“Who are the spirits living in cities, and why are they there? Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are—translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton—dares to answer this question, introducing us to the female sprites and yōkai (traditional Japanese monsters) who have clambered out of Japan’s ancient forests and wells and entered into modern-day cramped high-rise flats, corporate headquarters, beauty parlors, and tourist complexes . . . These tales demonstrate a wildness in all of us that connects body to land, human to animal. The convergences of the spiritual and corporeal, the traditional and modern, together form an anthology that is rare in feminist Japanese literature.” —Ysabelle Cheung, Sierra 

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