Weasels in the Attic: Hiroko Oyamada

Product Information

In three interconnected short stories, Oyamada explores the topics of motherhood and gender roles in domestic settings. From the acclaimed author of The Hole and The Factory, a thrilling and mysterious novel that explores fertility, masculinity, and marriage in contemporary Japan Weasels in the Attic Fiction by Hiroko Oyamada BOOK REVIEW: VERA WONG’S UNSOLICITED ADVICE FOR MURDERERS (2023) BY JESSE SUTANTO – A WHOLESOME INVESTIGATION OF THE UNCONVENTIONAL

Book Review: Weasels in The Attic – Hiroko Oyamada

These are three stories involving more or less the same cast of characters. The stories evolve in that in the first story we meet an old friend of the narrator and his new wife. In the second story another friend has also married. In the third we meet the second friend and his wife, plus the new addition to the family. Oyamada’s narratives seem to focus on banalities and social convention as in the shared meals featured in each episode. But then there are sudden ruptures as in a scene recalled by the narrator’s wife, an old, macabre method for ridding houses of weasels which incidentally reinforces the conceptual gap between maternal and paternal roles. Another arresting scene involves the narrator’s nightmare about a primitive bony tongue fish, bringing to the fore the narrator’s ambivalent feelings about the prospect of becoming a father. Oyamada’s style is direct yet elliptical, there are some stirring descriptive passages and imagery, but there’s also a sense that the narratives are not quite fully formed, an impression that’s possibly deliberate, reflecting the narrator’s inability to confront or fully comprehend the feelings stirred by his interactions. Oyamada’s fragmented approach to contemplating the nature of heterosexual families, fatherhood and lifestyle choices through her conflicted narrator is interesting, novel and engaging. But the work as a whole could also seem unnecessarily vague and insubstantial. Translated by David Boyd.

So if you have a lake or personal body of water on your property, you can potentially expect a burrow that tunnels underground through your home. Will A Weasel Kill A Cat? The book consists of three linked stories, featuring, more or less, the same set of characters and more or less, the same themes. Despite his desire for a child, the narrator later seems surprised to see how fatherhood has changed his friend. When Yoko says that Saiki “does everything from morning to evening” except feed the baby, the narrator exclaims, “Wait, so he changes her diapers?” “The Saiki I knew wasn’t the type who voluntarily took care of any child—even his own. I was pretty sure he didn’t like kids,” he comments, possibly jealous, given that unlike Saiki he does like children and, when he was younger, helped take care of his sisters’ children, playing with them and singing them lullabies. The narrator then laughs when Saiki, speaking to his baby daughter, refers to himself as “dada.” The narrator does not say whether his surprise is that any man should claim such a name for himself or that Saiki in particular is claiming this name. As for Saiki, he views the name practically: “It’s too hard for her to say anything else. I’m going to be ‘dada’ until she can actually talk.” One of Oyamada’s skills is that while, on the face of it, things seem straightforward, she puts in many little episodes that are more disturbing. Why and how did Urabe die and why did he die seemingly alone? There is the issue of the removal technique of the weasels by the narrator’s wife’s family, the eating of the fish food and the associated story,the role of the slightly odd neighbour of Saiki and Yoko and the behaviour of the fish, particularly the jumping bonytongue. All give us a sense that things are not quite as they should be Over dinner at Saiki’s house, a grotesquely rich boar stew, the narrator’s wife recalls that during her childhood, her parents also had a weasel problem. The infestation got so bad that a putrid liquid began dripping from the attic. She too developed a rash, all over her body. Her father and grandfather set a trap and soon caught one—an adult female. “Great,” announced her grandmother. “We got one of the parents.” But the weasel didn’t look like an adult. It was very cute: covered in golden fur, with little ears, a flat snout, and tiny legs that wriggled about in the cage. She wanted to keep it as a pet.

Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada | New Directions

The third story is more or less the same scenario, only a bit later. Yoko, Saiki’s wife, has had a baby, with the help of the narrator’s wife. This time we see that Saiki has once again shown an interest in fish and now has several fish tanks with discus fish and one with the rare bonytongue. As it is snowing, the narrator and his wife have to spend the night and they sleep in the room with the fish tanks. Bonytongues can jump three feet. Urabe’s detached view of family relationships appears not to be merely philosophical. He displays no affection for either his baby or his wife, who scrambles to get food to serve him and his guests. Neither the narrator nor Saiki know what to make of his death only six months later, or why his wife—to whom he may not actually have been married—does not come to his funeral. Nor does she even seem to have been living with him at the time of his death; most of his fish died because, as Saiki tells the narrator, “Urabe was dead for a few days before anyone knew anything.” We see this imbalance of gender present again in the second story. What initially appears to be a simple tale about Saiki dealing with a weasel-infested attic soon evolves into a critique of men’s passivity, as compared to women’s dynamism. Every trap Saiki sets for the weasels only catches the babies, which he then takes out to the mountains. The weasels seem to have foiled Saiki’s efforts to get rid of them, they keep breeding (again bringing up ideas about fertility) and will not leave his attic. Saiki has his whole life in the countryside disrupted by these tiny animals that have made a home in his attic. While he eventually decides to give up and co-exist unhappily with the weasels, an interesting solution is offered by our unnamed narrator’s wife, who is also not given a name. Rather than being known or referred to as a friend as the unnamed narrator is, his wife is simply referred to as “wife”. Thus, her personhood is only asserted by her relationship with her husband. Again, this reinforces the collections critique of how women are treated in Japanese society, at once required to do all the housework and childrearing yet not allowed to have their own interests or personalities, or in this case a name.History China Translation India Japan Hong Kong Biography Short stories Memoir Current affairs Historical fiction Korea Travel-writing South Asia Immigration Geopolitics Southeast Asia Russia WW2 Middle East Culture Central Asia Economics International relations Society Singapore Art Politics Japanese Iran Literary history Philippines Religion Turkey SE Asia Business Photography Colonialism Indonesia Taiwan Crime Chinese Essays Illustrated Islam Recent articles Meanwhile, all around the narrator, animals propagate. There are the weasels that seemingly cannot be exterminated from Saiki’s home—“We’re going to live out the rest of our days among the weasels, way out here in the middle of nowhere,” he complains to the narrator—and the one time the narrator visits Urabe, he sees that his living room is lined with tanks filled with fish, many of them discus, which Urabe breeds. In the second story, The Narrator and his wife visit Saiki who also has a new wife called Yoko and has moved to the country. They eat local rural food and discuss how to remove the weasels in the attic which are causing problems for Yoko and Saiki.