Is The Ending Of The Night Of Baba Yaga Explained?

I just finished The Night of Baba Yaga and it’s really been sticking with me. I loved this. The main plot points are sort of outlined in the publisher’s summary and in trade reviews, but (like me!) the book reads in pretty much the reverse order of events to how they actually happened, and really the only thing we really get in terms of explanation for Yoriko and Shoko’s long disappearance is that at one point they sort of fled, and then spent the decades of subsequent peace wandering about in quiet old age. Most of the reviews I’ve read have sort of panned the ending for not laying out in the sort of minute detail how exactly this escape was managed by a couple of women of middling ability against a powerful boss of the yakuza – as opposed to the attendant tone and after-effects of all that violence being recorded in pretty great detail – and the Asian Review of Books found it rushed and wondered at the plausibility of the serene jumps in time to peaceful old age that the author managed to execute in the few pages he did devote to wrapping things up. The ending is sort of bittersweet and mythic, and really, sort of fitting to this pretty unusual and violent book. For someone who reads comics for tight plotting and practical, ending-up-all-the-loose-ends closure, it wouldn’t have done the trick, but for me it was just fine.

I was prepared for a sort of pulpy, somewhat irreverent and Tarantino-esque take on Japanese crime, but this is ultimately a more serious and complex book than that. Yes, it does follow a fairly clear narrative throughline – Yoriko and Shoko escape from the clutches of the Naiki family, and spend decades of their lives afterward in reasonable peace – but as far as the practical mechanics of how they managed to escape from and were then able to evade for so long the resources of one of Japan’s most powerful yakuza bosses are concerned, the text doesn’t actually tell us all that much. The ending jumps forward in time by several years, and – as several of the other reviews here have noted – is somewhat muddled and somewhat mysterious in relation to how the two of them managed to survive for so long. A number of critics have complained that the ending of The Night of Baba Yaga is too rushed, and don’t get us started on how they managed to evade detection for so long – apparently it’s all left somewhat unanswered. For some readers no doubt this will be frustrating – they’ll be looking for a fully realized, utterly convincing and entirely explained-out ending, and this simply won’t provide it to them – but for others, the very essence of the novel’s mood and its characters’ aftermath will actually be sufficient. In short, it’s a long, complex, messy and often dark and violent novel, but it’s also a deeply, even formally, well-made one, and not a little effective. I’d broadly recommend it, not least because – as ever – a lot of what it leaves unexplained will, I suspect, have been deliberately left so by the author. It’s the sort of book that’s best read with the knowledge that there are certain things that are just never going to be told, and that – even when these are things that one would very much like to know – that’s really okay. In terms of specific appreciations of the ending in question, however, I’d simply say that – while it’s true that there are aspects of it which are decidedly mysterious, I do believe that a good deal of what we’re left with is intended – even, in a very basic sense, designed to be as it is. The implication, in short, is that some parts of their lives are simply going to remain, for them, and for us, forever untold. And yet – even when we’re left with the very greatest of uncertainties as to exactly how things worked out for Yoriko and her ward – there’s definitely much here that resonates rather powerfully with me, too.

The ending of 'The Night of Baba Yaga' is explained to us in fairly broad strokes but not in complete detail. The two main characters, Yoriko and Shoko, flee the Naiki clan and we see them again in the novel’s time-jumps. However, the details of their survival and how they managed to disappear are left somewhat vague and sometimes even rush through. I assume this is a deliberate choice by the author to create atmosphere and to dive deeper into the characters’ emotions instead of explaining everything in detail to his readers. Therefore, if you’re the type of reader who requires a very detailed and procedural ending to a story in order to be satisfied, then you might be somewhat let down here. However, if you’re okay with lots of implication and the ending even having a sort of mournful, almost fairy-tale like quality to it, then you will probably find the ending meaningful enough. As for myself, I found it sufficient to get the full weight of what the two characters had to endure in order to reach safety, even if the details of their actual escape are left largely to our imaginations.