Down the Rabbit Hole: The Strange and Wonderful World of Hiroko Oyamada
by JP Poole
Reading the novels of Hiroko Oyamada is a bit like walking into a test kitchen. Amidst the hustle and bustle, you watch flames leap six feet high, inhale mysterious aromas, taste flavors you never knew existed, and observe someone singe the top of a cake with a blowtorch. For a book under a hundred pages, The Hole especially is filled with food: mugicha tea, pickled cucumber, miso soup, rice, omelets, dried squid, Kameda Crisps, a spindly herb-like plant called myoga (Japanese ginger). Frankly, it’s nice to see characters eat, it’s a reminder that while they might be a bunch of symbols on a page, we still relate to them because they share our appetites—they get hungry after a long day’s work just like we do.
More so than character, the main ingredient in Oyamada’s work is place. Place is the bed of rice that plot is built around. Place is what tricks readers into believing they’re encountering something static, and recognizable, that is until Oyamada begins to shift the ground and cracks and fissures form, revealing strange and unsettling entities that were lurking all along. Her first book, The Factory, is set at a sprawling live/work campus akin to the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, or Google—a mini-city, complete with different colored badges, corporate lingo, and a company “ecosystem” that one must work to become a part of, or risk exclusion. Within the factory are species of animals that seem to be taking over—they arrive like a flock of birds outside of a fast food joint waiting for French fries to drop. There are Grayback Coypu (aka Nutria) that seem to be growing larger each year; Washer Lizards, reptiles that have learned to live off of lint fibers; and Factory Shags, black birds (think Cormorant) that have no fear of people and whose numbers are ballooning out of control. It’s a bit Hitchcock, a bit George Bernard Shaw. Animal invasion meets industrial sprawl, unchecked commercial growth and expansion, a threat that one senses could swallow humanity whole.
The setting in her newest book, The Hole, is a remote suburb along a river—with the nearest grocery store a long walk away and buses that run every hour. Not the liveliest setting; but then all you have to do is wait a few pages before the predictable turns intriguing. Asa’s husband Muneaki has been transferred to a new office a few miles from where he grew up. The timing happens to be perfect. Asa’s mother-in-law, Tomiko, offers the young couple the house she owns next door rent free. Asa’s comforted by the fact that they are moving next door to Tomiko, not in with her; it’s a chance for the couple to get their footing, and save, save, save. Asa gladly quits her job in the city and becomes a housewife for the summer, spending long hours alone, cooking meals for her husband, running errands, finding that, without a full-time job, the days are endless. Of her new mind-numbing unemployed life, Asa says:
In theory, I could watch TV, use the computer, read a book, bake like I used to when I was single—but it seemed like everything cost money. I had to spend money to pass the time. People say housewives get free room and board and even time to nap, but the truth is napping was the most economical way to make it through the day.
What you should also know is that it’s summer in the suburb and oppressively hot. The cicadas are cranked up loud. Asa states: “To my human ear, they sounded like a bunch of machines, a spray of emotionless noise.” She has to do her grocery shopping early in the morning; her husband needs the car, so she’s essentially housebound. (A familiar feeling, right?) Things turn strange when Asa’s sent on an errand. Tomiko needs some money deposited, so Asa must walk to the nearest 7-Eleven to deposit the cash. (That, too, is a bit strange.) On her way to the store, she sees an animal she can’t identify: it’s not a dog, or a raccoon, but a large black furry animal with stick legs, round ears, and a long tail. Instinct propels her to follow it to the river. It’s then that she falls into a deep hole. While this hole doesn’t lead to another world, everything thereafter takes on a hallucinatory air as thick as summer’s humidity. After falling into the hole, Asa is not the same, and the suburb and its occupants aren’t either.
Oyamada balances the recognizable boredom of modern life—a life where one must think about savings plans, benefits, permanent positions, home loans, and taxes—with ecological strangeness: plants, insects, and animals growing up around us as we exist. People, too, are strange creatures. After seeing the animal, Asa can’t forget it. She realizes that it isn’t something she can Google. Her description is too generic and would produce “millions of hits.” The more she learns about the animal, the more she questions reality. Like Alice in Wonderland, which Oyamada references in the book, Asa falls down a rabbit hole. Her brother-in-law, an outsider, who lives in a shack, doesn’t work, and is a shut-in, leads her closer to the animal, her white rabbit. He wisely states: “People always fail to notice things. Animals, cicadas, puddles of melted ice cream on the ground, the neighborhood shut-in. But what do you expect? It seems like most folks don’t see what they don’t want to see.”
He’s right. Think about all the strange things we choose to ignore (perhaps because we have to): creepy crawling insects in the sink, an odd-colored mushroom, invisible-to-the-eye microbes that feast on our human skin, without which we’d be in deep trouble. Writers, artists, thinkers—these are the outsiders, who help us to remove the horse blinders and see what surrounds us. Oyamada’s fiction is refreshing for how much it defamiliarizes everyday existence. There are things in life that are deeply familiar—punching the clock, shopping at the co-op, watching reality TV—but there are also mysteries, wonders, oddities that we cannot name. The natural world is especially intriguing and a bit suspicious because, like Asa, we can sense changes a-brewin’. Oyamada’s work begs the question: What happens when creatures know more about us than we know about them? Read more of her novels and perhaps we shall find out.