Weasels in the Attic

There is this pervasive sense of unease threaded throughout the book, like an unseen menace lurking in the margins. Digging into the dried shrimp fish food in place of any available snacks seems like it's ripe for some sort of reveal. The weasel infestation threatens something more. The reluctance to stay the night at a friends home, only to find yourself falling into a troubled sleep amidst the blue green glow of aquarium lights, tilts to some creeping fear.

Nope. It's not that the looming menace is revealed to be a pile of laundry with the flick of a switch - we're never truly afforded a glimpse at anything that might lend some shape to our unease.

Maybe that disquiet is meant to be paired with the notions of parenthood. There's the breeding of discus fish, the power of the mother weasel, and the parade of friends with their newborns as the narrator and his wife struggle to conceive a child. And maybe that's all the more ominous given the current population crisis, with Japan seeing the lowest number of births in a century paired with the fact that it enjoys one of the highest life expectancies.

Maybe I'm just grasping at straws, a Western reader that needs more resolution to allay my unease, but I just couldn't fully connect with this one.