Where the Wild Ladies Are

About

In these retellings of traditional Japanese ghost stories, the spirits don't haunt — they help. A woman murdered by her husband returns as a corporate motivational speaker. A ghostly seamstress runs a thriving alteration business. A fox spirit works in telemarketing. Matsuda takes the women who were victims in the original tales and gives them afterlives of purpose, humor, and quiet revenge. The collection is feminist reclamation disguised as comfort fiction — each story retaining the structure of the original folktale while replacing the horror with something weirder and more satisfying. The spirits are neither terrifying nor tragic; they're busy. Ghost stories where the dead have better jobs than the living — and the real haunting is the patriarchy that killed them in the first place.