When I was reading these works, I realized that my mind automatically grouped similar types of stories together for comparison, like the first two (Ice Man vs Straw Husband) and the last two(The Greengrocer’s Daughter vs Silently Burning). These pieces all seem to carry a flavor of traditional Japanese ghost tales, with a strange, otherworldly feeling and a suffocating atmosphere that, for me, feels unique to Japanese literature. Something interesting is, when I read literature from other countries, such as American authors or Taiwanese authors, I don’t experience this same suffocating intensity; only Japanese works give me that sensation. Another factor is that, after translation, most of the stories I read rely heavily on a third-person perspective, which makes me feel as if I’m standing by, watching the events unfold.
Meanwhile, Ice Man and Straw Husband seem to draw from folklore, one borrowing from the legend of the Yuki-onna (Snow Woman), the other adapted from a Japanese folktale. I especially liked the sense of helplessness in the female protagonist at the end of Straw Husband. It strongly reflects both the broader social environment and a common condition in Japan. Meanwhile, in Ice Man, the theme of powerless assimilation stood out. And when I reflect on both stories, I realized that if you replaced the non-human protagonists with real people, interestingly, you could still find corresponding counterparts in reality. This lead to an intriguing analysis suggesting that Matsuda Aoko employs a feminist perspective to transform Edo-period cautionary tales into stories of liberation.
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