Library Reviews
THE NIGHT OF BABA YAGA
AKIRA OTANI
The princess and the amazon. Refreshingly violent.
Recreational brawls are nothing new to Shindo and, as it happens, she is also very good at them. After laying out several toughs one day, a yakuza group forcibly coerce her into being the bodyguard for their boss’s trophy daughter. In spite of their odd couple dynamic, the two girls find common ground and a growing rapport.
Author Akira Otani is an established queer fiction writer and much commentary has been made in relation to the LGBTQ angle. The classic road movie, Thelma and Louise, has been recalled. Gender is definitely significant to The Night of Baba Yaga but appreciation should extend far beyond this. Characters are more complex than they appear. Their integration into, and the subtleties of, the storyline are very inducive to re-reading.
Baba Yaga is a folkloric entity of Slavic origin. Characteristics vary but she is commonly a crone possessed of a unique, walking cottage perched on a pair of enormous chicken legs. Fickle but powerful, like an aged tsundere, she usually displays an ability to bend fate so that an individual’s life path could be warped for better or worse. Her invocation here is wickedly clever, not just a cool title. Along with the rest of the book’s heavily thematic content, there is plenty of fodder for discussion groups and book clubs to chew on.
ALL OF US STRANGERS
TAICHI YAMADA ; Translated By WAYNE P. LAMMERS.
Adapted into a 2024 UK theatrical movie by the same name, this is the translation of the original story by Taichi Yamada. All of Us Strangers is an affirming yet haunting, modern-day drama set in Tokyo.
Harada is a middle aged man living a productive but emotionally desolate life. Divorced and estranged from his only son, he has little identity beyond work. One day, an impulsive visit to his childhood neighbourhood ends up being more than a stroll down memory lane. Astonishingly, he encounters his parents alive and well despite both supposedly having died during his childhood decades ago. More unreal, they haven’t aged and daily life in the old family apartment is exactly as it was in the past. What starts with the cliched trappings of the flawed Japanese male give way to a sentimental, lingering story.
The original Japanese edition was published in 1987 and largely set in that era. This paperback is a rerelease of the first English edition translation, Strangers (2003), also by Wayne P. Lammers. Author Taichi Yamada passed away but not before his old novel hit cinemas as the UK filmAll of Us Strangers (2023). Production began in 2017 and Yamada was aware and consenting of the film’s changes. The screenplay is modernised and significantly reworked but the soul of the story is intact and unmistakable.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Floating around the internet are some cracking takes on this work (film and the novel):
“Set in the great human maelstrom of Tokyo, Strangers is a thinking man’s ghost story” – from the 2003 jacket blurb and greatly copy pasted.
“the real people in Harada’s life are little more than ghosts to him, while the actual ghosts touch him in ways flesh-and-blood people have not”. – this gem from The Guardian in 2005 in an article titled Dead calm
“An off-beat Japanese ghost story from the Eighties has been turned into a gay cinematic sobfest” –The Times, 2024.
Cosmic Circus points out that the story was adapted as a Japanese horror of sorts in Discarnates (1988) before its reinvention into “a British romantic fantasy film”.
(Previously reviewed. Edited.)