Weasels in the Attic

There is this pervasive sense of unease threaded throughout the book, like an unseen menace lurking in the margins. Digging into the dried shrimp fish food in place of any available snacks seems like it's ripe for some sort of reveal. The weasel infestation threatens something more. The reluctance to stay the night at a friends home, only to find yourself falling into a troubled sleep amidst the blue green glow of aquarium lights, tilts to some creeping fear.

Nope. It's not that the looming menace is revealed to be a pile of laundry with the flick of a switch - we're never truly afforded a glimpse at anything that might lend some shape to our unease.

Maybe that disquiet is meant to be paired with the notions of parenthood. There's the breeding of discus fish, the power of the mother weasel, and the parade of friends with their newborns as the narrator and his wife struggle to conceive a child. And maybe that's all the more ominous given the current population crisis, with Japan seeing the lowest number of births in a century paired with the fact that it enjoys one of the highest life expectancies.

Maybe I'm just grasping at straws, a Western reader that needs more resolution to allay my unease, but I just couldn't fully connect with this one.

What a weird little book.

There's three stories that are interconnected and all told from the same unnamed narrator. He seems like a rather average guy whose more or less happily married to his wife, the only struggle being that they have yet to become pregnant.

We start off with the announcement of a death, whose his friends friend that he met once at the fish shop the friend owned. A wealthy kid living off of his family's money and enjoying his hobby with a fish shop where he breeds his fishes. Our narrator reminisces to when he met him, his friend having taken him there to the shop to drink and have a general good time. But surprise, the guy is married and his wife had just given birth.

The second story is our narrator and wife going out to the rural side to see his friend and his new wife. His friend recently purchased a new home and is having immense regrets because there's a weasel infestation in the house.

In the second story is where we get immersed into unsettling territory. The descriptions of the weasels in the attic space, and how though even one is captured in a trap there's another weasel to take it's place immediately afterward, is just gross and creepy. The noises they hear, the rash his friends wife has developed, how they can never sleep... truly a nightmare.

That arc ends with our narrators wife describing an absolutely horrid memory of her being young and her parents drowning a weasel they found in the home. A weasel infestation was never her fate because apparently the weasel they drowned was the mother weasel, and the weasels screams were warning to her babies to get out of the house and it wasn't safe there.

Third story has the couple returning to his friends house in the country side, the weasel problem being gone (under assumption that his friends used his wife's methods to get rid of them.) His friends wife just had a baby and they went to celebrate and see the new bundle of joy. A snow storm comes and it's worse than expected forcing them to stay the night at the friends house. During the night our narrator has a fever dream, regarding to a fish in the guest room that his friend owns called boney tongue (circling back to the first story.) the novel ends somewhat abruptly with a vague premonition from his friends neighbor that his wife is pregnant, and his wife and his friends wife wandering up the mountain.

All stories connected give the novel a general theme or allegory to being a parent, having responsibility, and the proper/socially acceptable in and outs of woman behavior and their roles as moms and wives.

It didn't in the end feel like a complete or proper gut punch ending, but many moments throughout causes feeling unsettled and uneasy. Tense, but without much purpose. Everyone in the novel appeared rather odd and unnatural and I'm not sure if that is more so the translation or the narrative. Still, I look forward to reading more of this authors work as I enjoyed the ideas explored in the novel.