3.0
The Hole
ByPublisher Description
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Hole Reviews
3.0
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“I genuinely wish I could unread this book and get some time back. I’m thankful that this was a short book.
I went in expecting something eerie, surreal, or at least conceptually interesting, and instead found myself slogging through pages of conversations that never seemed to matter. The pacing was painfully slow, and the book spent an excessive amount of time detailing interactions that added no tension, insight, or payoff.
From a craft perspective, the dialogue was especially frustrating. Large blocks of unbroken dialogue made it difficult to follow who was speaking, turning what should have been engaging scenes into walls of text that required unnecessary effort just to decode. Rather than feeling immersed, I was constantly pulled out of the story trying to track the conversation.
The symbolism never landed for me. The hole itself did not feel significant or developed enough to justify anchoring the entire book around it. The repeated references to cicadas became distracting rather than atmospheric, and the animal plotline ultimately went nowhere, leaving the story feeling hollow instead of intentional.
This book was not eerie, unsettling, or thought-provoking. It was simply boring. Any meaning it may have been aiming for was buried beneath repetitive details and underdeveloped ideas. If I could rate this, it would be negative stars.”
About Hiroko Oyamada
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.
Other books by Hiroko Oyamada
David Boyd
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.
Other books by David Boyd
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