An Afternoon with Novelist Aoko Matsuda: On Maintaining a Feminist Writing Practice across Languages

Aoko Matsuda represents a significant, award-winning voice in contemporary Japanese literature, distinguished by her incisive social commentary and innovative narrative techniques that interrogate gender politics and cultural conventions in Japanese society.

Her debut short story collection Stackable (2013) was nominated for the Mishima Yukio Prize and the Noma Literary New Face Prize. Her 2020 collection Where the Wild Ladies Are (tr. Polly Barton) won the World Fantasy Award and the Firecracker Award, and was named a best book of the year by TIME and The New Yorker. The English translation of her next collection, The Woman Dies, is forthcoming in September 2025 from Europa Editions.

Matsuda is also an accomplished translator, having brought works by Karen Russell, Amelia Gray, and Carmen Maria Machado into Japanese. She frequently writes for Japanese media, offering feminist insights into structural inequalities and cultural contradictions in Japan.