This might be the weirdest book I’ve read recently and I thoroughly enjoyed it. A few years ago, I read Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory, which I enjoyed, but reading The Hole felt like a much more focused experience. Everything in this novella felt bizarre and unsettling and completely engrossing. It felt like a conjunction of social terror, a werewolf tale, a ghost story, a surrealist’s dream, a reverse pied piper, and a gothic horror.
I find The Hole to be an instructive work for what I like and what I find disturbing in fiction. Nearly the entire history of literature is characterized by what I have landed on calling an “implied coherence.” We know that authors have strategically selected details to share with us because they share a natural connection and it gives the experience of entering a book a sense of order. What is important is mentioned; what is unimportant is left out. In a way, it’s very comforting—which is why it feels so uncanny and disturbing when increasingly disparate experiences are presented with an implied coherence. Oyamada recognizes that presenting vignettes as if there is a connection is what gives them their powerfully unsettling force. The novella is like a David Lynch film where the everyday is rendered uncanny through a character’s bizarre flat affect and some more explicitly surrealistic aspects more comparable to Murakami’s work.
The “implied coherence” that governs an uncanny work functions on two levels. The first is that it makes the bizarre moments stand out all the more: when normal things happen but something feels off, our sense of coherence is broken. The flip side of that is when strange things happen, we are forced to try to place them into a logical order and start forming those paranoiac connections, to see parallels where there might not be any.
All this to say that The Hole is a book that, despite its brevity, lingers. Even in its final lines, it offers more questions than answers, which would deflate the narrative entirely were they provided. The gesture is all The Hole needs.
So here’s the premise and some of the moments that stood out to me—I really recommend reading it myself, but if you’d like, the rest of what follows is a detailed summary of what was resonant. The main character is a young married woman named Asahi. Her position is not permanent and, at some level, the book presents itself as a commentary on the precarity of work and the destabilizing impermanence. But mainly it’s about Asa and her husband, Muneaki, who move back to Muneaki’s rural hometown. The home next to his parents’ has become available and they are able to stay there rent-free.
The book plays up social awkwardness as terror fuel. Like the Manderley estate in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Asa finds herself subject to the gaze of others as a fish-out-of-water. Her husband’s grandfather still lives next door, perpetually watering the garden, unable to hear most of Asa’s greetings to him. When Asa, jobless, receives a call with no number, she answers and finds her husband’s mother, Tomiko, asking for a favour. By this point, she has already been established as a little domineering of the couple. It occurs to Asa that her voice sounds different, that she does not know where Tomiko works, and so on. The favour is for Asa to pick up some documents and take them to the Seven-Eleven for authentication. Mysterious phone calls are already pretty weird, but the trip to the Seven-Eleven gets even more strange. When she arrives, there is a crowd of children being little pests. Asa is then in the awkward position that Tomiko did not leave her enough cash to fulfil the transaction—about 24 000 yen short—and Asa has to withdraw money from her personal account to complete the purchase. While she’s at the ATM, the kids are all staring at her pin number and refuse to look away. It’s a strange lapse in social decorum that feels so uncomfortable, so intentional. The issue is then even worse for us socially awkward people when Asa feels the need to tell Tomiko that she did not give her enough money (bad) and then Tomiko, without asking the price, gives her 3000 yen to cove the difference and Asa has to bite her tongue about it not being nearly enough (worse).
The social horrors of the novel are significant in establishing the awkward tone of the work, but there’s a deeply surreal component to the work. While on her excursion, Asa sees a strange creature—almost dog-like, black, claws, a protruding ribcage with a muscular back. Asa decides to follow it and chases it before falling into a human-sized hole up to her head. The image seems ridiculous, cartoonish even. Eventually she is stumbled upon by Sera, an elderly neighbour who refers to Asahi as “the bride”---everyone seems to know about her, but not in any kind of personal way. Sera is ghost-like in wearing all white, carrying a parasol, but she picks a bug of some kind off of Asa and guides her home.
Later, Asa sees the bizarre monstrous creature again and chases after it, only to stumble across a man with his arm reaching into a wall. He reveals himself as Muneaki’s secret estranged brother, the black sheep of the family that Asa has never heard of. What makes the moment uncanny is that he is described, very passingly, as having nearly skeletal protruding shoulders. It’s like the reverse of the skeletal protruding ribcage of the beast. He also knows all about the beast, puts covers over the holes it digs, and so on. It appears he, too, knows about the creature—and it makes me wonder if he is the creature, some kind of werewolf.
I’m piecing things together in retrospect here, but the brother-in-law refers to Asa as being like Alice from Alice in Wonderland and he himself is the rabbit. But the parallel doesn’t seem to me quite accurate: Asa never goes down the rabbit hole. She falls into holes that are stunted, that lead nowhere. Later on in the book, she falls into a hole that has the beast lurking in the bottom of it, sleeping—if only escaping reality were as easy as falling into a hole. For Asa, there is no escape and no expectation of an alternate world.
Returning to the brother-in-law, he agrees to guide her back to the hole later. Despite being, supposedly, a shut-in, he guides her through the route she would take to the river. As they travel, Oyamada gives me additional fodder for my brother-in-law-is-a-werewolf theory. The way his movements are described are animalistic, heavy. He leaps around and bounds through the wilderness to the river. Asahi sees a number of holes and looks for her precise one and sees a number of kids playing around—the same kids from the Seven-Eleven, the same kids who called the brother-in-law Sensei at the same Seven-Eleven (yes, he was there too—what a coincidence!). The weirdest part is that when they find the holes, Asa is ready to return home but the brother-in-law stays behind, mingling with the children. There’s something ominous about how he does not acknowledge Asahi as she leaves. It’s like a reverse pied piper story somehow—especially ominous when Asa is later told that there are no children in the village and that it is an area entirely of the elderly.
Speaking of the elderly, Muneaki’s grandfather has a strange excursion at night. Asa follows him, as does the brother-in-law. The entire sequence has a strange quality to it. It’s similar, in some ways, to the scene of the grandfather running in the film Get Out. Anyway, they follow the grandfather and watch as he gets into a hole, only his head protruding, watching the moon. Asa similarly climbs into a hole where the grandfather is visible. He gets out of the hole, but dies a few days later. At the funeral, Asa tries to find the brother-in-law and the hints pile up that perhaps he was a ghost—his backyard cabin has no signs it was ever occupied.
Throughout the book, there are references to the precarity of work. She notes at the beginning of the book that her job would discard her and withhold wages if she were to have a child. When she moves, Asa is not able to find a job—her ability to navigate the city is profoundly hindered by the need for a vehicle she does not have. Her wages at her previous work were minimal, relative to the bonuses full-time workers got. By the same token, her husband is staying longer hours at work, and texts incessantly when she tries to speak to him. She hardly knows her father-in-law because he works so much. Even Tomiko is weirdly abstracted in the workforce. That’s why even at the end of the novel, it feels like an odd moment of doubling where she gets ready for job, seemingly in a Seven-Eleven uniform, and sees her mother-in-law’s face in the mirror. It’s an ominous conclusion, fitting for a ghost story.
I really don’t know what to make of The Hole other than the fact that I loved it. I refuse to make sense of it; I just want it to wash over me and revel in the experience of these strange non-coincidences that disturb me like puzzle pieces with their tabs sawed off.
Please read it so that we can discuss.
No comments:
Post a Comment