• Marginalia: Hiroko Oyamada

    Alix Ohlin

    01/2025

    For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to one of their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Alix Ohlin—whose story “A Lake in Wisconsin” appears in our Fall 2024 issue—examines a passage from The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada.


    Hiroko Oyamada’s mysterious novel The Hole doesn’t make sense—and doesn’t attempt to. The narrator, Asa, relocates to a rural area after her husband is offered a new job, and they move in next door to his parents. Out in the country, untethered from her work routines and city connections, she moves through her days as if in a dream. Summer heat rises, extreme and suffocating, while cicadas buzz constantly. People appear and disappear, their entrances and exits fluidly unpredictable. Walking to the 7-Eleven, Asa follows a murky, stagnant river, noting grasses and leaves and vines, as well as the litter of half-eaten Cup Noodles, a box of tissues. When she sees a large black animal she can’t identify, she follows it, and then she falls into a hole:

    At the edge of the hole, a click beetle flew up toward my face. When it landed, I could see streaks running down its black shell. The antennae on its head looked bent. It was making a clicking noise, but I couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. As I tried to move, I realized how narrow the hole really was. The hole felt as though it was exactly my size–a trap made just for me. The bottom of the hole was covered with something dry, maybe dead grass or straw. Looking toward the river through a break in the grass, all I could see was white light. The beetle flew away. I couldn’t hear it anymore. The cicadas were the only sound. Cicadas cry to find a mate. They hear other cicadas crying around them and use what they hear to choose a partner. To my human ear, they sounded like a bunch of machines, a spray of emotionless noise. Maybe that’s how we sound to them, too. I wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t even uncomfortable. I could smell something, maybe the grass or the river. I let it fill my lungs and body. There were a few rocks and bits of plastic on the flat grass surrounding the hole. I could see some black ants and red ants in lines, soldiering around. Their lines broke apart and intersected, the tiny red ones marching over the bodies of the larger black ones. My bag was there, near the ants. Most of them went around it, but a few crawled over it. I grabbed the bag and shook the ants loose, then checked inside to make sure everything was still there. Nothing was missing. A black ant took one of the red ones in its mandibles while other red ones bit its legs. The red ones looked softer than the black ones. I could feel the top of my head starting to bake in the sun. I had to get out of this hole, but it didn’t look like it was going to be easy. I put my hands palm-down at the edge of the hole, and tried pushing myself up, but I barely got off the ground. My heart sank. On the opposite bank, I could see the gray chimney of what looked like some kind of factory.

    Throughout this passage, and the novel in general, Asa shares a combination of declarative sentences and limited perceptions. The lines describing the hole land with unsettling force, assigning to the landscape a kind of willful malevolence that is all the more frightening for being unexplained. The hole exists at the intersection of what is known and not known, what can be stated as fact and what remains impossibly enigmatic. She doesn’t know what the black animal she followed is, but she knows that cicadas cry to find a mate. She can name the click beetle, but outside there’s only white light and what might be a factory. Cicadas sound like machines, and maybe we do, too. The natural and the constructed landscapes overlap and blur, as they do throughout Asa’s journey past grasses and trash, rocks and plastic, ants and factories. Where, if anywhere, is the distinction between the built and unbuilt worlds, and which one is she in? Is the hole a natural occurrence or a trap made just for her? Nothing was missing, she states confidently. Yet in that moment she’s the one who’s missing, a creature who has tumbled into absence. 

    Lately I’ve been thinking about what climate fiction can look like, what it can do. There are evolving conventions and tropes around climate storytelling—the dystopian, the post-apocalyptic, the disaster novel, the eco-horror novel. The Hole is not exactly any of these or even overtly a climate change novel, and yet I find myself drawn to its evocations of disappearance and dislocation—the all-encompassing feeling that things have gone awry. The beads of ordinary life have come unstrung. Our days are marked by what Amitav Ghosh, writing of climate and literature, has called “uncanny and improbable events.” For me, The Hole’s oblique, dream-like confusion of categories across human and animal, plant and factory, speaks to the ever-shifting reality of life in the Anthropocene. Narrative causality falls apart; classifications blur; the center cannot hold. How to chronicle a world in which microplastics are found in human blood, in which known weather patterns fragment, in which the only constant may be the disappearance of flora and fauna, in which we move steadily towards our own extinction? What can we see from the hole we’re in? 

    Alix Ohlin is the author of six books of fiction, most recently the novel Dual Citizens and the story collection We Want What We Want. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and many other places. She lives in Vancouver and teaches at the University of British Columbia.

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