松田青子

彼女たちを「違う世界」へ連れて行ってくれる魔法、それは―『スタッキング可能』で話題の松田青子が贈る第2作品集がついに刊行!

英子の森

Emma Nash

A novella and five shorts by the contemporary writer Aoko Matsuda, whom I first encountered through Polly Barton's translation of a short story called "The Woman Dies." In addition to publishing original fiction and essays, Matsuda has also translated work by Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado into Japanese. I mention this not only because knowing these other authors might help to give you some idea of Matsuda's own style—unsettling, fairytale-like, magical realist, lightly experimental—but also because Matsuda's English translation experience is directly tied to the themes of Eiko no Mori ("Eiko's Forest"), the first and longest story in this book. The main character, Eiko, is a professional interpreter unsatisfied with jobs that demand only the blandest applications of business English or otherwise fail to compensate her for her years of language study (the difference between a job that does and doesn't use English, we learn, is just ¥50/hr—5 dollars). She dreams of finding a job that uses the full extent of her English ability—and of leaving the Grimms' Fairy Tales-style forest where she lives with her overprotective mother.

"Eiko's Forest" is, essentially, an inventive critique of the false promises of English education in globalizing Japan. Learn English, they say, and you'll be invited to a whole new world of ideas. Spend tons of money on eikaiwa lessons and study abroad and you'll gain the skills to get ahead in the world of global business. The promise of English is the promise of infinite freedom and opportunity. Eiko, however, finds only low-paying jobs and is allowed to use her English ability only in ways already dictated by capital. (There is also a gendered element of this critique—Eiko's mom sees English as her daughter's ticket out of a life of feminine sacrifice etc—which I'm not fully capable of explicating right now). This is an interesting, timely subject, and one I'm happy to see dealt with as creatively and affectingly as it is here, even if I sometimes found some of the story's more experimental flourishes a little tedious.

That last criticism is occasionally true of the shorter pieces of this book, though I still find plenty to like in them. My favorite, which I liked even more than "Eiko's Forest," is actually the last story, "Watashi wa o-isha-sama?" ("Am I a Doctor?"), about a bunch of delivery workers (? I kind of don't remember) playing something like 20 Questions. They write different occupations (normal stuff like "doctor," "Catholic nun," and "Enma, King of Hell") on sheets of paper, tape them to each other's foreheads, and have whoever's 'It' guess what's on their forehead based on their questioning of the other people in the room. The results are very funny even before things take a turn for the absurd—and then poignant—when one woman throws "Penguin Petter" into the mix, based on her childhood dream of being a person whose only job is to pet the penguins at the zoo (this is important, of course, because otherwise the penguins won't be happy to greet visitors, and the zoo will suffer a huge financial loss). Then everyone else starts naming their own "dream jobs." I don't know how to describe why what happens next is so startling and moving, which is probably why I'll probably keep coming back to this story. Very excited to read more Aoko Matsuda, particularly as more of her work becomes available in translation 💕

英子の森

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