Have you ever read a story that actually kind of changed the way you think about things? Because I just did. That story was “Smartening Up,” the first story in an anthology called Where The Wild Ladies Are, written by Aoko Matsuda and translated by Polly Barton.

First, a shoutout to my younger sister, who got me this book as a Christmas gift. She knows me too well.

Also, as a content warning: the story does have a mention of suicide.

We start off with an unnamed narrator, giving herself little affirmations about how sexy and capable she is. It turns out that she’s actually at a hair removal place, getting the hair from her arms removed. The beautician finishes, and the narrator heads out and goes to a department store for a while before heading home. While on the train, listening to a Western singer, she decides that she’d like to be blond in her next life.

She gets home, grabs some dinner, and puts on an American romantic comedy, when the doorbell suddenly rings. She hesitates a moment (since as a woman living by herself she’d make a wonderful target), but gives in when the doorbell rings to find her aunt standing outside the door.

She lets the woman in, and the first thing the aunt says is about how dreadful she looks, before commenting on how small her apartment’s entrance hallway is, before moving on to her posture. Her aunt then plops down next to the dinner table and asks her for a drink. The narrator hands her a bottle of perry, which she gulps down before watching the movie with her niece.

The aunt them comments that the hair on foreign women’s legs and arms is so pale, but the all have dark pubes, to which the narrator concedes. The aunt, however, really wants to talk about hair, which the narrator is less thna keen to do.

A little later, while the narrator is taking the DVD from the player, the aunt looks at her and asks what she’d been doing that day, to her confusion. The aunt responds to this by saying she “know[s] [she’s] been deliberately weakening the power of [her] hair,” which just confuses her more. The aunt continues, and this leads to an argument over the narrator’s lifestyle.

Here it’s revealed that the narrator just got out of a relationship where the dude she was seeing had cheated on her, and her aunt thinks that she believes that by completely changing her look and going through body hair removal, she’ll be able to get some kind of revenge against him.

This pisses the narrator off, and she chastises her aunt for coming to her house to tell her all this. It’s also here that we learn that her aunt is actually dead, having hanged herself a year ago.

The narrator continues, asking why her aunt is bothering to haunt her, instead of her son, who was the one who had found her body. The aunt brushes this off a bit, telling her that her son doesn’t really need her that much, though she does wish he’d stop visiting her grave so often.

The tone then gets a little more serious when the narrator asks her aunt why she killed herself. It turns out that she had been the mistress of an engaged (and eventually married man) who had decided to end their 30 year relationship. This had made her so angry that she had decided to do herself in, out of spite. This is a decision that she now very deeply regrets, as she didn’t really think it through before she did it.

She then abruptly changes the subject to a time when the narrator was a kid, and accompanied her and her mother to a kabuki play called The Maid of Dōjō Temple. The play is basically about a woman named Kiyohime who falls in love with a priest at the local temple, but is rebuffed and turns into a giant snake. She kills the priest and destroys the temple’s bell.

The narrator remembers not really understanding what the play was about, but being quite awestruck over the actor playing Kiyohime, and how graceful her movements were. After the play, her aunt pointed out to her that Kiyohime’s silver kimono was meant to represent a snake’s scales.

The aunt points out that she should have fought instead of hanging herself, maybe put a curse on him. Then she says that she’s developing a “special trick” that she’s going to show him later. Basically, she plans on showing up at his place, but wants to make it a lot scarier than just coming in through the door.

Anyway, the topic turns back to the narrator’s hair, and how she should stop going to have it removed, because it’s diminishing her own power. She wants the narrator to fight like Kiyohime, to which the narrator responds by pointing out Kiyohime turned into snake, which are naturally hairless. The aunt responds that wasn’t really her point, before pointing out some performances of the play have two dancers, adding, “Let’s become monsters together.”

She then promises to show the narrator her “special trick” before leaving.

Later, at a bathhouse, the narrator contemplates what her aunt had told her. She thinks about how no matter what she does, the hair always comes back, and watches other women there shaving their own hair. Here we get into a bit of a deeper reason for the narrator’s obsession with hair removal: the day she was dumped, she’d forgotten to shave, and she thinks that was part of the reason he dumped her. She thinks that by depilating herself she’ll be able to find another man and finally be happy.

And it’s here that she realizes that her aunt was actually right, and getting rid of all her body hair won’t change anything. Because the reason her boyfriend dumped her wasn’t the hair, it was because he was a cheating jerk. And here’s where something weird happens.

She grows a thick coat of glossy, black hair all over her body. Which gets her some odd looks, since she’s in a public bathhouse.

The narrator runs back home and looks at herself in the mirror, before deciding that this whole thing is actually pretty cool, comparing herself to a number of famous ghosts. She then notices that her arms, where she had the hair zapped earlier, aren’t quite as thick as the rest of her hair, so she decides to do something about that.

She starts eating liver and seaweed, and rubs horse oil on her arms to get the hair to grow in better. She also discovers that she can retract and extend the hair at will, so she can still do her work. Meanwhile, she tries to decide what her own “special trick” would be, thinking about her and her aunt dancing together.

So, essentially, this story boils down to beauty standards, and how freeing rejecting those standards can be. Which kind of brings me back to the beginning of the post.

See, I’m not super gender conforming. I wear my hair in a buzzcut, rarely wear dresses or jewelry, and don’t wear makeup at all. I think that beauty standards (for anyone really) are kind of bullshit, except I frequently would do one thing.

I would shave my legs and armpits.

This story actually kind of made me rethink this, because I don’t conform to beauty standards otherwise, and I’m ace, so why do I care if other people find me sexually attractive? Also, shaving is time consuming, expensive, itchy, and I cut myself all the time because I’m the clumsiest human being alive. So, shortly after reading this tale, I stopped. I haven’t shaved now for a couple of weeks and I’ve got a pretty nice little crop going.

So, what do you say? Let’s be monsters together.

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