The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd (New Directions) ~Ernie Hoyt

Hiroko Oyamada is a Japanese writer from Hiroshima. After graduating from university, she worked in a factory that manufactured cars. Her experience there would lead her to write her first novel, 工場 (Kojo) which would also be first book to be translated into English as Factory.

The Hole is her second book to be published in English. It was originally published in the Japanese language as 穴 (Ana) which means “hole” in Japanese. It was published in 2014 by Shinchosha. It won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award, in 2013. 

The story is about a woman named Asa, short for Asahi, who moves to the countryside due to her husband’s job transfer. She also narrates the story. They would move to her husband’s home town and would be living in the house next door to her husband’s mother. A house which his parents own.

Asa was having a hard time picturing the second house. She thought to herself, “it was strange how I couldn’t seem to picture this house - how big it was, what color it was, what the yard was like”. She told herself, ‘my inability to conjure any memory of the place meant it couldn’t have been remarkably large or small”. Then again, she couldn’t even recall what her husband’s house was like. 

The husband, whose name is never mentioned in the book, says that will be able to stay at the house rent-free. Asa has no qualms about quitting her job and hopes she will be able to find a new one close to their new home. Her mother-in-law, Tomiko, tells 

One day as Asa was doing an errand for her mother-in-law, she spotted a big black animal. However, she couldn’t make out what kind of animal it was. She knew it wasn’t a weasel and it wasn’t a raccoon. It has “wide shoulders, slender and muscular thighs, but from the knees down, its legs were as thin as sticks”. It didn’t seem dangerous, so Asa decided to follow it.

That’s when she falls into a hole. The hole was about four to five feet deep. As Asa tried to get out of the hole, she then realized how narrow it was. She felt the hole was “exactly my size - a trap made for just me”. This would be the beginning of her surreal encounters with other people in the town. 

She first meets one of her neighbors. A woman named Sera. Sera already knows who Asa is but only refers to her as “the bride”. It was Sera who helped Asa out of the hole. In fact, many people in town referred to Asa as “the bride”.

This would be the beginning of a sequence of surreal incidents which would take place in Asa’s life. She can’t be sure if what she sees is real or if she’s hallucinating. Did she hallucinate the black animal? Why has her husband never mentioned that he had a brother? A person she would meet while out wandering in the field full of holes. 

Is Asa the “Alice in Wonderland” in her new surroundings? Is her husband’s brother the “rabbit” she follows down the hole? The book even makes a reference to the Lewis Carroll novel. The story is quirky and irrelevant while also being serious and mysterious. Oyamada makes the reader feel like Asa herself, is what we’re reading true or is it a fantasy of some sort? If you, as the reader, will be puzzled.