This "novel" is comprised of 3 brief, well-written, connected short stories, each with a seemingly different focus: 1) high-end fish collecting; 2) Weasels at friend's new house; 3) friend and new bride's new baby, and high-end fish and fish tanks in the guest bedroom. Is there a larger through-line here? I'm not going to say no. Our protagonist and his wife are trying to get pregnant...kind of. They're going through the motions of getting tested, etc., and she seems to have a deep affection for the friend's new baby. The solution for the weasels in the second story, brought to light by the protagonist's wife (that of drowning a female weasel so the other weasels will hear its warning screams) was disturbing. That the friends never had a weasel problem again and it was all thanks to her was also disturbing but thankfully occurred "off-screen." Propagation does not guarantee flourishing. As Urabe says of his fish, “Some lay lots of eggs, others don’t. But quantity doesn’t necessarily mean anything.” And so, though the stories are suffused with the narrator’s uncertain longing, they each also contain warnings: Urabe’s sudden and unexpected death in “Death in the Family,” for example, or the horrifying shrieks of a drowning mother weasel in “The Last of the Weasels.” In “Yukiko,” a warning comes from Saiki, who is raising tropical fish in his new home. The fish live in tanks in the room where the narrator and his wife sleep, and in a terrifying episode of sleep paralysis, the narrator dreams that one of the fish—a bonytongue, long and silver, the fish the narrator likes best—has leapt out of its tank and landed on him, weighing him down. “I could feel the bonytongue twisting,” he says. “It had to be in pain. If it died like this, Saiki was going to be upset. I didn’t want this fish dying on top of me. I tried to raise my voice—to say something. I couldn’t even get my tongue to move.” The narrator is as helpless as the fish—and then he wakes up. The fish is in its tank, its scales shining. “I can really see the appeal of tropical fish. Maybe I should get some of my own,” he says to Saiki, after his terror has been dispelled in the morning light. “Don’t do it, man,” Saiki says, warning of the work involved. “I know they look pretty, but they’re living things.” The most notable of all is the Least Weasel. It weighs approximately one ounce. This is the most notable weasel because it is the smallest carnivore in the world, according to Animal Diversity Web . It is about two 30-something friends who meet at three different occasions: the death of a mutual friend, a housewarming and the birth of a child.

BOOK REVIEW: WEASELS IN THE ATTIC (2022) BY HIROKO OYAMADA

At first, it would be a game of cat-and-weasel, simply chasing and running around. Until the cat somehow corners the weasel. And with its life on the line, the weasel will do everything in its power to outsmart the cat.According to Urabe’s wife, the breeding is experimental; she says, “We still don’t fully understand the relationship between genotype and phenotype. We haven’t been able to confirm which genes lead to which patterns.” According to Urabe, there is as much intuition as intention behind his approach. Choosing mates for fish, he claims, is not so different from how humans choose their mates: “We live our lives in the groups we have—in our cities, our countries, even though we didn’t choose them. Know what I mean? We like to tell ourselves it’s love, that we’re choosing our own partners. But in reality, we’re just playing the cards we’ve been dealt.” Despite its elements of surrealism and the understated but constant senses of uneasiness it manages to convey, I find the writing a tad too sparse to be effective.

Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada | New Directions

The third story is more or less the same scenario, only a bit later. Yoko, Saiki’s wife, has had a baby, with the help of the narrator’s wife. This time we see that Saiki has once again shown an interest in fish and now has several fish tanks with discus fish and one with the rare bonytongue. As it is snowing, the narrator and his wife have to spend the night and they sleep in the room with the fish tanks. Bonytongues can jump three feet. But mainly, for me, the problem is that the book is poorly written. The kind of writing failure I have in mind is not an effect of translation, and it isn't a matter of cultural differences. I know this because the issues I have in mind are problems in narration. This is just poor writing. Unfortunately, this is the same time of year you could become aware of noises coming from your loft space. We all know mice can get inside any property, especially when seeking shelter from colder weather. However, just as mice look for sources of food wherever they can get them, so other animals will seek out mice as their own source of food. The implication is obviously that the narrator, like other men, isn’t heavily invested in children. The impetus to start a family must come from the narrator’s wife. But although he has kept his feelings to himself to spare her, the narrator is just as eager to become a father as she is to become a mother. He doesn’t answer her question about “the scale from one to ten”, but he does think about it: “I liked kids. I wished I could have one of my own. I couldn’t give it a number, but I knew it was what I wanted.” Despite his desire for a child, the narrator later seems surprised to see how fatherhood has changed his friend. When Yoko says that Saiki “does everything from morning to evening” except feed the baby, the narrator exclaims, “Wait, so he changes her diapers?” “The Saiki I knew wasn’t the type who voluntarily took care of any child—even his own. I was pretty sure he didn’t like kids,” he comments, possibly jealous, given that unlike Saiki he does like children and, when he was younger, helped take care of his sisters’ children, playing with them and singing them lullabies. The narrator then laughs when Saiki, speaking to his baby daughter, refers to himself as “dada.” The narrator does not say whether his surprise is that any man should claim such a name for himself or that Saiki in particular is claiming this name. As for Saiki, he views the name practically: “It’s too hard for her to say anything else. I’m going to be ‘dada’ until she can actually talk.”I sure do hope that cats are aware of this tactic before they approach a weasel. For such small bodies, they can do a lot of damage. How Much Does A Weasel Weigh? The first point to make about this story is the role of women. Nearly all the women in this book have a role of wife and mother and not much else. The narrator’s wife works but we know little about her job. Even the female fish are there to breed and the female weasel to protect her family. Only Saiki’s neighbour, an elderly widow, has a slightly different role but she does follow traditional female roles in providing food and gossiping. In the first story, The Narrator and Saiki visit a friend of Saiki called Urabe who lives above a failed pet shop with a lot of tropical fish. When they arrive, the two men find that Urabe is not only married but has a baby too, something Saiki was not aware of. If it were typical slice of life, I would have expected more (or any) character quirks, witty dialogue, societal satire, or social commentary. At least a unique perspective on life. Needless to say, none of these things were on offer here.