Fairy Tales and the Fantastic (2): Transforming women and reimagined horror traditions: hair, revenge, and gender in Matsuda Aoko’s ‘Smartening Up’ (みがきをかける) (2016)

Speaker:

Saffron Nyx is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, Australia. She received Class I Honours in Japanese in 2022, with her thesis focusing heavily on themes of liminality and representations of queer girls and women in Japanese girls’ culture. Her current research continues to examine representations of queer women and gender transgression with a strong focus on temporality, tragedy, and intertextuality in Japanese literature and pop culture.

Abstract:

Malevolent and wronged women have been recurring figures in Japanese Gothic and Horror literature and theatre for centuries. In recent decades, these figures continue to emerge in a variety of ways across film, television, and pop culture, with some notable examples being Tomie (1987), Audition (1999), and Ringu (1998). In this paper, I examine yet another iteration of the figure of the vengeful, monstrous woman in Japanese literature. The text I will be focusing on is ‘Smartening Up’ (みがきをかける), the first story in Matsuda Aoko’s feminist short story collection, Where the Wild Ladies Are (おばちゃんたちのいるところ) (2016). Throughout this anthology, Matsuda playfully retells tales of ghosts, monsters, and vengeful women from Japanese folktales, Kaidan, Rakugo, and Kabuki theatre. Matsuda subverts and satirises many of these older texts, while also highlighting their contemporary resonances in literature and society.

‘Smartening Up’ features strong intertextual references to the Kabuki performance "The Maiden at Dojoji Temple" and Ringu, with hair, revenge, and metamorphosis as major motifs. In this paper, I will contextualise and analyse the main character’s initial anxieties pertaining to her body hair, contrasted by her joyous transformation into a long-haired monster. Moreover, I will elucidate the ways in which Matsuda wryly plays with Horror and Gothic traditions to empathetically reimagine typically malevolent figures such as Kiyohime, Okiku, and Sadako.