Today’s GalleyCrush is Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd, forthcoming from New Directions on October 6, 2020.
Perfect pitch: Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, The Hole is by turns reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, David Lynch, and My Neighbor Totoro, but is singularly unsettling.
First lines: “I moved out here with my husband. We’d found out about his transfer at the end of May. His new office was going to be in the same prefecture, but far from where he’d been working. A local branch office out in the country.”
Book notes: Paperback, fiction, 112 pages.
Author bio: Born in Hiroshima in 1983, Hiroko Oyamada won the Shincho Prize for New Writers for The Factory (New Directions, 2019), which was drawn from her experiences working as a temp for an automaker’s subsidiary.
Translator bio: David Boyd is an assistant professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.
