THE HOLE

The narrator of this taut, surreal novel finds herself stranded in a strange rural landscape.

As Oyamada’s novel begins, a married couple has decided to move to a rural area because narrator Asa’s husband has been transferred there. His new office is near where his parents live, and they offer the couple the newly vacant house they own next door to their own. It’s an appealing offer, and Oyamada uses the couple’s economic anxieties as a way to keep the book grounded. Before the move, Asa and a friend discuss the specifics of the cost of getting a manicure, and she muses on the difference in compensation between permanent and temporary employees at her workplace. After the move, the couple has only one car, leaving Asa stranded when her husband goes to work: “Except for rush hour, the bus came only once every sixty minutes, and it was a forty-minute ride to the train.” One day, her mother-in-law asks Asa to run an errand for her—a simple task, involving a visit to a nearby 7-Eleven. But on the walk there, Asa encounters a bizarre mammal, which she compares to a raccoon, a weasel, and a dog. “Maybe it had hooves,” she adds. She follows it, then falls into a hole, where she meets a woman who refers to her as “the bride.” Throughout, Oyamada balances the surreal with the quotidian. Asa meets her husband’s long-lost brother, who she never knew existed and who's perennially shadowed by a group of bug-obsessed children who call him Sensei. Throughout the novel, Oyamada memorably conveys Asa’s dislocation. The prose frequently transforms everyday scenes into something menacing, too: “Deep in the grass, I caught glimpses of black shapes, moving quietly. It was the heads of children.”

Familial awkwardness and bizarre imagery take this story of unrest and disquiet to memorable places.