Weasels in the Attic: Hiroko Oyamada

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That’s impossible, Saiki explains. His house, in a remote countryside, is old and riddled with gaps and crevices. “When you think about it,” writes Oyamada, “Japanese homes are full of holes.” But for some reason the weasels ignore Saiki’s neighbors. All three stories share a single, unnamed narrator, who interacts with his friend Saiki at three different dinners. In the first story, this narrator goes with Saiki to meet his wealthy pet shop owner friend, Urabe. They converge upon a compact sitting room lined with aquariums. Urabe, we discover, is adept at fish breeding, a practice that is soon put in conversation with ideas about human fertility and eugenics as the unnamed narrator and his wife continuously try for a child, yet never succeed. These fish appear throughout the three stories, Urabe tries to experiment with them to create different patterns on the “bonytongues” silvery scales through the use of different genetic pairings and Saiki eventually tries to breed the “bonytongues” himself.

Weasels in the Attic - Kindle edition by Oyamada, Hiroko

Now! When you include the length of their tail, they get even longer. Our western weasel friends have tails that can grow between 4 and 8 inches; that places the full length of the weasel at an above average length of 14 to 20 inches! There is also the social aspect that the young wives in the novel are doing all the domestic labor, from caring for the infants to preparing the food and drinks in each of these scenes. It is a critique of the inequality of domestic labor standards, which occurs even in households where the male partner is under the impression he is helping equally. In Dr. Kate Manne’s book Entitled she cites a US study (the novel is Japan, of course, not the US, but the ideas still apply) that ‘ working women took on around two-thirds of at-home child care responsibilities’, and of the 46% of male participants who said they were coequal parents, only 32% of their partners agreed. For the three men in Weasels, this is seen as normal and when the narrator feels bad the new, possibly underaged mother is doing all the labor, social stigma keeps him from speaking up about it. BOOK REVIEW: VERA WONG’S UNSOLICITED ADVICE FOR MURDERERS (2023) BY JESSE SUTANTO – A WHOLESOME INVESTIGATION OF THE UNCONVENTIONAL

The first point to make about this story is the role of women. Nearly all the women in this book have a role of wife and mother and not much else. The narrator’s wife works but we know little about her job. Even the female fish are there to breed and the female weasel to protect her family. Only Saiki’s neighbour, an elderly widow, has a slightly different role but she does follow traditional female roles in providing food and gossiping. If you are simply trying to keep them away from your property, set up an exclusion, and save yourself from their meat-eating desire. What Are Weasels Afraid Of?

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At first, it would be a game of cat-and-weasel, simply chasing and running around. Until the cat somehow corners the weasel. And with its life on the line, the weasel will do everything in its power to outsmart the cat. Joy Williams’s Harrow, a screwball fantasia of environmental collapse, is mercilessly contemptuous of the pieties of our age. The narrator and his wife visit the couple. It turns out that the narrator’s wife’s family had had the problem of weasels when she was a child and they had found a way, albeit cruel, to deal with the problem.From the acclaimed author of The Hole and The Factory, a thrilling and mysterious work that explores fertility, masculinity, and marriage in contemporary Japan. The stories in Hiroko Oyamada’s “Weasels in the Attic” all display the monotony of daily life before interrupting it with the strange intrusion of animals, either as a metaphor for a larger concept or to contrast against human behaviour. It is a major departure from her previous two previous, surrealist novels; while “The Hole” and “The Factory” focus on the unreal, “Weasels in the Attic” looks at the everyday lives of normal people. While there is some great social commentary going on, it is done rather sparsely and there isn’t as much surreal atmosphere as in Oyamada’s previous works. The small details, such as a nightmare of being crushed by a fish, add up to a successfully eerie atmosphere, but it never feels like enough and seems so washed out in too many other details. While I like the sparseness and the impressions built through juxtaposed scenes, this one never quite registered with me. This could be, perhaps, a casualty of just having read Elisa Shua Dusapin’s masterful Pachinko Parlour which pulls off this technique much more effectively. Hiroko Oyamada is a fabulous writer, this one just didn’t work for me but if you like sparse eerie tales, this might be for you. Behind all these meeting and strange happenings with tropical fish and weasel infestations there is the growing concern of the narrator that he might never become a father, would he be a good father and is it really what he wants. His desires and concerns are echoed in the odd situations and his dreams.