After a long history of marginalization, unconventional narratives of gender, parenthood, and conception are coming to the forefront, representing a pivotal step forward as our conversations around these foundational matters continue to be rife with tumult, tensions, and inquiries. In this month’s Book Club selection, Weasels in the Attic, award-winning Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada confronts the murky subject of family and childbearing with her signature command of the strange, weaving a narrative that encapsulates the surreality of these societal pressures. In her questioning of gender stereotypes and heteronormativity, Oyamada’s novella is a fascinating, disarming path through the psychology of not-yet parents, casting a dark suspicion onto the bright facade of nuclear familyhood.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.
Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd, New Directions, 2022
Though Japan is famed for horror films of unsparing gore, I feel that the nation’s best stories of the uncanny are found in quieter narratives. Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic, translated by David Boyd, joins other globally famous Japanese authors like Yoko Tawada, Yukiko Motoya, Sayaka Murata in delivering a chill, caused not so much by overt implications of a world gone sideways than by the uneasy feeling that something is deeply wrong—something you can’t quite put your finger on.
Weasels in the Attic, Oyamada’s third volume from New Directions, also shares with Tawada, Motoya, and Murata a preoccupation with fertility and childlessness, two physio-sociological conditions gripping contemporary Japanese society as the population continues to shrink. While some politicians have acknowledged that reforms in work life and childcare are necessary to encourage population growth, blame is still often laid at the feet of women who supposedly prioritize career over family. In Weasels, however, the women of the story seem desperate to have children, while men are the ones expressing reservations or shock at the thought of starting a family. The narrator and his wife haven’t yet gotten pregnant, and she is increasingly frantic for a child while his interest is lukewarm at best. “I always tell her it’s her call,” the narrator explains to his male friends. “Then she comes back with all these pamphlets and websites . . . It’s the same thing every night. Then she asks me: ‘On a scale of one to ten, how badly do you want kids?’” The narrator’s qualms are further hampered by his possible impotency, something he refuses to investigate even when his wife hands him a sample cup point blank.
During a visit to friend-of-a-friend Urabe, the narrator holds Urabe’s newborn daughter and narrates her appearance: “The baby’s face was small and red. Her shut eyes looked like knife slits. I could feel her warmth and dampness through the layers of cloth.” In such a small child, there are already hints of the uncanny, of something lurking in the humid, murky depths. The moment the narrator relinquishes the baby to her mother, he becomes preoccupied with Urabe’s extensive exotic fish collection. Tanks fill Urabe’s home, and he and his wife breed the fish selectively, carefully—yet at the same time, unpredictably. “We still don’t fully understand the relationship between genotype and phenotype,” Urabe’s wife tells the narrator. “We haven’t been able to confirm which genes lead to which patterns. He says that’s why we need to experiment with different pairings—to see which combinations they produce.” In the course of rereading (which I would highly recommend with this text), this sentence rings differently, terrifyingly. Who precisely is experimenting with whom? And to what end? Is it Urabe experimenting with fish worth hundreds of dollars, or is it his uncanny wife—or more accurately, the mother of his child—experimenting with potential mates? After all, as we soon learn, she might possibly be the same girl he discovered in his storeroom dressed in nothing but underwear and a slip, eating bags of dried fish food. The reader, however, is never given clear confirmation of this fact; the shadowy depths of Weasels refuse any straightforward details.
Boyd’s cunning translation substantiates the sense of the uncanny by filling in cultural information that may be otherwise missing for Anglo readers. It’s not that Boyd sprinkles in glosses or footnotes, but rather that his translation choices reflect the bizarre atmosphere of the story in ways that generate a certain tone, even for readers who lack context. In the English language, weasels are often associated with sneakiness, but not necessarily with magic or the supernatural. In Japan, however, like foxes and raccoon dogs, weasels are often portrayed as shapeshifting tricksters, and their cries also purportedly portend misfortune. The implication in Weasels—though never outrightly stated—is that the women themselves are weasel shapeshifters, hungry for children at any cost. Their eyes glow, they don’t know how to cook, their appetites veer to the bizarre. When the narrator first meets his friend Saiki’s new wife Yoko, he comments on how oddly both his own wife and this woman appear in the moment:
Maybe I was imagining things, but it looked like my wife was adjusting her posture. Rolling back her right shoulder, then the left, straightening out to her full height. The woman who appeared from the kitchen had bushy eyebrows, with her knees hidden by a long skirt and her shoulders hunched inside a turtleneck sweater. Her swollen arms were covered.
Boyd never adds a note about weasel shapeshifters, but many of his other translation choices nod toward concepts of the supernatural. For example, when the friend Saiki moves to the countryside after his marriage, he mentions that he is neighbors with a “hag.” The Japanese term, babā, is a derogatory term for an old woman. “Old lady,” “old bat,” or “old bag” would all be equally valid translation choices, but by utilizing the term “hag,” Boyd subtly connects her character to Anglo notions of witchcraft and magic, adding that necessary touch of eerie folklore. In another section, he translates the idiom itachi gokko—weasel tag, meaning a futile back-and-forth—as “toys in the attic.” He then turns that phrase even further by punning it into the eponymous “weasels in the attic” and linking idiomatic madness to weasel madness.
This carefully maintained tone means that by the time Saiki has welcomed his first child, readers are in a state of heightened attention, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Oyamada’s narrative seems to drive toward the kind of denouement one would expect in The Ring or The Grudge, trapping the narrator and his wife at Saiki’s by snowstorm. But instead of culminating in some kind of ghostly manifestation or supernatural reveal, the tension of the story’s thread does not snap; it remains taut and coiled, hinting but never giving.
I glanced at my wife, but she was looking at the baby. And it was like she couldn’t even hear me. She was still moving her lips, but making no sound. Yukiko . . . look at all the snow, my little Yukiko. [. . .] Saiki whispered something to Yoko, and she nodded a few times. My wife kept her eyes on the baby in Saiki’s arms, moving her lips like before. I poured some hot water into my tea cup and drank it. White steam rose from the cup in wild swirls. When I sat down at the table, the three of them and the baby looked like a bizarre Holy Family.
When the narrator discovers that, just like Urabe before him, Saiki has started keeping exotic fish, the novella comes full circle. A bonytongue (serendipitously named in the English) lurks in a tank, ready to devour other creatures alive. Flashes of red glint from the tanks. A dank, humid atmosphere fills the pages. The narrator’s wife never comes to bed. We are handed fragmentary pieces, like crumbs of fish food scattered over the lid of the tank, but ultimately, Oyamada asks us to reassemble the final picture—with a few helping hints from Boyd’s translation. There is something very wrong in the pages of Weasels in the Attic, but ultimately it lurks in between the lines, awaiting a reader to condemn the narrator to his fate.
Laurel Taylor is a translator and Ph.D. candidate in Japanese and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her writing and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Monkey, the Asia Literary Review, Mentor & Muse, and more.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: