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Hiroko Oyamada (author), David Boyd (translator), The Hole, New Directions Publishing, 2020. 112 pgs.
As a teenager curious to know more about my father, I once asked him about his experiences with psychedelics in the 1960s. By my age, he told me, he had experimented with various substances, including LSD—a relationship cut short after a “bad trip.” Hearing these words, I immediately pictured the stereotypical melting walls and demonic visions. What he described instead was reality itself, ever so slightly off-kilter. It was as if the world around him were hanging by the thinnest of threads, ready to snap at any moment. This tenuous-at-best hold on everything he knew to be true frightened him so deeply that he never touched a hallucinogen again. After reading The Hole, I have a sense of what he felt.
Hiroko Oyamada’s understatedly powerful novella is a slow-motion punch to the gut of our expectations for what constitutes a “good life.” What begins as a mere relocation morphs into a nightmarish caricature of itself. Our narrator is Asahi (“Asa”) Matsuura, who gives up a job to accommodate her husband Muneaki’s transfer to the countryside. This move lands them in Muneaki’s hometown, where his mother happily offers them the house next door. Such is our first hairline crack in the façade, as Asa has no memory of her mother-in-law ever having owned another property—adjacent or otherwise. When questioning these discrepancies, she is met with dismissal and affirmational platitudes. In one such interaction, a co-worker expresses jealousy over Asa “living the dream” of staying home all day to wile away the hours in blissful domesticity. And yet, as the novelty of rural life wears thin before the first 24 hours have even passed, she thinks to herself: “People say housewives get free room and board and even time to nap, but the truth is napping was the most economical way to make it through the day.” From this, one might think that stillness and emptiness are to blame for her unease, but it is quite the opposite. Of the cicadas, she notes: “Their cries were so close that I wondered if they were coming from inside me.” And despite not seeing a single soul on the streets, whenever she has an errand to run, she is met with a sea of people. During one frustrating episode, she agrees to take care of a deposit for her mother-in-law but must navigate an entire group of children under the watch of a man they call “Sensei” just to reach the ATM.
Because the quotidian seems to take far longer than it should, Asa seeks solace in exploring her new surroundings—an escape that proves to be short-lived. While navigating the oppressive heat, she encounters a large black mammal, which she follows into the titular hole that “felt as though it was exactly my size—a trap made just for me.” Thus, it does not take us long to see that definitions are fluid in Oyamada’s world, as when a neighbour whom Asa was told to steer clear of offers to help her out and addresses her as “the bride.” The use of such labels does not configure this story as one of archetypes, however. Neither is it one of individuals, but rather of human beings who cannot quite colour within the lines (“How did everyone know so much about me,” Asa wonders, “when I knew nothing about them?”). Whether it is her husband’s grandfather, who cannot seem to communicate or do much of anything even as he tends to the family garden day in and day out, or the aforementioned Sensei, no one stays in their proverbial lane. The latter, who later introduces himself as her husband’s older brother, occupies much of the book’s second half. A self-professed shut-in, he claims to have lived in a nearby shack for the past twenty years out of principle, and has no compunctions expounding at great length on his personal protest, the animal Asa encountered (for which his makeshift trap serves as a temporary form of capture at best), and her incredulity over his claims.
He is also the only one willing to offer her the hard truths others are too polite to voice. When she mentions falling into the hole, for instance, he chastises her for playing the part of an Alice in Wonderland aspirant, adding, “Yours is no grand adventure.” Uncertain how to respond to his increasingly inappropriate ramblings, Asa instead turns her gaze to the children on summer holiday, playing by and in the river. She observes: “I could see violence, hear consolations. Reconciliation. Pain and anger dissolving in a deafening chorus of rock, paper, scissors.” This violence is more than a by-product of youth—it is a force that shreds her sense of time. What unfolds from there is no more or less eventful, yet it becomes all the more poignant as it plays out along the ever-shifting dotted lines of self-realisation.
In addition to her disturbing flourishes—which, if anything, are hyperreal rather than surreal—Oyamada moves me with her deft subversion of literary tropes. Most strikingly, she pays homage to a perennial theme in Japanese women’s fiction: that of dislocation to unfamiliar places, often at the behest of men. This is central to works such as Maki Kashimada’s The Female Novelist, Yōko Tawada’s Missing Heels, Nanami Kamon’s A Piece of Butterfly’s Wing, Kyoko Nakajima’s The Little House, and Yōko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor, among others. While novels by their male counterparts tend to cast the countryside as a refuge—see, for instance, Natsume Sōseki’s The Three-Cornered World or Hiro Arikawa’s The Travelling Cat Chronicles—Oyamada portrays it as something far more insidious.
Although the narrative unravels at precisely the moment normalcy appears within reach, I hesitate to classify it as fantasy. Just as the brother-in-law exists between states of mind, Asa appears unwilling to make definitive claims about anything at all—as though articulation might serve as a kind of entrapment. There is a particularly sobering moment of self-reflection early on, as she muses about her husband: “There was a time when I would have wanted to know what he was up to, but not anymore. As long as he wasn’t doing anything sexual or criminal, there was no need for me to get involved.” Like the elusive creature that preoccupies her, her mind prefers to burrow, to come and go of its own accord, permitting contact only when the mood allows. Her refusal to commit to any single version of reality becomes a kind of protective film around her sanity—a reminder that much of what we say and do is disquieting enough without being named or framed. We wade daily, after all, through the murky questions of balance.
How to cite: Grillo, Tyran. “Unanswered Questions of Balance: Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 13 Jul. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/07/13/hole.
Tyran Grillo holds a PhD in Japanese Literature from Cornell University and is an avid reader, translator, music critic, and photographer. His latest book, Fuzzy Traumas: Animals and Errors in Contemporary Japanese Literature (2024, Cornell East Asia Series), explores complex interspecies relationships through a posthumanist lens. Although he has left academia to pursue a full-time career as a professional editor, he remains deeply engaged with his fields of interest through lived experience and creative practice. [All contributions by Tyran Grillo.]
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