Weasels in the Attic: Hiroko Oyamada

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How often do you go up into your loft space? Most people have access to their loft space via a ladder and a loft hatch, but rarely go up there unless they need to grab the Christmas tree and decorations to bring down for the festive season. It is notable that Oyamada has chosen to write Weasels from a man’s perspective. (After The Factory and The Hole , Weasels is Oyamada’s third full-length title to be translated into English. The Factory has both male and female narrators. The Hole is narrated by a woman.) Weasels is a novella about motherhood, but from a man’s perspective. Oyamada has taken up infertility, but asks, “What is it like for the male partner when a couple can’t get pregnant?” This "novel" is comprised of 3 brief, well-written, connected short stories, each with a seemingly different focus: 1) high-end fish collecting; 2) Weasels at friend's new house; 3) friend and new bride's new baby, and high-end fish and fish tanks in the guest bedroom. Is there a larger through-line here? I'm not going to say no. Our protagonist and his wife are trying to get pregnant...kind of. They're going through the motions of getting tested, etc., and she seems to have a deep affection for the friend's new baby. The solution for the weasels in the second story, brought to light by the protagonist's wife (that of drowning a female weasel so the other weasels will hear its warning screams) was disturbing. That the friends never had a weasel problem again and it was all thanks to her was also disturbing but thankfully occurred "off-screen."

Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada, David Boyd - Waterstones Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada, David Boyd - Waterstones

Their slender bodies and fine fur creates a serious issue: excess loss of body heat. Weasels manage this potential defeat by consuming around 40 percent of their own body weight in one day! Over dinner at Saiki’s house, a grotesquely rich boar stew, the narrator’s wife recalls that during her childhood, her parents also had a weasel problem. The infestation got so bad that a putrid liquid began dripping from the attic. She too developed a rash, all over her body. Her father and grandfather set a trap and soon caught one—an adult female. “Great,” announced her grandmother. “We got one of the parents.” But the weasel didn’t look like an adult. It was very cute: covered in golden fur, with little ears, a flat snout, and tiny legs that wriggled about in the cage. She wanted to keep it as a pet. If the weasel feels threatened, or any type of unnecessary pressure, they will initiate their whimsical “war dance” and while you’re being hypnotized, they’ll strike at you with a powerful bite, when you least expect it! In a culture saturated with gendered norms, women are painted in the same shade of faded pink: “Every baby is adorable to us… Maybe it’s different for men. They only see their own babies that way. Sorry, I shouldn’t have…” Yoko’s voice and character disappear in a mumbling of apologies, and we, the readers, are left to imagine her fate.Oyamada drops hints that something about these friends and their homes is vaguely sinister. She’s a writer who skates uncomfortable facts over the skin of her readers. She never brings readers the relief of looking at a problem straight on—and of course she never resolves a thing.

Weasels in the Attic” by Hiroko Oyamada “Weasels in the Attic” by Hiroko Oyamada

As their identities erode, so does their work: technical documents reviewed by the copyeditor disintegrate, merging into his own stream of consciousness. Time blurs accordingly. Oyamada flits between disparate events, months or years apart, from paragraph to paragraph, without transition or comment. Though it seems as if the events of the novel unfold over the first few weeks after the workers are hired, it later becomes clear that fifteen years have drifted by.Larger weasels, like the long-tailed weasel that’s found in North America, and the tropical weasel that inhabits South America have been documented to grow between 10 and 12 inches in length. Questions about fertility run through the book. In three years of marriage, the narrator and his wife have been unable to conceive a child, and discussions of whether and how to pursue fertility treatments have become a “nightly routine.” The narrator tells Saiki, “It’s the same thing every night. Then she asks me: ‘On a scale of one to ten, how badly do you want kids?’” Saiki responds, “Man. What can you even say to that?” The narrator doesn’t say what he tells his wife, but later, holding Urabe’s baby, he says, “I could feel her warmth and dampness through the layers of cloth. I’ve always liked kids. I wished I could have one of my own. I couldn’t give it a number, but I knew it was what I wanted.” It’s a rare moment of vulnerability and openness from the otherwise matter-of-fact narrator—though he admits his wish only to himself and readers, not to his wife or friend.

Weasels in the Attic - Kindle edition by Oyamada, Hiroko

My grandpa carried the cage over to the trash can and dunked it in the water…. When he did I heard the most horrible sound…. It was this series of piercing shrieks. I’d never heard anything like it before – and I haven’t heard it since, not once. The weasel was screaming with everything it had. What have I contemplated though? I'm not sure I'm getting it. This sounds like a collection of carelessly chosen phrases that failed to convey any figurative meaning. Similar to the denouement —there have been numerous interpretive deconstructions because it was so unconstrained, consequently made the novella appears to be as obscure as its subject matter. Is it about patriarchy? motherhood? or simply weasels in the attic? I guess I'll never catch it. So if you have a lake or personal body of water on your property, you can potentially expect a burrow that tunnels underground through your home. Will A Weasel Kill A Cat? One mother, for example, is much younger than her partner. The reader is left with questions about just how much younger she is and just how free she was to choose the relationship. Another mother never updates her partner about his fertility status after a sperm count test. When she gets pregnant, the reader, too, is left unanswered questions.The most notable of all is the Least Weasel. It weighs approximately one ounce. This is the most notable weasel because it is the smallest carnivore in the world, according to Animal Diversity Web . Fascinating slim novel about fertility, marriage and friendship with a surreal atmosphere. The endings are sudden and open, almost as if you missed something, but it worked for me here and had me intrigued. Weasels in the Attic contains three chapters / short stories with mainly the same characters. In three completely different situations, two friends, MC and Sayiki, have a conversation each time over dinner. Topics of conversations in this novel vary from fish breeding to weasels in the attic.

Weasels in the Attic: Oyamada, Hiroko, Boyd, David

The implication is obviously that the narrator, like other men, isn’t heavily invested in children. The impetus to start a family must come from the narrator’s wife. But although he has kept his feelings to himself to spare her, the narrator is just as eager to become a father as she is to become a mother. He doesn’t answer her question about “the scale from one to ten”, but he does think about it: “I liked kids. I wished I could have one of my own. I couldn’t give it a number, but I knew it was what I wanted.” In three interconnected short stories, Oyamada explores the topics of motherhood and gender roles in domestic settings. ii) Position the bait far enough from the wall so that the weasel can’t simply reach in from the outside and grab it. Set up the Trap

History China Translation India Japan Hong Kong Biography Short stories Memoir Current affairs Historical fiction Korea Travel-writing South Asia Immigration Geopolitics Southeast Asia Russia WW2 Middle East Culture Central Asia Economics International relations Society Singapore Art Politics Japanese Iran Literary history Philippines Religion Turkey SE Asia Business Photography Colonialism Indonesia Taiwan Crime Chinese Essays Illustrated Islam Recent articles There is also the social aspect that the young wives in the novel are doing all the domestic labor, from caring for the infants to preparing the food and drinks in each of these scenes. It is a critique of the inequality of domestic labor standards, which occurs even in households where the male partner is under the impression he is helping equally. In Dr. Kate Manne’s book Entitled she cites a US study (the novel is Japan, of course, not the US, but the ideas still apply) that ‘ working women took on around two-thirds of at-home child care responsibilities’, and of the 46% of male participants who said they were coequal parents, only 32% of their partners agreed. For the three men in Weasels, this is seen as normal and when the narrator feels bad the new, possibly underaged mother is doing all the labor, social stigma keeps him from speaking up about it.