Review of The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda

*The Woman Dies* by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton (2025). Published by Europa Editions.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

Running a book blog and reading almost two hundred books a year (I’ve done this almost every year of my life—it’s been a fascinating trend, even when I’ve been too busy to exist outside of life and work), I tend to know what kind of books I like. I’m also very intentional in analyzing the trends of what I’m reading, as I’m genuinely committed to diversifying the books I pick up and see new perspectives.

I often go to the library to hunt among the shelves for books that interest me, whether I have heard of them not or before, but lately I’m coming out of an unemployment spell. For the longest time it feels like I’ve been starting all of my blog posts detailing my journey as an unemployed Gen Z-er trying to find a job in this horrendous market, but I did end up finding a job eventually after 300 applications.

It took a while, but I got there. During that period where I was job hunting I ended up finding out in my free time that I would go insane if I constantly thought about my future, so I read a lot and watched a handful of movies here and there. This blog has been a flurry of activity because of that.

I also spent a solid chunk of my last few weeks of unemployment just catching up on what needs to be done when it comes to my advance copies. I take deadlines very seriously, especially when it comes to books gifted to me, even if my reviews are independent of the fact the publisher gave this to me for free.

This is a fairly quick breeze to get through if we’re going to be honest—I finished this collection in about an hour, which is fairly fast for even me.

Let’s get into the review!

Fifty two stories addressing sexism and the lack of gender equity in modern day Japan.

Now this review is going to be interesting for me, as usually with short story collections I discuss some of the prominent stories. But the typical short story collection has less than fifteen stories, and the interesting part about The Woman Dies is that there are 52 stories contained within its pages. That’s not typical for the average short story collection at all, and I don’t think I’ve ever read one with this many stories.

We use the term short story loosely here, as some of these pieces are indeed flash fiction. I double checked the synopsis before typing out my review, and it does confirm that there are flash fiction pieces in this collection. Flash fiction generally means that the stories are under a 1,000 words with most publications, and in this book is averages out to be a page or two.

Some of these stories are literally only a handful of paragraphs, so if you want to get invested in them, good luck with that. They end faster than you spend eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich during a lunch break at work. I will admit upfront, even in this section of the blog post: I did not really care for the flash fiction pieces as much.

As someone who has written and published flash fiction, I think what I’m looking for is a really grounded sense of purpose, and that’s not what I got from most of these stories. Some of the short stories I was really starting to get invested in, but because we have so much content to get through in this book, they’re not too long either.

Regardless: the stories themselves and their themes were interesting. A lot of it is critiquing contemporary Japanese society and the roles that women have to play. I found a solid handful of these stories to be quite playful and less serious in time, but still packing a punch when it comes to the broader message the writer was trying to play. Others, not as relevant to the themes (probably because of how short they were) but still fairly enjoyable.

I find Japanese literature by women specifically to be incredibly fascinating, as it’s mainly what we get in the West. Considering how women are discriminated against in East Asia, it’s wild to me that a lot of the novels and literature in translation from Japan and South Korea especially are by women.

I also imagine that the formatting is going to be fixed on the final copy of the book that ends up in the average reader’s hands, but the advance copy formatting for Kindle was incredibly difficult to read at times. It wasn’t clear where a story ended or started, so I had to go back a handful of times to clarify whether I had begun a new story (usually I had) and if I needed to move on from the previous one mentally. This isn’t a critique to take seriously if you’re considering reading it though, as this is definitely going to be fixed.

Overall Thoughts

I would say that overall I enjoyed reading this collection. However, I don’t know if I’m going to be returning to it for my own leisure reading. Maybe if I was doing research and writing an article or academic work on Japanese women’s literature in the modern day would I return to this, but I don’t know if I would willingly come back to this otherwise.

That’s simply my opinion though. The writing is fairly solid throughout and accessible. Polly Barton is such a good translator for Japanese literature that I knew going into this that I was going to have very few problems with the translation itself, and I didn’t notice anything clunky throughout or seemingly out of place. I trust Barton; I’ve read a lot of her translated work and even the nonfiction she’s put out into the world.

I say read this if it interests you, or if you want to read more Japanese women’s literature. It’s quick weekend read and I had a lot of fun with it. Pick it up at your local indie bookstore or library if you get the chance!

Much love to the publisher and to NetGalley for the advance copy.

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