Gender-bent Vengeance in "The Night of Baba Yaga"

By Leah Rachel von Essen on July 11, 2024

In The Night of Baba Yaga (translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett), Akira Otani takes a familiar form and gender-bends it. A rogue agent in a yakuza gang, the eyelash-batting young girl trapped under her criminal father's thumb, a connection that sparks and holds into a wish of escape. It's a classic story, but Otani transports it into new, exciting dimensions. Shoko's bodyguard is a woman, after all: strong, muscled, brutal, but still a woman. Fans of female vengeance tales like Kill Bill are highly recommended to pick this one up.

It all begins when Yoriko Shindo accidentally reveals her fighting abilities in front of a group of yakuza. She's dragged into the home of Genzo Naiki, the boss of a fierce family, and told that she's newly responsible for the life and purity of his daughter, Shoko. If she fails, she'll be tortured and killed. Her old life is gone.

Truthfully, Shindo isn't as upset as she could be. She doesn't have anyone in her life to go home to. But she hates being under someone's thumb, and the yakuza around her are full of tense, unreleased violence. They resent the presence of a strong, muscled woman who's capable of embarrassing them in a fight. And she's not pleased by Shoko, either. The girl is sheltered, quiet, and snobbish. She knows nothing but luxury and her after-school lessons in everything from archery to music. Shindo shuttles her from one thing to the next, but can't see anything but an old-fashioned naive sentiment in Shoko.

It takes her quite a while to realize she's wrong. Shoko is sheltered, but she's also trapped. Her schedule is regimented, and she is closely watched at all times. Her father's paternalism feels increasingly suspect and possessive. Her mother went missing under strange circumstances, and her father now forces Shoko to wear only her mother's old clothes. Plus, Shoko's lessons will only last until she's married to her betrothed—and she doubts her marriage will actually come with more freedom than she has now.

How far will Shindo go to protect her charge?

It can be difficult to read a book as viscerally violent as this one. Blood splatters, ballpoint pens stab, hands are severed, eyeballs gouged out. But the book also has very graphic scenes of attempted, implied, and committed sexual assault and rape. What purpose do they serve in this gender-bent story about a realm of male-dominated violence? Where do we place Shindo's own thirst for blood in such a cruel, male-dominated landscape? What does Shoko's quiet, pink-fingernail, sweet-smelling femininity serve in this house of cruelty and blood?

While I don't want to ruin the story, I will say that Shoko's own journey with gender in this novel is fascinating. Her femininity is forced upon her, just as her mother's old-fashioned clothes are forced upon her by her father. He also forces her to wear a gold "N" around her neck, for his name. Shindo thinks it resembles a collar. All of the quiet, shy, peevishness covers the trauma inflicted on her, promised for her. It is all withdrawal and forced silence. "I guess you learn to sense the footsteps," she tells Shindo at one point, "just before you hear them." She is an exercise in tense anxiety and fear, trapped in a bubble of her father's making. None of that stifled femininity is hers.

Meanwhile, Shindo is violence simmering and ready to be unleashed. "The heat was something that you never felt around a normal person with a normal life, an honest job," she thinks. "It was familiar because she had it, too, the same heat, spilling out of her. She was unsure of what to call it, but aware of what it did, or made her do. It fed on violence, chased it down." She has no call to be a man, or to masculinity, but she does feed on violence. Her grandfather trained her to do so, to be strong and heal fast, through brutal, abusive training sessions—including both martial arts instruction and hanging her upside down by her feet to teach her tenacity and endurance.

There is a moment, briefly, when Shindo thinks she might be like those men. That she was "no good." That there was no place for her in a normal life, because she "chased after the violence." But ultimately, she realizes that she's wrong. She simply chose the violence over fear, time and time again.

While she thrills on violence, she's uninterested by games of power. And that's ultimately where male violence of the yakuza seems to break off: their horrors are a sick game of chess where no one wins. Sexual assault and rape are constant threats. When someone messes up, male or female, they are sent to Utagawa, a sadist who thrills on killing people slowly, brutally, often with sexual violation involved in his torture. When a yakuza tells Shindo of him, he pretends to barf. When a bunch of the men flee the scene after trying to assault a drugged Shindo, they run "giggling, as if the whole thing were some kind of prank." These are horrid games of violation and power, of pride and debasement, and Otani comes back to them repeatedly.

Even the retribution is male-coded—after the attempted assault on Shindo, Shoko's intervention leads her father to take vengeance, presenting Shindo with the castrated members of the attempted rapists, clearly proud of his gesture and joking about what she should do with them. Shindo is taken aback, horrified, and ultimately unimpressed by the bloody act. She drops the entire box into the compost bucket. The other men are struck by this, feeling it's a wasted act, but she doesn't understand that. The entire act of revenge was foolish. It was not done for her, but for the games of men.

So ultimately, vengeance isn't the true goal for these two. Victory can only exist in escape. Escape from the machinations, the acts and vengeance, the horrors and twists. Escape from imposed femininity and the need for Shindo's steely exterior. Neither Shindo nor Shoko belong in the roles they've been handed. They will have to use everything at their disposal to shake free for good—and forge a new (queer) life all together.