Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko

Where the Wild Ladies Are by Matsuda Aoko

Author:Matsuda Aoko
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Tilted Axis Press
Published: 2020-03-01T22:41:46+00:00


A Fox’s Life

‘If you were an animal, you’d definitely be a fox,’ the young man next to Kuzuha piped up out of the blue.

Kuzuha’s eyes twinkled. ‘If, you say…’

Since she’d been a child, Kuzuha had been told she resembled a fox. There was something decidedly vulpine about her long, lithe body, not to mention her narrow eyes and slender face. She realised early on that the words ‘You look like a fox’ weren’t intended as a compliment. Ironically, the girls held up as ‘foxy’ at school were actually those who looked nothing like foxes.

In her twenties, when Kuzuha was working in an office, the nation was rocked by the Glico-Morinaga scandal, an extortion case that targeted several major confectionary companies through blackmail campaigns and kidnapping. The only known suspect from the mystery group calling itself ‘The Monster with 21 Faces’ was identified in the papers as ‘the fox-eyed man’. As his antics wreaked havoc on Japanese society, Kuzuha cursed him internally for giving foxes an even worse reputation than they already had. With their round eyes and tubby bodies, Kuzuha’s parents were built more after the model of another shape-shifting animal, the tanuki and Kuzuha’s sister, older by her than five years, had been born a raccoon dog too. Kuzuha grew up as a lone fox surrounded by cuddly raccoon dogs.

The Fox was good at school. From the very beginning, there wasn’t a single subject that she struggled with. She excelled at sport too.

Whenever she approached a problem, Kuzuha spotted a shortcut. These shortcuts were always immaculately paved, without even the tiniest of pebbles littering the surface; the arrow-straight path it traced to the answer was well-lit. All Kuzuha had to do was waltz her way there. When her classmates complained of finding their schoolwork hard, Kuzuha simply couldn’t understand what that was like.

Yet for all her mental agility, Kuzuha was incapable of leaning back into her cleverness. Each time she performed well in a test and the results list stuck up in the classroom showed her name above all the boys’, she felt everybody’s eyes on her. Outshining the boys only made other people uncomfortable, and consequently, Kuzuha was troubled by a creeping feeling that something bad was going to happen to her. Sometimes she loathed that pebble-free, arrow-straight path. If only it had a few weeds, the odd twist and turn – something, Kuzuha thought. Then she could trip and fall in a cute, comical way, and other people would look and laugh, and she’d be able to laugh along with them. That was a more suitable way for a girl to be. Kuzuha loathed standing out. She couldn’t see a single benefit to it. People turned a cold shoulder to girls and women who stood out, both in her class and in the world outside it. That was how it seemed to Kuzuha.

Kuzuha could see shortcuts, which meant she could see what was to come. She knew that however hard she tried, the road ahead would be blocked to her at some point.



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