The Hole

Cover of the UK edition of 'The Hole' by Hiroko Oyamada.

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.