The 150th Akutagawa Prize, for the second half of 2013, went to Oyamada Hiroko 小山田浩子. She was born in 1983,
debuted in 2010. She won for the story “Ana 穴”
(Holes).
Unlike the last story, this isn’t being advertised as
“horror.” But I’d submit that it is
literary horror. There is a
supernatural/horrific aspect to this story.
It is (I’m going to spoil it) a ghost story. Told in a fairly creepy way. But for literary rather than visceral effect.
This and Tsume to me
represent, I think, a kind of triumph for the J-horror genre. Horror has of course always been with us, and
this isn’t the first time “literary” authors have dabbled in it; but I think you could argue that the present
generation of literary authors dabbling in it are specifically the product of
the horror boom of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, Oyamada’s and Fujino’s formative
years. Authors like Suzuki Kōji, mangaka
like Itō Junji, directors like Kurosawa Kiyoshi. I’d want to argue that, anyway (maybe I just
did).
The narrator is a woman whose husband is transferred suddenly
from the city where they’ve been living to a small town elsewhere in the same
region. It so happens to be the same
small town where he was born and raised, and it turns out that a rental house
his mother owns has just gone vacant, so his mother offers to let them live
there rent-free. So the narrator and her
husband decide, rather than have him commute long distance, to move there, even
though it will mean the narrator has to give up her job. Her job is just temp work, not something she
terribly identifies with, and even though their income will fall they’ll more
than make up for it by saving on rent.
They make the move, and the rest of the story plays out over
the course of the summer after the move.
They only have one car, and the husband drives it to work; the house isn’t within easy walking distance
of anything but a convenience store, so the narrator is somewhat trapped in the
house. She has no children, so there are
few demands on her time, and she’s reluctant to spend money when she’s not working
so she has little to do with her time.
Her mother-in-law lives next door, but she works, and so does her
father-in-law; her grandfather-in-law is
the only one in the neighboring house who she sees regularly, and she can’t
seem to communicate with him – deaf or senile or both.
So the narrator falls into a funk. Her enforced solitude and idleness begin to
take their toll. One hot day she’s
walking along the road to the convenience store, past a field with a stream
flowing through it, and she sees a strange black beast. She follows it into the weeds, trying to
figure out what it is, and then she falls into a hole. It’s only about neck-deep, but still it’s
deep enough and the dirt soft enough that she can’t climb out on her own. She’s saved by an older woman in a white
dress who introduces herself as her neighbor.
The beast – it’s never named, and she can’t identify it –
appears again one day when she’s at home.
She sees it in the yard, and then she sees it run into her in-laws’
house. But when she investigates, it’s
nowhere to be seen. But she finds
another hole, in an alley hidden by a concrete wall. And there she also runs into another
“neighbor” – in fact, he introduces himself as her husband’s older
brother. He says he lives in a shed on the
property. She wonders why her husband
never mentioned him, but he explains that he’s been a shut-in for decades, so
the family is keeping him a secret. They
talk for a long time – he even takes her to see the beast’s lair, the hole by
the riverbed. While there she sees a
bunch of children playing happily by the river.
The last encounter with the mysterious brother-in-law is by
night: she sees her grandfather-in-law
walking out of the yard and into the street.
She runs out to try to catch him, and finds the brother-in-law aiding
her. She brings the father-in-law
back. The last scene is the
father-in-law’s funeral – presumably his nighttime wandering made him sick. At the funeral the narrator notices the
brother-in-law is missing, so she goes out to the outbuilding – it’s full of
junk that hasn’t been touched in years, dust and insects. Nobody lives there. He was a ghost.
This has the makings of an entertaining, if run-of-the-mill,
ghost story. The author presents it in
such a way, though, that it’s obviously meant to have deeper resonances. Some of these are easy to identify.
You’ll notice that I don’t name anybody. Most of the characters in the story are
conspicuously left unnamed. The narrator
refers to her family members by their relationship to her: “my husband,” “my mother-in-law,” etc. And when she moves into the rental house she
finds herself referred to by everybody as “the bride,” even though they’ve been
married for many years. None of this is
particularly unusual in Japanese, but Oyamada is putting particular emphasis on
it here, and the “bride” business in particular, to make the countryside
setting suggestive of traditional family roles.
In the city the narrator may have had an identity of her own, as a
working woman, but in the countryside she’s nothing but an appendage of the
family into which she has married. Some
of the other ghostly encounters reinforce this impression: the woman in white may be a ghost, and in
addition to pulling the narrator out of the hole, she shares with her a recipe,
thus encouraging an adjustment to housewifely cooking. Later at the funeral some old lady mourners
(it’s not clear that anybody else sees them) tell the narrator to change the
way the flowers on the altar are arranged – we do it differently here, they
say, thus encouraging her to adjust to local ways. Like a good housewife.
Her status as a wife is one of the interesting issues in the
story. Her loss of individual identity,
coupled with her slide into I-see-dead-people psychological instability as she
slips into solitude and idleness in her new home, seems to be a critique of
traditional gender roles. She’s a modern
woman suddenly placed in an old-fashioned situation, and this is what it does
to her. However, this reading is complicated
by the fact that her mother-in-law is herself a working woman, and is surprised
that the narrator is so willing to quit her job. We never learn much about the mother-in-law,
but it is suggested that she finds some fulfillment in her job and expects that
the narrator would have felt the same.
So the narrator’s life in the city, as a modern woman, also
seems to be called into question. She
has no emotional investment in her work.
And her life with her husband is a drag, as well – since they both work,
they live on takeout food and hardly see each other, and when they are together
he spends all his time on his smartphone, totally ignoring her. This is why she can accept the idea that her
husband has a brother he never told her about, I guess. So she seems to be facing anomie and
anonymity whether in the country or the city, whether surrounded by in-laws or
not.
I didn’t find it a very impressive story, to be honest. Oyamada’s narration is very thick – her
paragraphs go on for pages at a time, regardless of how many people are
speaking or how many times the topic shifts.
And while her descriptions of place and atmosphere are very vivid, her
evocation of people is not. All of the
characters, even the flesh-and-blood ones, feel like ghosts or shells. These factors combine to make reading it a
slog.
The narrator’s passivity is the biggest problem. Anomie and anonymity, I get it – and I’m a
Murakami Haruki fan, so I’m used to passive.
But his characters at least want something – even if, following
Vonnegut’s advice, it’s just a sandwich (or sex, or a Chet Baker record). Oyamada’s narrator is passive far beyond the
point of believability: she is
completely disengaged from her own life.
And because she never tells us what she feels, we’re left with only two
likely explanations for this passivity.
Either she’s paralyzed by the meaninglessness of existence, or this is
the only way Oyamada can think of to create suspense. Neither is a very satisfying answer.
The first bonus story is called “Itachinaku いたちなく” (a pun: could be read as Weasel-less, or as Weasel Cries). It’s narrated by a
middle-aged husband whose wife wants a baby;
they can’t have one, but it’s not clear if the problem is with her biology
or his. Early in the story she asks him
to give her a sperm sample so she can have it tested.
The main thread of the story concerns an old buddy of the
husband’s who has married a much younger woman and moved out to the
country. They’ve renovated an old house
and moved into it, doing the country life thing to a T, but now they find they
have weasels in their attic. Nothing
works. They keep catching them but more
always appear.
Eventually the narrator and his wife go to visit the buddy
and his wife at their country home. Over
a dinner of wild boar nabe they talk about the weasel’s, and the narrator’s
wife, who had a country upbringing herself, tells a long intense tale about how
her family got rid of weasels in their house when she was a girl. They caught the mama weasel, and then her
grandmother drowned it in a bucket in the front yard. The girl and everybody else was harrowed by
the weasel’s screams, but then the grandmother explained that those screams
were the mama weasel telling the rest of its family to stay away from the house
or you’ll get drowned. It would only
work with a mama weasel: a baby weasel
would just cry, and a papa weasel would fight until he was worn out. Only a mama weasel would use her dying breath
to warn her family.
Later the narrator’s wife gets a call: the buddy’s house is now free of weasels. And the narrator doesn’t know what happened
with the sperm test, but his wife has stopped talking about kids.
It resonates with the title story in some obvious ways: clearly this author is thinking about marital
issues, and rural-urban issues, and using the one to get at the other. And animals.
There’s less of an emphasis on trad gender roles here – though perhaps
that’s because we’re getting the husband’s perspective, and maybe he’s a bit
clueless. He claims not to know what the
result of the sperm test was, but as my wife points out, if the wife stopped
talking about kids it probably means it’s his biology at fault, and she’s just
being tactful.
The way the last paragraph reads, it’s clear that the weasel
story is meant to somehow explain or comment on the fertility/virility
issue. I’m not quite sure how,
though. Is it just a vision of primal
mommy-daddy behavior, meant to contrast with human ineffectuality?
The third and last story, “Yuki no yado 雪の宿” (A place to stay in
the snow, or: Yuki's Home), connects to the second. The
buddy’s wife has a baby, a daughter named Yukiko, and the narrator’s wife is
with her during the birth. A little
while later the narrator and his wife drive up to visit the buddy and his wife
and get caught in a blizzard. They have
to spend the night. There’s a lot of
business about walking quietly around the sleeping baby, cooing over it when
it’s awake, etc. And a bit about an
elderly neighbor woman (mentioned in the earlier story) who brings over some
food when she sees the stranded guests’ car.
During the night the narrator and his wife sleep in a room
with tropical fish tanks, and he has a kanashibari episode – a night paralysis
in which he dreams that one of the fish, a big arowana, has jumped out of its
tank and is dancing on his belly, while his wife has gone out of the room. In the morning the narrator and his buddy are
playing in the snow, and the neighbor lady comes over and whispers to the narrator
that his wife is pregnant. Implying that
the dream about the fish, the night paralysis, was anxiety over unconfirmed but
dimly sensed impending fatherhood.
And a complete lack of communication with his wife. This is the real connection between this pair
of bonus stories and the title story: a
picture of married people with, evidently, nothing at all to say to each
other. They may even be essentially (not
literally) the same people – that the picture is much less bleak in the second
and third stories than in the first may simply be a function of them being
narrated by an oblivious husband, rather than by a wife who’s bothered by his
obliviousness. But that may not really
be what Oyamada’s trying to get at here – it may be incidental. She seems far more interested, at least in
this book, in the symbolic meanings of animals.
I’ve been analyzing these stories mostly for their social commentary,
but I may be on the wrong track. Dream
analysis might be more appropriate.
