Excerpt from The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani, Sam Bett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
The Night of Baba Yaga

"MY EYES ARE puffy. This is bad."

In the car outside the café, Shoko pulled a compact from her handbag and gave her face a serious inspection.

"It'll be fine in the morning."

"I know that. But not by dinner. Father will ask what happened to my face. Maybe I should tell him I was bullied by my driver."

"Go ahead."

"... Would that upset you?"

"If you want me to be upset, then sure."

"... You're the worst. So twisted."

Look who's talking, Shindo almost said. Instead she started up the car.

The last of the daylight was retreating from the streets.


Salarymen heading home and students in their uniforms and moms with kids walked through the sunset, each person at their own pace. Tokyo was full of people. The thought hit Shindo at least once a day, even after years of living here. So many different kinds of people, doing different things. Different ages, different jobs, faces and bodies, clothes and interests. Living here, Shindo was just another person in a sea of differences.

Ten minutes down the road, Shoko spoke up.

"I can tell him that I saw a dead kitten on the road and cried because I was so sad. Father will believe me. When I was little, on a walk together, we saw a cat that was run over by a car. It made me cry. Father told me I was nice.

You're such a nice girl, Shoko ..."

It was like she was talking to herself. Shindo focused on the road.


DINNER WAS TONJIRU soup and rice with takuan.

Sitting at the corner of the table in the big room, Shindo ate the first half of her heaping bowl of white rice garnished with the artificial yellow pickles, then dumped the other half of the rice in the pork and miso soup, which she sucked down in slurping gulps. She had always been a big eater, but for the past day or so, her appetite had been insatiable. She had a headache and felt spacey, like her period was coming. It's not like she could borrow pads from the princess. I'll buy some at the pharmacy tomorrow, she told herself, as she tasted the last grain of broth-soaked rice. Just as she was thinking about grabbing seconds, another bowl of tonjiru appeared in front of her.

"Really? Arigato."

It was the youngest guy living in the annex. He bowed and shuffled off. Thankful for the gesture, Shindo took big sips of the piping hot pork soup.

After dinner, some of the junior staff tidied up while others played mahjong or watched baseball on TV, and still others took up posts or returned to other tasks. Shindo knew she wasn't welcome at the mahjong table and couldn't join the men at the TV, so she went to take a bath. The annex had its own communal bathing area, where the men bathed in groups. Since this was obviously offlimits for her, Shindo was allowed to use the bath in the main house. Shoko took a long bath at the same time every night. Once she was finished, Shindo was next.

In the changing room, she took her clothes off and used the mirror to inspect her back and shoulders. The cuts had healed together, the bruises mostly disappeared.


Perhaps she had her youth to thank for this rapid recovery. Her grampa saw things differently. "You have a gift," he used to say. A person couldn't get as big and strong as her, or heal as fast, simply by training all the time.

She couldn't say exactly why her grampa made her train so hard, or why she kept it up. There was a vague memory from early on, a time she asked for his advice. Kids had been bullying her because her hair and eyes were different. How could she make them go away? A normal question, for a kid. That on its own should not have been enough to start a regimen of training so intense it verged on torture.

Shindo touched her bulging arms, her chiseled stomach. Her grampa never told her where he came from. Nobody ever told her. Not even her gramma. As much as she liked to talk, she never even mentioned how the two of them had met. The most Shindo could say about her grampa now was that he showed no mercy. He was dangerously strong. He saw nothing wrong with throwing his own grandchild on the ground or stringing her up by the ankles from a tree so he could whack her with a wooden sword. He used to make her stand out in the snow and practice punches until she nearly froze to death. In sparring matches, he broke her bones on three different occasions. Shindo almost never cried. When her grampa asked her "Wanna stop?" she shook her head.

Excerpted from The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani. Copyright © 2024 by Akira Otani. Excerpted by permission of Soho Crime. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.