The opening pages of Akira Otani’s raging 2020 bestseller, “The Night of Baba Yaga,” immediately contradict the reader’s expectations.
In the backseat of a white sedan, a young, red-haired woman, kidnapped by a group of Japanese yakuza, flits in and out of consciousness. Only these gangsters aren’t cold, hardened mobsters. These men are on edge, vulnerable and wary; as jumpy as their loud, colorful neckties. But it is when the car stops and the woman is dumped to the ground where expectations truly realign. Because in Otani’s adept hands, neither is this woman a victimized, helpless ingenue. She is Yoriko Shindo, undaunted and unwilling to compromise. Shindo relishes violence and excels at it. Despite her weakened state, she won't be subdued by the horde of white-shirted henchmen who rush in to subdue her, physically overpowering them all. Yet, she finally acquiesces by refusing to kill the attack dog they unleash on her.
The Night of Baba Yaga, by Akira Otani. Translated by Sam Bett. 216 pages, Soho Press, Fiction.
This opening scene is a microcosm for the entire novel: Otani’s narrative unfolds around ruthless violence tempered by authentic compassion. It marks Shindo’s entry into the patriarchal yakuza kingdom of 1970s Japan and launches her subsequent connection with Shoko Naiki, the sheltered, outwardly submissive 18-year-old daughter of a mob boss. Because of her fighting prowess, Shindo has been kidnapped to serve as a watchdog and driver for Shoko, whose last bodyguard — a man — was raped to death after accidently touching the girl. Referred to as the “princess,” Shoko herself wields power just as she has been raised to do so — with imperious, prickly tyranny.
Although Otani never shies away from the gritty, often grisly, brutality of the Japanese underworld — fainthearted readers, be wary — the novel again subverts expectations as the narrative juxtaposes testosterone-fueled power games with a sensitive exploration of the burgeoning relationship between these two women as each slowly shares their past. While the author never directly refers to a queer love story playing out between them, the message is clear. But it’s not the queer coding or the yakuza setting that make this story interesting, it’s the novel’s refusal to play by any conventions of genre. Joyfully aggressive and painfully tender, “The Night of Baba Yaga” instead dares to reimagine the boundaries of self within the systems of any society, boldly questioning ideas of violence, love, family and honor.
As translator Sam Bett explains, he was attracted to the novel precisely for its refusal to adhere to any established conventions.
“I was interested in working on a book with queer content because that’s still something that hasn't really been explored much yet in translation from Japanese (writers),” Bett told The Japan Times recently.
Bett has earned some right of choice, himself a somewhat unconventional success in the translation scene. He was awarded the Grand Prize in the 2016 JLPP International Translation Competition, won the 2019-20 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for his translation of “Star” by Yukio Mishima, and followed that success by making the shortlist for the 2022 International Booker Award with “Heaven” by Mieko Kawakami, co-translated with David Boyd. Savvy on the intersection of art and entertainment, Bett was immediately hooked by Otani’s work beyond the rarity of translating queer content.
“At first, we had a hard time attracting interest because it's not really a safe book, but I mean that in the most complimentary way,” explains Bett. “I can’t say that I love reading safe books, and if you think about publishing not only as a way to make money but as a service industry where you're trying to provide an entertaining, engaging and rewarding experience to readers, we should be focused on interesting books that challenge conventions.”
Luckily for readers, Soho Press agreed, a well-known publication for introducing bold voices in literature and award-winning crime fiction — like Mick Herron’s “The Secret Hours,” a New York Times’ 2023 Best Thriller. “The Night of Baba Yaga” debuts July 2 in America, and will be released by Faber and Faber in the U.K. in September.
It’s Otani’s first novel to be translated into English, and was a critical and commercial success in Japan. It’s easy to understand why. I shot through the slim read, compelled by its fast-paced narrative sleight-of-hand, but Otani’s subtle wordplay immediately demanded a second read to absorb the finer details. Shortlisted for the 74th Mystery Writers of Japan award, Otani’s skill is not simply in her subversion of story or character tropes. Every page feels stylistically inventive under Bett’s deftly wrought translation as Otani also manipulates stylistic expectations of mirrored timelines and dual perspectives.
Bett, himself a fiction writer currently completing his first novel, admits he has been lucky to translate contemporary greats pushing the boundaries of Japanese literature. In addition to Mishima and Kawakami, Bett has also translated fiction by Izumi Suzuki and Osamu Dazai, with another book by Dazai (“The Beggar Student”) upcoming later this year.
For Bett, the most challenging features of a book are also the most meaningful to translate. “Fiction is one of our greatest tools for talking about under-discussed emotions: the pain of being left out or ostracized or bullied; the role of violence among complicated feelings,” Bett says. “Otani, as well as Kawakami and others, provides an opportunity to process violence rather than just indulge in or enjoy the stylized depiction of violence.
“What’s particularly admirable about Otani’s writing is her precision and economy of style, her choice of imagery alongside a high entertainment factor within the novel. Translating would be much harder if dealing with less elegant materials.”
There is nothing clumsy or ill-considered in this spare, unflinching read. “The Night of Baba Yaga” radiates with both cinematic grandeur and a subtle, constant railing against normalization of any kind, the latter of which can be seen in another aspect of queerness that permeates the novel: Its framing of what it means to be the “other” in society. Shindo is different. She is biracial and physically intimidating, towering over the men around her. Yanagi, second-in-command in the Naiki crime family and an important ballast on Shindo’s journey of self-actualization, is also othered as an ethnic Korean with few choices in the society he lives in. Otani’s vision celebrates the other and grants the marginalized individual the freedom to realize a happily-ever-after outside of the expectations of both society and the reader; defiant, capricious and powerful like the Baba Yaga witch of the Slavic folktales Shindo was raised on, and which gives the novel its title.
“One of the questions the book answers is, ‘How do you, over the course of a lifetime, make sense of the forces that made you?’” Bett says. “And part of what makes the book beautiful and successful as a piece of literature is that the bad characters are not simply bad and the good characters are not made of goodness. It’s a much more nuanced look at the complexity of relationships that's really essential to the breaking of any binary paradigm. You can't deconstruct a binary with another binary. It’s like the Audre Lorde idea about the master's tools. You can't tear down the master's house with the master's tools. And I think Otani is tearing down the house of literary fiction, and she’s having a great time doing it.”
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.