Weasels in the Attic | Hiroko Oyamada

Two friends meet across three dinners. In the back room of a pet shop, they snack on dried shrimps and discuss fish-breeding. In a remote new home in the mountains, they look for a solution to a weasel infestation. During a dinner party in a blizzard, a mounting claustrophobia makes way for uneasy dreams. Their conversations often take them in surprising directions, but when one of the men becomes a father, more and more is left unsaid.

With emotional acuity and a wry humour, Weasels in the Attic it is an uncanny and striking reflection on fertility, masculinity, and marriage in contemporary Japan. 

About 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.

About the Translator

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.