The Hole
Hiroko Oyamada
(Author)
David Boyd
(Translator)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
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.
Product Details
Price
$12.95
$12.04
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
October 06, 2020
Pages
112
Dimensions
5.1 X 7.9 X 0.3 inches | 0.28 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811228879
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Become an affiliateAbout the Author
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. His translations have appeared in Monkey Business International, Granta, and Words Without Borders, among other publications.
Reviews
Praise for The Factory:
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.
Horrific and scary, while at the same time affirming and beautiful.--Rumaan Alam