Staff Pick
How can the highs and lows of everyday life cause such an unerving vibe? Oyamada does it again. All killer, no filler. Recommended By Nick K., Powells.com
Hiroko Oyamada is my new hero! She consistently writes the most wonderful, strange fiction (The Factory, The Hole) and it's so short and bite-sized, usually about 80 pages. How she fits all that she's exploring into such a small package, I don't understand. Weasels in the Attic consists of three deeply linked stories that share most of their characters and are perhaps separated in time by six months. Each story has its own fascinating vibe, but they add up to the hilarious, disturbing eco-horror she's known for, plus something new: maternal horror across species lines. There were a number of laugh-out-loud moments, my favorite being, "Once the weasels show up, you're done for." Recommended By Jennifer K., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
In three interconnected scenes, Hiroko Oyamada revisits the same set of characters at different junctures in their lives. In the back room of a pet store full of rare and exotic fish, old friends discuss dried shrimp and a strange new relationship. A couple who recently moved into a rustic home in the mountains discovers an unsettling solution to their weasel infestation. And a dinner party during a blizzard leads to a night in a room filled with aquariums and unpleasant dreams. Like Oyamada's previous novels, Weasels in the Attic sets its sights on the overlooked aspects of contemporary Japanese society, and does so with a surreal sensibility that is entirely her own.
Review
"Nothing feels fixed; everything in the book might be a hallucination." — Parul Seghal, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Surreal and mesmerizing." — Hilary Leichter, The New York Times
Review
"Horrific and scary, while at the same time affirming and beautiful." — New Republic
About the Author
Born in Hiroshima in 1983, Hiroko Oyamada won the Shincho Prize for New Writers for The Factory, which was drawn from her experiences working as a temp for an automaker's subsidiary. Her novel The Hole won Akutagawa Prize.
David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated stories by Genichiro Takahashi, Masatsugu Ono and Toh EnJoe, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa's Slow Boat won the 2017/2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. With Sam Bett, he is cotranslating the novels of Mieko Kawakami.