The Hole

At first, when looking at the new fiction in hardback at the Abergavenny branch of Waterstones last month, nothing had caught my eye. Then I thought to look closer and see if any of the shorter & thinner books nestling between the stouter, more eye-catching ones might be of interest. No fewer than four of those seemed appealing and I ended up buying two of them: Shy by Max Porter (122pp); and, shown above, The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada (92pp). I liked the bold & simple cover design of the latter, and the fact that its author had also written another book called Weasels in the Attic. Those two things, and a mildly intriguing blurb, were all it took to persuade me to part with the £12.99 asking price. In another mood on another day I may well have just put the book back on the shelf.

The story concerns Asa, a young woman, who moves with her husband from an expensive city apartment (and from a stressful, unrewarding job) to live rent-free in the countryside next door to her in-laws. Despite the superficial changes for the better in her circumstances, she feels ill-at-ease in her new surroundings, and in the oppressively hot summer that ensues she has a variety of strange encounters and experiences. It’s not spelled out as to whether these are delusions, or supernatural phenomena; nor if they are to be taken at face value or construed as metaphors. It’s very likely that some of the weirdness is a commentary on the social norms and conventional expectations weighing down on our protagonist, but any neat & tidy explanation for it all eluded me.

It’s a book where I felt that a few pages of end-notes from the translator may have been helpful. Several Japanese terms in the text were unfamiliar to me. One I had heard of (‘hikikomori’) did get a brief gloss. More than once I wondered if I were missing some or other allusion as a result of my ignorance. Aside from that quibble, I thought David Boyd’s translation into American-accented English came across well. On balance, I enjoyed this odd and confusing little book.