The Girl Who Is Getting Married is not one of those stories that you get to read every day. It is strange, sophisticated, beautiful and complicated all at the same time. It has its own rhythm and forces you to agree with its pace. Aoko Matsuda created an exciting piece of work with this story.
The Girl Who Is Getting Married is not actually about the girl who is getting married. It is rather about the reader and how he/she wants it to be.
This short story begins clearly, and then it starts to blur a little. Through the end, the reader doesn’t even know who the girl is getting married, or the unnamed narrator is. The relationship gets more complicated on every page, and it is not clear if we are reading about the same person anymore.
If you are looking for a different storyteller, you may like Aoko Matsuda.
The Girl Who Is Getting Married
An unnamed narrator visits her friend, the girl who is getting married, in her apartment on the fifth floor of an anonymous building. With each flight of steps, the narrator recalls different memories of the time they have spent together their time in high school, their first jobs, a chance encounter on the train. However, just as the building’s corridor twists and turns toward the flat, we realise that the story, too, is shifting under our feet. As details go missing and memories are contradicted, we are left wondering whose eyes were looking through.
Aoko Matsuda
Aoko Matsuda, born in 1979, has published three collections of stories. English translations of her work include ‘Photographs Are Images’ and ‘Love Isn’t Easy When You Are The National Anthem’ (trans. Jeffrey Angles) in Monkey Business, ‘Smartening Up’ (trans. Polly Barton) in Granta, and ‘Planting’ published as part of the Waseda Bungaku Japan Earthquake Charity Literature project.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
