📁 RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
📁 RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS
Click HERE to read all entries in Cha on Hiroko Oyamada.
Hiroko Oyamada (author), David Boyd (translator), The Hole, New Directions Publishing, 2020. 112 pgs.
Hiroko Oyamada’s second novella The Hole, originally published in 2014, swiftly won acclaim and the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, and it’s easy to see why. It is a quick, easy, and enjoyable read; in its English translation—by David Boyd, assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte—it amounts to only 96 pages in print. Yet between its covers lies an impressively multilayered story, whose unsettling imagery and atmosphere linger in the mind long after the reader has reached the final sentence.
Based on the title and the blurb that accompanies the English translation, it’s tempting to think this book is largely inspired by Lewis Carroll’s The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, perhaps adapted to a more mature setting. Yet while it does allude to the famous Alice’s predicament more than once, portal fantasy this novella is not, at least not in the traditional acceptance of this subgenre. Nor is it fantasy, exactly.
The narrative, written in first person, follows Asa—short for Asahi—as she quits her city job to follow her husband, who has received a promotion that requires them to move to the countryside, close to his family. We thus see Asa moving into a house right next door to her in-laws, which is also, as it happens, owned by her in-laws, in a sleepy little provincial town that manages to appear, at the same time, both sparsely populated and claustrophobic.
In her new town, Asa is jobless and unmotivated to find a place of work, as she struggles to adjust to the town’s atmosphere or decide what she wants her life to look like. Having moved there at the beginning of summer, she is haunted and oppressed by the seemingly relentless song of invisible cicadas, whose buzz follows her everywhere she goes, yet which otherwise leave no evidence of their existence. With her husband mostly away from home, working long hours, Asa’s interactions are mostly limited to her mother-in-law, a quietly dominant figure, and her husband’s parental grandfather, who is stuck in a loop watering the plants in the garden, the only action that Asa ever sees him perform.
The grandfather character, indeed, gives the impression of a glitch in the system, hugely contributing to the feeling that the provincial town is a sort of matrix where an error has found its way into the code. Quiet and eerie, “Grandpa”, as he’s referred to by the other characters, performs the same automatic actions over and over again, and never speaks, only smiles in reply to anything Asa might have to say to him. Like other episodic characters that appear in the novella, “Grandpa”, at best robotic in demeanour, recalls the “uncanny valley phenomenon”—very aptly, a concept coined by another Japanese great, Masahiro Mori, best known for his work in robotics and automation.
In what is now a seminal paper, originally published in 1970, Mori stated that “in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear like a human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny valley.” He hypothesised that when we encounter a humanlike creature that falls just short of fully emulating a real human individual, our tendency to feel affection for it, as we might for a doll, soon dissipates and is replaced by a feeling of uneasiness—precisely the kind of feeling that “Grandpa” evokes in Asa and, by extension, the reader.
“When the speed is cut in half in an attempt to make the robot bring up a smile more slowly, instead of looking happy, its expression turns creepy,” Mori wrote. Grandpa’s smile is a robot’s smile, devoid of real feeling: “Just when I thought he couldn’t grin any wider, he did. He couldn’t hear a word I said. Beneath his giant hat, his teeth were shining. His eyes and nose were hidden in shadow. Only his mouth—a rigid smile—was clear to me. It didn’t even look like a smile to me anymore, but I had to believe that it was.”
It is not just “Grandpa”, but the entire town that feels uncanny—that is, both familiar and unfamiliar, or rather, defamiliarised, at the same time. Even the cicadas sound “like a bunch of machines, a spray of emotionless noise”. This is what Oyamada excels at in The Hole: even as she lays out ostensibly mundane spaces and events, she manages to depict them in a subtly unsettling light that emphasises the predicament that Asa finds herself in. Alone, friendless, and jobless in the remote countryside, she feels the pressure to fit a societal mould that has been prescribed to women like her for generations. Neighbours refer to her exclusively as “the bride”, since that is the position she occupies in her husband’s family and in their community.
By comparison, Asa’s single (and singular) adventure—which lends the book its title—is not nearly as eerie, though it is the defining experience that prompts Asa to scrutinise her own context more closely. One day, as she is out running an errand for her mother-in-law, Asa notices an unusual “big black animal” that she cannot identify. She feels compelled to follow it, and in doing so, ends up falling into a hole. Far from being the obvious tunnel-gateway into another world that the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland provides, this hole feels more like a trap or a grave than anything else. The character-narrator indicates as much: “The hole felt as though it was exactly my size—a trap made just for me.” Having fallen into this hole, unable to dig her way out, or climb up on her own again, Asa also finds herself at the mercy of the mysterious local invertebrates, which make short work of her vulnerable situation. Soon, she finds that “[n]ear the top of my ring finger was a small red beetle, biting into me”. Both of these images—the grave-like hole that seems to have been dug especially for her, the red beetle biting into her ring finger—are significant. They seem to reflect Asa’s own position in society: trapped, perhaps, in her marriage, and in this small town, unemployed, where she is bound to be known only through her relationship to the family that she married into. To give any more details about the plot and characters of this novella would be to offer unnecessary spoilers, but I will say this much: without explicitly suggesting that Asa is either happy or unhappy about her predicament, the narrative does a great job of reflecting the dilemmas that she comes up against—should she continue to be a stay-at-home wife, should she find work, what social identity will she or should she take on?—and the discomfort of being an outsider in a small town where everybody knows everybody.
Haunted by mysterious animals only ever glimpsed from the corner of the eye, ghostly children, and striking episodic characters, The Hole manages to achieve a splendid sense of eeriness without resorting to complex, unnecessary gimmicks, and it is a poignant reflection on the subtle web of societal pressures and expectations that have entrapped women—and men—for generations.
As an aside, I also appreciated the well-placed Easter eggs that Oyamada includes in this book, such as the nod to her previous novella, The Factory, which she astutely references in the narrative, creating a sense that these two novellas are interconnected. “On the opposite bank, I could see the grey chimney of what looked like some kind of factory,” Asa’s character notes at one point, as she surveys the town’s surroundings. Through this reference, Oyamada weaves a net connecting these two works, perhaps suggesting that they form part of the same conceptual universe—and they certainly do, at least from a thematic point of view.
I admit I had not read anything by Oyamada before I picked up this novella, even though her works had been on my radar for a while. Yet, after reading The Hole, I was so hooked, so intrigued by her style and by her character-psychology-building skills, that I went on to read The Factory and Weasels in the Attic, too, in quick succession—both of these books are available in English translation (also by David Boyd). And while these two works each deserve their own dedicated reviews, suffice it to say that I was not disappointed.
To come back to the subject of the current review: if you enjoy the weird, the eerie, and the uncanny as a means of delivering subtle social commentary, of reflecting on the troubling aspects of our societies, then The Hole is the novella for you.
How to cite: Cohut, Maria. “Trapped in The Uncanny Valley: Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 5 Jun. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/06/05/the-hole.
Maria Cohut is a writer, journalist, and independent researcher living in Brighton, UK, with her collection of typewriters and her colony of Giant African Land Snails. She has a special interest in the Gothic, the weird, cross-genre literature, and topics surrounding themes of migration, identity, defamiliarisation and alienation. Her creative writing has appeared online and in print at Cephalopress, Flights, The Hyacinth Review, and The Hellebore, among others. Her first poetry pamphlet, Spatter Pattern, out from back room poetry in 2023, addresses the issue of gender violence by reimagining detective fiction tropes. Maria occasionally blogs about things unusual, forgotten, and obscure at Encyclopaedia Vanitatum: a dictionary of spectral curiosities. She can be followed online on Instagram at @mariac_phd. [All contributions by Maria Cohut.]
Cha 