Hiroko Oyamada - Weasels in the Attic

This is a fascinating and unnerving short novel that examines gender roles, masculinity and parenthood through three short stories. Food, hospitality and friendship play a central role in all the stories with two friends meeting at three separate locations - a bankrupt fish shop, a expensive new home in the remote countryside and trapped as unexpected overnight guests in a third home by a blizzard following a dinner party.

The narrator, in all of them, is happily married yet he and his wife have yet to have a child, and in the the stories he is constantly reminded of this as his friends and other guests are beginning families. This draws out questions of parenthood and children and the authors highlights misogyny and inequality with female constantly having to take responsibility to childcare and cooking. This is cleverly weaved into wider portrayals of Japanese culture, cusine and apparent social norms - though I wondered how many of these came from my own perception of Japan rather than reality.

But what makes these stories and the novel they form stand out is the sense of unease and strangeness that lies everywhere in the book. I kept expecting catastrophe. This is heightened by two things - the unreality of the conversations the friends have - a key one centring on a weasel infestation and the strange locations - a disused aquarium shop where the friends eat shrimp that is clearly fish food and a locked down home in a blizzard. But there is also the unease driven by the subordinate role of the women and, in a couple of cases (though not the narrator) the readers sense that there is something slightly inappropriate about the age differences within several of the couples.

This is a strange novel, but it is interesting and a very short read. I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. One to be shared and reread.