In ancient Greece and Rome, if you were out in the middle of the day and came across what you thought was a ghost, you probably weren’t seeing an actual representative of the dead come back for mischief or menace, but rather some not-quite-specter that qualified as a “warning apparition.”1 I’m guessing you still would’ve gotten goosebumps, though, even in the safety of broad daylight.
Reading Hiroko Oyamada’s brief novel The Hole, I kept wondering whether something similar was showing up for the protagonist.2 Asa moves with her husband to the provincial town in which he grew up, and where his job has transferred him. Because he’ll make good money, and because they can live in his parents’ second home rent free, it doesn’t really matter that there’s no readily available job for her.
And it’s not that she minds all that much; having been slaving away at some uninspiring and thankless temp position, Asa isn’t disappointed to give it up. But she doesn’t know anyone in this small town, not even her in-laws, really. And with no means of transportation and the summer heat bringing every unnecessary form of movement to a halt, and the cicadas so ever-present and loud they seem sometimes to dwell inside her, the situation grows tiresome pretty quickly. But then Asa’s mother-in-law, Tomiko, asks her to run an errand.
On the way there, Asa catches sight of some sort of animal she’s never seen—maybe a dog, maybe something else; all she can tell is that it’s black and furry, and has spindly legs. When it veers off into the grass by the river, she follows it—and promptly falls into a hole, one that seems to fit her perfectly. She’s rescued by a neighbor lady she’s never seen before—but who seems to know all about her, referring to Asa, as will soon become pretty standard practice around here, as “the bride.” From here on out, it’s a confrontation with characters who aren’t exactly strange, but who just seem oddly out of place or are perhaps seen only by Asa: children playing in the aisles of the convenience store, a brother-in-law she never even knew existed—and of course, the furry creature every now and then. And always, being confronted by some pale-skinned person who knows who she is, but about whom she knows nothing.3
We could simply be dealing with a subtle Obon story; the strange goings-on do happen, after all, before and after the few days during high summer when the dead are thought to check back in on the living—and where those spirits are usually guided back to their own world thanks to lanterns floated down a river. But if that were all there was to it, the story wouldn’t make much sense to or resonate with audiences unfamiliar with Japanese culture.
Anyone who’s ever lived in a small town—especially if you’ve moved there from a larger place—can probably identify that sense of claustrophobia, of always being watched, even when it would seem you’re safe behind your own solidly opaque walls. You’ll catch the corner of a lace curtain being pulled back in a window—the action carried out in a way both intended and not to be noticed—and you’ll know some town matriarch is gathering bits of data to be passed along the inner grapevine.4 Or you’ll be assigned a role and title, based on your relationship to other members of your family, that will stick, unbudging, for all time. Whether unjust or not, spot-on or ridiculously off the mark, your fate has been sealed as Jean’s daughter, or one of those newcomers, a socialist, a bad father. Asa will always be known as “the bride,” never as herself, never called by name or assumed to have defining qualities or desires or roles of her own. And the town will continue somehow to build up its knowledge about her and her family; the neighbor who pulled her out of the hole already seems to be keeping track of their comings and goings, knowing Asa’s husband usually gets back from work extremely late.
We could, then, be dealing as well with a refined version of folk horror, the secrets and questions lingering for both the reader and Asa not as potentially leading to the discovery of supernatural beings in the hills or being trapped by a homey death cult, but instead just as a revelation of the uncanny nature of the everyday. But again, there’s more going on here, and I’m going to link Oyamada’s book to Franz Kafka not because it’s weird, but because it fits right in with his short story, “Before the Law.”
Here, a man from the country sits before the open gate of the Law, waiting to be let in, and held back by the implicit, sometimes verbal, threat of the doorkeeper. At the end of a life spent lingering there on his stool and asking ineffectual questions and making futile attempts to get through the gate, the man asks the doorkeeper why he’s been the only person ever to show up and try and find admittance to the Law. He’s told that “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.”5
Things seem to have been decided for Asa: her in-laws invited her and her husband to move into their second house next door; Tomiko takes charge of the move; all of her conversations with people Asa meets involve references to her family position and the characteristics or histories of her husband or in-laws. Her husband seems to be turning into his workaholic father, at home almost as little now as that rarely seen family member, and there’s a resemblance Asa can’t shake between Tomiko and a photograph of Tomiko’s own mother-in-law. Asa’s run-ins with her brother-in-law, her pursuit of the black animal, her attempts to communicate with or keep an eye on her husband’s grandfather: everything seems to hint at a system in place to whose workings she has no access, and about which anyone she asks seems unable or unwilling to provide an answer.
She finally sees Grandpa out walking in the middle of the night, and joined by her brother-in-law, follows the old man to the river, where he crawls into a hole. Asa does the same—but the investigation offers nothing in the way of answers. Kafka’s man from the country tried once to peek beyond the gate, and was rebuffed by threats of even more menacing doorkeepers to be found ahead. He received no clues about how things worked, or how the Law affected him. Jumping into a hole near Grandpa’s own, observing him watching the river from his sunken vantage point, Asa tries to get a glimpse of what’s driving this situation. She can’t see any further than the ground around her, though, and she’s left with no further clue about any of it—even though she realizes she’s now in the same hole as the elusive black animal. But then everyone leaves, with none of her questions answered about what’s just happened or why, and Grandpa is soon dead, the house filling up for the wake with old people no one’s ever seen, an elderly horde bringing with them strange rules and rituals and sutras, and Asa the only one who thinks there’s anything that needs to be explained. She’s never had any idea what’s taking place in this town, and if her only source of clarifying the state of things, its own Law, is dependent on the people who live there, she’ll never be any the wiser. The Law of the place directs her life, but even when everything’s out in full view in the bright, hot glare of day, that direction always occurs in ways she can neither understand nor, apparently, influence.
The only thing that’s certain, though, for Asa or for anyone else who stays in that small-town universe is that, if you’re to survive, you’ll become one of them, one of the acceptable inhabitants. Try to resist, and at best, you’ll only keep hitting your head against the same invisible wall, lucky not to be shunned or worse. Consider the resentment that occurs when “outsiders” move into a place and try to change things, whether by not showing up for church on Sundays, by making a show of yourself doing yoga on the back porch, or by trying to amend a city noise ordinance. Whether just recently arrived or still regarded as new after two or three generations of family have considered the place home, the outsider may never be allowed into the ranks of the true, original citizenry able to understand, influence, or even have access to the operation of community Law.6
You could call the way things work in the closed universe of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel an especially extreme case of small-town Law’s functioning, Jack the caretaker being gradually molded into the sort of person acceptable to the place’s hidden old guard. Mark Fisher describes how
Jack is drawn out of the present… into an aeonic time in which various historic moments are conflated and compressed…. The suggestion is that the apparitions which alternately seduce and menace Jack are creatures like himself, hapless individuals who have been drawn into the Overlook’s fatal influence. What remains undisclosed is the nature of the forces that actually control the hotel.7
And even by end of the film (or book), no one, whether inside the story or just viewing it (or reading it) from a safe outside distance, knows what those forces are or what their ultimate aim is. But we do know that Jack’s been assigned a part in it—has in fact been fated to take up that role, long before he even knew the place existed. When he encounters the former—and very dead in “real life”— caretaker Delbert Grady, Jack’s insistence on the real-world history he’s experienced is countered by Grady’s knowledge of the universe they now inhabit: “You are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, Sir. I’ve always been here.”8
Here we have the Law functioning in its own inexplicable, impossible, irrevocable, way. Within its confines, you’ll be drawn into its practices whether you like it or not, whether you understand it or not, even if you try to push back against some or all of the nonsense, if you attempt to establish a place and personality you’ve chosen on your own, according to your own logic. There’s no way to reason with the Law or its representatives, no way to get a real explanation for why things function as they do, or to convince anyone subject to it that things could be or look different, no harm done. The rule of the Law may force you into the choice of succumbing and staying, or fleeing in order to keep intact what you understand as yourself or maybe even your sanity.
Asa seems to have chosen the former option; why fight against a generally comfortable life, weird as it seems, when all that’s left out in the rest of the world is another stupid office job that will wear you down as you scrimp and save to put a tiny roof over your head and keep up your strength with crappy processed foods—another sort of Law that will shape you in its own unrelenting way? In the world of The Hole, there appears to be no middle ground between the big-city rat race and the stifling and often eerie Law of the country that prescribes not only who you are, but who you’re destined to become: rule in one way or another by phantoms real or metaphorical or hallucinated. Staring into the mirror at the end of the book, Asa sees “Tomiko staring back.”9 We’re left to wonder whether it’s the image of Tomiko as the embodiment of a role Asa’s destined to take on, or as a face she will gradually resemble just as Tomiko resembled the photograph of her own mother-in-law. What we do know, though, is that in this place, she will always be the bride.
D. Felton, Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 6.
Hiroko Oyamada, The Hole, transl. David Boyd (New York: New Directions), 2020.
I also wonder, given the uncertainty about whether many of the characters in The Hole are living or dead or real at all, whether Oyamada could be playing on a tradition that goes back at least to The Tale of Genji, in which a living person’s spirit goes out at night and attacks other people. Here, Fumiko Enchi’s novel Masks (transl. Juliet Winters Carpenter, New York: Aventura, 1983) does amazing work at bringing that tradition into the contemporary world.
But with all the cameras everyone seems to have on their homes and buildings now, are we all in some ways turning ourselves into lots of small towns, keeping up with the context-free comings-and-goings of characters on the sidewalk or waiting to be buzzed in while a gate camera holds its gaze on the code-punching taking place? No hiding behind curtains or peepholes is necessary now, when the camera will absorb any need for us to pretend we’re hiding our nosiness.
Franz Kafka, “Before the Law,” in The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, transl. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1972), 150.
Think stereotyped portrayals of the Deep South, as in Fletch Lives, where some townsfolk are upset in the 1989 in which the movie was made about an “undesirable carpetbagger” taking up residence. (Written by Gregory McDonald and Leon Capetanos, directed by Michael Ritchie [Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 1989].) Or the frighteningly relevant school board meeting from Field of Dreams, in which a townswoman tries to link the invalidity of her opponent’s message to who that woman’s husband is: “Well, your husband plowed under his corn and built a baseball field… the weirdo… At least I’m not married to the biggest horse’s ass in three counties.” (Written and directed by Phil Alden Robinson, based on W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe [Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 1989]).
Mark Fisher, “Alien Traces: Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Christopher Nolan,” in The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 112–13.
Diane Johnson and Stanley Kubrick, The Shining, based on the novel by Stephen King, directed by Stanley Kubrick (Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers, 1980).
Oyamada, 110.