept humour, but a very specific kind. So they didn’t take my stuff seriously at all, I guess. When it was published in the West, and was nominated for these awards and so on, I imagine they were surprised – the more old-fashioned they were, the more surprised. I didn’t actually see their reactions, I should say, but that’s what I imagine. I also saw on social media a Japanese sci-fi and fantasy critic who read Where the Wild Ladies Are the second it won the World Fantasy Award. I imagine that until that point he didn’t think there was any need. The Japanese fantasy and sci-fi world is also very male-dominated, and it wasn’t taken seriously there either.

That’s something I think about your work a lot, particularly within the Japanese context of literature: that it falls between certain set categories. It’s deadly serious in its message and very style-forward, sometimes very conceptual and always extremely inventive, but it’s also playful and silly and funny. And I think that’s reflected in the lack of awards – and I think it’s maybe worth sticking on that for a moment, just to bring home how unusual you are in a way. Because, almost every Japanese writer out there has their career because they won a so-called ‘newcomer’s award’ (run by all the big literary journals, and taken as the accepted way into the industry). And then ideally, shortly after, they get nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, which is the most prestigious, highbrow award. It’s not that you haven’t won any awards, but you didn’t get into the industry through winning a newcomer’s award, and you’ve never even been nominated for the Akutagawa.

Actually, I think there are surprisingly many writers who make their novelistic debut without winning a newcomer’s award. But what’s maybe different about me is that at an early stage I deliberately gave up writing novels of a length that would make them eligible for the Akutagawa Prize. After I started writing, I began to notice that new writers are forced to write for the Akutagawa, by their editors, because that sells books, and it’s thought that you can’t survive as a writer without it (although, in honesty, even once you do win it, that’s no guarantee of your continued survival either). I feel very uncomfortable with this kind of literary culture that we have in Japan now. The page-count limit for the Akutagawa means you start conceiving stories and writing in a way that fits that prize, and I feel like it’s really unhealthy. I don’t want to be in that kind of environment. I just want to write the things I believe I really should write. When I began writing the serialised feature that became Where the Wild Ladies Are, my editor said that I could write whatever I wanted, of whatever length, and so I didn’t need to have to be thinking about all that page-count stuff. I decided to theme it around the concept of fun, which is what gets the least literary acclaim.

It’s not healthy psychologically or emotionally, but it’s also not healthy for the work, either, that kind of pressure. It’s very limiting.

It’s really not good, and I’ve seen and heard so many authors who are struggling psychologically because they haven’t yet won – the Akutagawa, and other prizes, in fact. It’s so rare for the Akutagawa to be awarded to experimental novels that are actually doing something new. There’s a real style for Akutagawa books, and I don’t find it very interesting. Barely any books I’ve liked have won.

Do you feel like a bit of a lone wolf in the Japanese literary world, then?

I’m definitely not consciously trying to be one. I just want to focus on my work, and writing good stuff, and surviving through my writing.

Are you able to make it work financially, even without conforming to the majority of expectations?

At the moment, fortunately enough, I’m managing to sell enough books to get by, in Japan. To add to that, I do a lot of serialisations, like essays and book reviews. In that way I manage to make it work. After my debut was published, a lot of female editors at women’s magazines wrote to me asking me to write pieces and, thanks to those people, I’m able to keep on writing.

You translate authors like Amelia Gray, Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado into Japanese. Can you tell us a bit about how you see your writing and your translation practice connecting up? I really see how working on the books I’ve translated has shaped me as a writer, and I was wondering if you felt that way.

I almost exclusively translate female writers writing strange and powerful work that I really love, that I enjoy the procedure from beginning to end.

But I think I see my shaping as a writer going further back than that, actually. When I was a high-school student I went to study for a couple of years in the US, and that was my first time studying Western literature in the original. I had this incredible tutor who taught me the art of reading literature. She taught me so much about how works of literature were structured, how the writer hid important sentences away in the text, which sentences were doing the important work – the kinds of things that the writers were doing. That experience formed the cornerstone of me as a reader, a writer, and a translator. What she taught me is particularly useful when I’m translating: I understand to which parts the author I’m translating has paid particular attention, and I know that, as a writer, I need to be really careful with those bits from a writerly perspective. Reading those stories over and over, and translating them, their structure became embedded in me, and now when I write that’s there inside me, that knowledge of how to structure something, how to generate that kind of dynamism.

So far, you’ve only had one collection of work out in English. Can you tell us a bit about your other books that are not yet translated?

The title story of my first book, Stackable, is about various people with various vulnerabilities working in a single Japanese company. (The book contains stories of all lengths, and one of them has been released in English translation by Angus Turvill as a chapbook, The Girl Who Is Getting Married, from Strangers Press.) I wanted the company to serve as a microcosm of Japanese society. Stackable is more conceptual than Where the Wild Ladies Are – I use letters for people’s names, and so on, to show how similar people living in the same society turn out, but how they are also still individuals – but in a way it’s doing a similar thing in showing how we’re all connected.

Because that’s where people can draw strength from in a way? Like with Virginia Woolf?

Yes, exactly. In my work, I always want to show that a single person is part of a mass, that we’re all connected.

Then my latest novel, The Sustainable Use of Our Souls, is about Japanese idol culture. It’s sometimes called feminist sci-fi. I realised that the way that society treats the young girls who become idols is a perfect symbol of the way Japanese society treats women in general: that they need always to smile and be nice to men and are used as a kind of attractive entertainment device. People in the West might have seen on the news, but the world of politics in Japan is made up almost exclusively of middle-aged and older men; the videos of Diet meetings and conferences and so on are just a sea of black suits. It’s those people who’ve decided how our society should be, in a self-interested manner. The Japanese word for men of middle age and older is ‘ojisan’. I try to show the state of Japan as it is currently by repeating that word, ‘ojisan’, during the work, as a symbol of the patriarchy. I think it’s a really interesting book…

And then the final one I’d like to mention is my collection of short stories and flash fiction, The Woman Dies, whose title story was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award. I was motivated to write a collection of ‘short shorts’ after meeting a female assistant at the hairdresser, who told me that she didn’t have time to read because she was working so late every day. It struck me then that if I created a book of short shorts, then hard-pushed people might still be able to read one or two stories a day. I haven’t seen that particular woman since but, recently, after meeting my editors, the owner of the café where we’d met asked me if I was Aoko Matsuda, and then told me that in the period of total exhaustion right after giving birth, she’d managed to read The Woman Dies, and had become a fan of mine. Meeting someone who’d read the book, in just the way I hoped they might, made me so happy.

Aoko Matsuda is a writer and translator. In 2013, her debut book, Stackable, was nominated for the Mishima Yukio Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize. In 2019, her short story ‘The Woman Dies’ was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. In 2021, Her short story collection Where the Wild Ladies Are (tr. Polly Barton), published by Tilted Axis Press was selected as one of the 10 Best Fiction Book of 2020 by TIME, and won and World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 2021. She has translated work by Karen Russell, Amelia Gray and Carmen Maria Machado into Japanese.

Polly Barton is a writer and translator of Japanese literature and non-fiction, based in Bristol. Full length translations include So We Look to the Sky by Misumi Kubo, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, and Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai. In 2019, she was awarded the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize for her non-fiction debut Fifty Sounds (Fitzcarraldo Editions/Liveright), and has just released her second non-fiction work with Fitzcarraldo, Porn: An Oral History (2023). In 2021, her translation of Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda (Tilted Axis Press/Soft Skull Press, 2020) won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection.

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