‘Weasels in the Attic’ by Hiroko Oyamada (Review)

After finally wrapping up the 2023 reading year, it’s time to set off on another bookish adventure, and there’s no better way to usher in 2024 than by enjoying my traditional #JanuaryInJapan bout of J-Lit reading.  This year, as is customary round these parts, January will be set aside for reviews of Japanese literature, and I have plenty lined up.  There are some of my own purchases, a review copy or two, as well as a few books I picked up at the local library, and just to pique your interest, I have an interesting little mini-project coming up which will probably round the month off.  That’s for the future, though – we’re kicking things off today in a nice, gentle manner, with a short book that would make an excellent start to any reading campaign 🙂

*****
Hiroko Oyamada has already had two novel(la)s (The Hole and The Factory) released in English to great acclaim, and Weasels in the Attic (translated by David Boyd) is another excellent work, albeit of a slightly different nature.  It’s a fairly slender book bringing together three stories published between 2012 and 2014, but you can see why they were published like this in English as they are all connected, with a narrative arc running through them.

The stories are all narrated in the first person by a married man in his early forties, and each piece involves an old friend, Saiki, whose phone calls provide the starting point for the first two.  ‘Death in the Family’ sees Saiki informing the narrator of the death of a mutual friend, which triggers memories of a visit to his flat above an exotic fish shop, involving an encounter with the man’s young wife and an unusual story involving fish food.

In ‘The Last of the Weasels’, it’s Saiki’s turn to get married, and the narrator and his wife are invited to the friend’s home for some boar stew.  Alas, despite his marriage and new house, Saiki’s not happy, and it’s all because of some other, unwelcome, visitors:

“Damn weasels.  They’re up above us, making all this noise…  Then there’s the bugs.  I don’t know if they’re fleas or ticks, but they’re all over the place.  My wife’s arms are looking real bad…  And let me tell you, weasel crap stinks like hell.  I’m at the end of my rope.  It was a big mistake coming here.”
‘The Last of the Weasels’, p. 29 (Granta Books, 2022)

The final piece, ‘Yukiko’, sees the narrator and his wife making a return visit on a happier occasion, only to be snowed in and forced to stay the night, one punctuated by crying and bad dreams…

Oyamada’s previous work in English could only be described as strange, Kafkaesque, even, with a tendency towards the supernatural and magical-realism.  However, the stories in Weasels in the Attic take a rather different approach.  The three tales are fairly mundane for the most part, focusing on marriage, houses and babies, and there’s nothing here that really stands out as unusual or sinister.

And yet somehow there’s still an air of mystery and unease floating over everything.  A series of encounters, dinners, that should be fun and comforting, instead turn out to be slightly tense and nervy.  The writer expertly makes us think that something’s up, that there’s something we’re missing, that there’s an almighty elephant in the room, if only we could see it…

The main theme of the book is relationships and marriages, with three different examples on offer.  None of the marriages are overly romanticised, and in the first story a rather depressing opinion on love is offered:

“We meet at school, or work, or maybe a store.  Whatever it is, there’s just a random group of individuals, right?  Within that group, you find your mate.  If you were in a different group, you’d end up with a different mate, right?  But we never dwell on that.  We live our lives in the groups we have – in our cities, our countries, even though we didn’t choose them.  Know what I mean?  We like to tell ourselves it’s love, that we’re choosing our own partners.  But in reality, we’re just playing the cards we’ve been dealt.”
‘Death in the Family’, p.17

This idea of marriage as something trivial, random even, is more than a little disturbing.

Within marriages, there are, of course, other issues, and another idea running through the stories is the problems the narrator and his wife are facing in trying to have a child.  Even if the narrator seems calm about it all, it’s easy to see the stress this causes, with much remaining unsaid, and as much as he tries to gloss over the issue, little things tell us it’s an issue that’s pushing them apart.

All three of the stories are excellent, and Boyd has done great work on the English side, bringing us smooth, unadorned writing that’s somehow rather creepy.  It has to be said, though, that if you’re the kind of reader that buys their fiction by the pound, this may not be the book for you.  When you take away the title and blank pages, I calculate that the three stories together run to 65 pages of text!  That’s well under an hour’s reading for me, so I’m glad I got my copy from the library (and that I managed to hold onto it long enough to read it twice).

Nevertheless, Weasels in the Attic is an excellent set of linked stories, a genre I particularly enjoy.  Oyamada’s tales are an exploration of certain aspects of marriage and relationships, and a thought-provoking look at domestic life.  All in all, it’s made for a nice first step on my #JanuaryInJapan adventure, and that’s just the start – watch out for much more J-Lit on the blog in the weeks to come 🙂