‘Weasels in the Attic’: What if men felt as insecure as women about infertility and ageing?

Hiroko Oyamada is fast turning into a favourite. Her writing is zany and contemporary and she is exceptionally inventive in her use of animal metaphors to portray human conditions. In her two earlier books The Factory and The Hole (both translated by David Boyd), Oyamada deploys birds, lizards and coypus and rabbits and cicadas respectively to animate the conflicts to her human characters. These animal characters gradually overshadow the human characters as the line between the feral and the civilised rapidly starts to blur. I was immensely impressed by these two books. Naturally, Weasels in the Attic was next on the list.

Male, married, middle-aged, childless

The animal-human relationship that has become synonymous with Oyamada’s fiction continues in this book. Birds, lizards, coypus, cicadas, and rabbits are replaced by tropical fishes and obviously, weasels. In The Hole, Oyamada addresses a young woman’s sudden transformation from a working woman into a housewife. In The Factory, she turns a critical eye to environmental degradation and the pointless rigours of modern capitalism.

In her latest book, Weasels in the Attic, Oyamada’s concerns are fertility, masculinity, and marriage in contemporary Japan. By making the narrator a childless married man in his 40s, Oyamada observes the anxieties of fertility...

Read more