The Hole

Staff Top Fives 2020-2021

Our favorite books of 2020-2021.

Equal parts Miyazaki and David Lynch. I consumed this short book on a hot summer afternoon and was left in a daze the rest of the week. Much like the main character, I had a hard time grasping what had just occurred but knew full well that it had it's teeth in me. Recommended By Nick K., Powells.com

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, The Hole is by turns reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, David Lynch, and My Neighbor Totoro, but is singularly unsettling.

Asa’s husband is transferring jobs, and his new office is located near his family’s home in the countryside. During an exceptionally hot summer, the young married couple move in, and Asa does her best to quickly adjust to their new rural lives, to their remoteness, to the constant presence of her in-laws and the incessant buzz of cicadas. While her husband is consumed with his job, Asa is left to explore her surroundings on her own: she makes trips to the supermarket, halfheartedly looks for work, and tries to find interesting ways of killing time.

One day, while running an errand for her mother-in-law, she comes across a strange creature, follows it to the embankment of a river, and ends up falling into a hole — a hole that seems to have been made specifically for her. This is the first in a series of bizarre experiences that drive Asa deeper into the mysteries of this rural landscape filled with eccentric characters and unidentifiable creatures, leading her to question her role in this world, and eventually, her sanity.

“Oyamada unsettles readers, not allowing us to remain comfortable in the reality she creates, which makes for a beguiling read.” Booklist

"Throughout the novel, Oyamada memorably conveys Asa's dislocation. The prose frequently transforms everyday scenes into something menacing, too…Familial awkwardness and bizarre imagery take this story of unrest and disquiet to memorable places." Kirkus Reviews

"Horrific and scary, while at the same time affirming and beautiful." Rumaan Alam

"She is fond of jump cuts and scenes that dissolve mid-paragraph and flow into the next without so much as a line break. A pleasant vertigo sets in. Objects have a way of suddenly appearing in the hands of characters. Faces become increasingly vivid and grotesque. Nothing feels fixed; everything in the book might be a hallucination." Parul Sehgal

"Oyamada’s atmospheric literary thriller puts a fresh, gripping spin on the bored housewife set-up." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Born in Hiroshima in 1983, Hiroko Oyamada won the Shincho Prize for New Writers for The Factory, which was drawn from her experiences working as a temp for an automaker’s subsidiary. Her novel The Hole won Akutagawa Prize.

David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has translated stories by Genichiro Takahashi, Masatsugu Ono and Toh EnJoe, among others. His translation of Hideo Furukawa's Slow Boat won the 2017/2018 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. With Sam Bett, he is cotranslating the novels of Mieko Kawakami.