Cbr17bingo Red
Akira Otani’s The Night of Baba Yaga won the 2025 Dagger award for best translated crime novel and it is a doozy! I read it in an afternoon and loved it, but be warned: it is incredibly violent and includes passages describing sexual assault. Shindo is a physically imposing young woman who is extraordinarily talented at fighting. Against her will, she finds herself in the employ of the local Yakuza boss, acting as bodyguard to his daughter. What follows is a tale of obsessions, vendettas, and outsiders finding one another and living life on their own terms.
The novel opens with Shindo regaining consciousness under guard in a car headed to the mansion of Genzo Naiki, a powerful Yakuza boss in Tokyo. We learn that Shindo, who is in her early 20s, was minding her own business when a couple of Naiki’s lackeys started to harass her. Shindo beat the shit out of several goons before being knocked out by a couple of blows to the head with a beer bottle. Shindo is unimpressed with Naiki and his men, and she is only too willing to keep fighting but Naiki’s right hand man Yanagi inadvertently discovers her weak spot — dogs. As a result, Shindo agrees to work for Naiki guarding his 18-year-old daughter Shoko. Shoko is a quiet and delicate school girl who wears very odd, old-fashioned clothes and doesn’t seem to have any friends. Naiki is ridiculously protective of her, going to extremely violent lengths to keep her safe from any male interference. We learn later in the story the quite gruesome lengths to which Naiki will go in order to shield Shoko. Shindo, being a woman and incredibly tough, seems the perfect guard.
Shindo finds herself in a tough position at the Naiki compound. The other men employed there despise and shun her with the exception of Yanagi, who develops a grudging respect for her. Shoko, despite outward appearances, is a pretty tough and angry young woman. She is rude and scornful towards Shindo, but with time, Shindo and Shoko learn more about each other and develop a relationship that will complicate their situation with Naiki and his allies and that will endanger their lives.
This novel is full of blood, violence, and snark. It seems like the kind of story that Tarantino would love to turn into a film. Shindo and Shoko are a great duo. Each woman is an outsider for different reasons, Shindo because she is mixed race and a muscular woman who enjoys fighting. Shoko is isolated from the world by her father but faces other constraints due to a situation involving her mother. Yanagi is also an outsider because of his Korean heritage.
The plot of this novel is tight and moves at a fast pace. Otani fleshes out characters skillfully and creates some very tense (and sometimes very gross) situations in just over 200 pages. This is a wild and gripping story about the relationship between Shindo and Shoko, and I won’t be forgetting some of the imagery anytime soon. This could be one of my 2025 end of the year favorites.