CW: Rape (both attempted and implied), incest, violence, gore, misogyny, transphobia
The Night of the Baba Yaga came on my radar by way of a skeet from the Read Japanese Literature podcast as a part of Pride Month. A queer author’s English debut about an ass-kicking bodyguard and her charge, a yakuza princess? Sounds like a bloody good time! I just had one major concern: in the seedy male-dominated world of organized crime, how much will sexual menace play a role in the story for our protagonists?
Turns out the answer is a lot!
It begins right away too. Our POV character Yoriko Shindo is kidnapped off the street by a gang of goons working for a local high-level boss Genzo Naiki and is immediately forced to strip to “prove” that she’s a woman. (Genzo made sure to add a crack about trans women here for good measure.) Already the vibes are rancid, and it does not get any better from there. Put more succinctly, in the 116 pages of this book, the phrase “raped to death” was used three times.
This all kicks off because Genzo is in need of a bodyguard for his 18-year-old daughter, however he is too psychotically protective of her “virtue” to trust any of his men to do the job. Luckily for him, Shindo just happened to pick a fight with some of his men that night. After being subdued, she is pressed into service on the threat of…well, you know. Bad stuff.
Shindo is, of course, a social castoff with a strange background. She’s half-foreign, was raised by her grandparents, which included bizarre (and, to be honest, abusive) training that made her a formidable fighter. She isn’t just capable of throwing fisticuffs—she relishes the thrill of it. She’s quippy and feisty. We are supposed to think that she’s cool, but she’s a little too cool.
Our yakuza princess in question, Shoko, has had her life completely controlled by her father. Her mother ran off with one of Genzo’s subordinates some ten years prior, and while the boss continues to hunt for his absent spouse, he has groomed Shoko to be something of a direct replacement. (Do we find out that this is more literal than we’d like? Yes, yes we do.)
Now, what could have salvaged this story is the rapport between Shindo and Shoko. This is a classic pairing: a rough-and-tumble low-class scrapper and an uptight, sheltered girl who cannot escape her circumstances. Of course they are going to clash at first, but eventually emotional walls will come down, trust will be built, and eventually love will bloom.
That isn’t what we get here. The story barely spares any words on building their relationship. Shoko hates Shindo’s guts on sight, and they share maybe two scenes together before a turning point, where Shoko saves Shindo from being gang raped by a group of Genzo’s men. After that, Shoko can no longer hold her steely façade in front of Shindo, but at no point I would say that they emotionally bonded at all.
There is one specter lurking in the background of the story: an associate of Genzo’s who is described as a complete pervert for torture, particularly of the sexual kind. The first of two twists in this book is that this man is Shoko’s fiancé. None of this makes sense considering how protective and possessive Genzo is of his daughter, but fuck it, we need a Big Bad, so why not this guy? Shindo, out of some sense of duty, decides that she can’t let Shoko be married off to this pervert, so they end up running off together, much like Genzo’s wife and henchman had done years prior. (Oh, and in the process Shindo gets to repay the favor by saving Shoko from being raped by her father too. Symmetry!)
The last section of the book is where most of the queer themes show up, as the two begin living life together under false personas. Their bond turns into something of an “honor-bound” queer platonic relationship with a little bit of Gender thrown in. To be honest, it wasn’t well seeded prior to the end of the book, and the series of vignettes we do get are pretty scant. It is the only element of the book that isn’t heavy-handed.
The second twist to the story is one that I will not spoil, but my reaction to it was less “oh, that’s neat!” and more “oh, ok.” The ending tries to wrap the story with a dramatic showdown, but it feels under-baked.
The one lone bright spot for me were the fight scenes, particularly the first one. They were all properly visceral and well-choreographed. With the title and Shindo’s love of dogs, I was expecting a certain amount of John Wick influence, but I was pleasantly surprised it comes through strongest when Shindo is breaking bones.
Sam Bett is credited with the translation, and I think overall he did a good job of it. There is one line of dialogue that I found particularly groan-worthy (hint: it includes the phrase “thunder thighs”), but I assume that the source material carries most of the blame for it.
All in all, this is very much a novella that really badly wanted to be an exploitation film. If you are looking for a grimy crime family story with a dash of queerness, then you should let this Baba Yaga haunt you for an evening or two.
Rating:
Overall – 6 For the number of severed sex organs presented to us for our trouble
As a shoutout, I read this book through The Japan Foundation via the Libby iOS app. There isn’t any yuri manga available in the catalogue at this time of writing, but there are queer-themed books and such that may be of interest. Best part is that it’s free for those in the US and Canada, so long as you have a library card.
Matt Marcus is a cohost of various projects on the Pitch Drop Podcast Network, as well as the writer for the blog Oh My God, They Were Bandmates analyzing How Do We Relationship in greater depth.
