Piercing, inventive, and darkly humorous, the fifty-two stories in Aoko Matsuda’s The Woman Dies explore the persistent and pervasive sexism faced by women in modern-day Japan. The normalization of violence against women on screen and in the media is confronted in the story ‘The Woman Dies’, while others invest inanimate objects with their own perspectives, examine the aesthetics of technology, and use clever wordplay to riff off the absurdity of contemporary life. Masterfully translated by Polly Barton, the translator of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, The Woman Dies is more than a simple thrill ride. Blending humour, surrealism, and sharp social critique, it’s a vast, multifaceted theme park of ideas by one of Japan’s most exciting writers.
