The Strong Ant

Originally published in 1971 by Bungeishunju in Japan under the title The Strong Ant, this is one of the most representative full-length novels in Seicho Matsumoto's "wicked woman" series. The novel tells of the beautiful young Isako, who marries the wealthy Nobuhiro Sawada, a man thirty-one years her senior, and leaps at a stroke into high society and the life of a rich wife. Yet behind this splendor lie layer upon layer of shackles: she has no right to control the household money, must live under the constant surveillance of her husband and the servants, and finds freedom and happiness slipping away from her. Unwilling to be manipulated, Isako has no intention of accepting her fate—while secretly plotting various schemes in the hope that her husband's illness and death will arrive as she wishes, she moves among several men: Shiotsuki, who leans on power and influence; Ishii Kanji, a securities salesman entangled in a wrongful-death lawsuit; and her husband's lawyer Saeki—each of them bound to her by countless threads of illicit affair. She tries to use the hands of others to do away with her husband and seize the inheritance alone, while these men each have calculations of their own. The title "The Strong Ant" is itself a metaphor: men and women steeped in desire are as tiny and lowly as ants swarming around sugar, yet capable of erupting with astonishing force at any cost. The novel employs multiple viewpoints, interspersing diary entries, confessions, and transcripts; its pacing is cool and restrained, peeling back layer by layer the web of mutual exploitation and mutual scheming among the characters. Calculation piles upon counter-calculation, crime leads to further crime, and in the end Isako does not get what she wants; instead she falls into the defenses her husband had long since set in place and gains nothing.