Review by Booklist Review
Asa moves for her husband's work transfer from the city to a house in the Japanese countryside next door to her husband's parents. Living in a new place with no rent, no car, and all the time in the world, she tries to find things to do while her husband works long hours and socializes with his friends. While running an errand for her mother-in-law, Asa sees a strange, black animal and decides to follow it. It leads her off the path, and she falls into a hole that is perfectly her size. An older, unfamiliar neighbor finds her and helps her out, sparking the beginning of Asa's peculiar experiences. Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, Oyamada's (The Factory, 2019) novel tells a fantastical story, as translated by David Boyd, in which increasingly bizarre illusions blend into reality, with a reclusive adult at the center. Oyamada unsettles readers, not allowing us to remain comfortable in the reality she creates, which makes for a beguiling read.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Oyamada's eerie latest (after The Factory) follows a young woman as she acclimates to a new life in rural Japan. Asa quits her job so that she and her husband, Muneaki, can live closer to his work. In the countryside, she attempts to fill their hot, unoccupied summer days with housework, naps, and cooking, and Oyamada inflects the domestic setting with the tone of a thriller, from the ominous sound of a child's overheard cry to a missing envelope full of cash. Asa has unfulfilling, terse conversations with the distracted Muneaki and bewildering, paranoia-provoking interactions with Muneaki's family, who are Asa's closest neighbors and about whom she knows very little. The suspense cranks up when Asa repeatedly sees a strange black animal on the grounds that looks vaguely like a dog. After Asa falls into one of the holes the animal digs, she becomes determined to find out what's going on with the animal; her efforts lead only to more questions, which build to a neat, satisfying ending. Oyamada's atmospheric literary thriller puts a fresh, gripping spin on the bored housewife set-up. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The narrator of this taut, surreal novel finds herself stranded in a strange rural landscape. As Oyamada's novel begins, a married couple has decided to move to a rural area because narrator Asa's husband has been transferred there. His new office is near where his parents live, and they offer the couple the newly vacant house they own next door to their own. It's an appealing offer, and Oyamada uses the couple's economic anxieties as a way to keep the book grounded. Before the move, Asa and a friend discuss the specifics of the cost of getting a manicure, and she muses on the difference in compensation between permanent and temporary employees at her workplace. After the move, the couple has only one car, leaving Asa stranded when her husband goes to work: "Except for rush hour, the bus came only once every sixty minutes, and it was a forty-minute ride to the train." One day, her mother-in-law asks Asa to run an errand for her--a simple task, involving a visit to a nearby 7-Eleven. But on the walk there, Asa encounters a bizarre mammal, which she compares to a raccoon, a weasel, and a dog. "Maybe it had hooves," she adds. She follows it, then falls into a hole, where she meets a woman who refers to her as "the bride." Throughout, Oyamada balances the surreal with the quotidian. Asa meets her husband's long-lost brother, who she never knew existed and who's perennially shadowed by a group of bug-obsessed children who call him Sensei. Throughout the novel, Oyamada memorably conveys Asa's dislocation. The prose frequently transforms everyday scenes into something menacing, too: "Deep in the grass, I caught glimpses of black shapes, moving quietly. It was the heads of children." Familial awkwardness and bizarre imagery take this story of unrest and disquiet to memorable places. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
