The Hole [Paperback]

Asas husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his familys home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: she makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time.Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, As Oyamadas slim, beguiling novel unfolds, the eerie atmospherics steadily ascend from unease to maximal uncanny... It takes a writer of great talent to mold the banality of the everyday into the stuff of art, and to build an entire world around a metaphor other writers might quickly deploy and cast aside, but Oyamada is in complete control of her talent.? Oyamadas atmospheric literary thriller puts a fresh, gripping spin on the bored housewife set-up. Oyamada's slender novel belies a multi-layered, complex examination of contemporary disconnect and isolation so chillingly affecting that the surreal quickly turns convincingly plausible, and then all too insistently real. Oyamadas greatest strength lies in keeping readers feeling discomfited... [The] whole narrative shudders not at mysterious creatures or secret family members but at the banality of life. Surreal and mesmerizing. The desire to escape the doldrums of late summer, for both the isolated Asa and the (likely lockdown-weary) reader, is telling of the current moments general malaise. Horrific and scary, while at the same time affirming and beautiful.