At the Edge of the Woods by Masatsugu Ono, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter, is about a father parenting through an apocalypse in the absence of his pregnant wife. Alternatively, Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi, translated (like Weasels) by David Boyd and co-translated by Lucy North, is about a woman who fakes a pregnancy to escape sexist expectations at work. Slated for release later this year, The Thorn Puller by Hiromi Ito, translated by Jeffrey Angles, is about a mother juggling children in the US and parents in Japan. Writing about parenthood isn’t new, of course: Woman Running in the Mountains by Yuko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt, is an important four-decade-old novel about single motherhood reissued earlier this year.

Weasels in the Attic: Oyamada, Hiroko, Boyd, David

Now the typical weasels that you may be thinking about are only slightly bigger. Take the long-tailed weasel or the tropical weasel. On the low end, their weight can be around 3 ounces, while becoming as heavy as 12 ounces. Just like any other animal foe that steps up to a weasel, a cat is just as likely to be bitten by their power oral grip, and will most likely die from it. Weasels bite down at the base of the skull until it breaks! This amazing natural mechanism is a great asset during the winter because it camouflages the weasel while it’s in the snow! It works so well, that this feature is the primary reason as to why weasels can still catch their prey in the snow, and continue to eat. Here are some of our favorite productsThis "novel" is comprised of 3 brief, well-written, connected short stories, each with a seemingly different focus: 1) high-end fish collecting; 2) Weasels at friend's new house; 3) friend and new bride's new baby, and high-end fish and fish tanks in the guest bedroom. Is there a larger through-line here? I'm not going to say no. Our protagonist and his wife are trying to get pregnant...kind of. They're going through the motions of getting tested, etc., and she seems to have a deep affection for the friend's new baby. The solution for the weasels in the second story, brought to light by the protagonist's wife (that of drowning a female weasel so the other weasels will hear its warning screams) was disturbing. That the friends never had a weasel problem again and it was all thanks to her was also disturbing but thankfully occurred "off-screen." My grandma told my dad that it was the mother weasel they'd caught, and that a whole family had been living up there. She said that sound - the mother weasel's final scream - was a warning to the father weasel and their children...It's a good thing we got the mother, she said. When you get a baby, they just scream for help. Father weasels get violent and wear themselves out trying to chew through the cage before you can even get them in the water. The mother's the best" A weasel’s underground tunnel can be up to ten feet long! Each burrow contains at least one adult weasel, and three to six kits (baby weasels.)

BOOK REVIEW: WEASELS IN THE ATTIC (2022) BY HIROKO OYAMADA

Book Genre: Asia, Asian Literature, Contemporary, Cultural, Fiction, Japan, Japanese Literature, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novella, Short Stories Propagation does not guarantee flourishing. As Urabe says of his fish, “Some lay lots of eggs, others don’t. But quantity doesn’t necessarily mean anything.” And so, though the stories are suffused with the narrator’s uncertain longing, they each also contain warnings: Urabe’s sudden and unexpected death in “Death in the Family,” for example, or the horrifying shrieks of a drowning mother weasel in “The Last of the Weasels.” In “Yukiko,” a warning comes from Saiki, who is raising tropical fish in his new home. The fish live in tanks in the room where the narrator and his wife sleep, and in a terrifying episode of sleep paralysis, the narrator dreams that one of the fish—a bonytongue, long and silver, the fish the narrator likes best—has leapt out of its tank and landed on him, weighing him down. “I could feel the bonytongue twisting,” he says. “It had to be in pain. If it died like this, Saiki was going to be upset. I didn’t want this fish dying on top of me. I tried to raise my voice—to say something. I couldn’t even get my tongue to move.” The narrator is as helpless as the fish—and then he wakes up. The fish is in its tank, its scales shining. “I can really see the appeal of tropical fish. Maybe I should get some of my own,” he says to Saiki, after his terror has been dispelled in the morning light. “Don’t do it, man,” Saiki says, warning of the work involved. “I know they look pretty, but they’re living things.” There is also the social aspect that the young wives in the novel are doing all the domestic labor, from caring for the infants to preparing the food and drinks in each of these scenes. It is a critique of the inequality of domestic labor standards, which occurs even in households where the male partner is under the impression he is helping equally. In Dr. Kate Manne’s book Entitled she cites a US study (the novel is Japan, of course, not the US, but the ideas still apply) that ‘ working women took on around two-thirds of at-home child care responsibilities’, and of the 46% of male participants who said they were coequal parents, only 32% of their partners agreed. For the three men in Weasels, this is seen as normal and when the narrator feels bad the new, possibly underaged mother is doing all the labor, social stigma keeps him from speaking up about it. New Book Announcement: “The Inscription of Things: Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China” by Thomas Kelly I’ll say this: weasels are way more ferocious than I thought! Did you know that weasels are carnivores? They prey on small animals like mice or chipmunks, but are known to take on much bigger prey like rabbits, fish, voles, birds, and other small mammals.Their size is exactly the reason as to why an extra-small, or small live trap is necessary. How Long Is A Weasel? So if you have a lake or personal body of water on your property, you can potentially expect a burrow that tunnels underground through your home. Will A Weasel Kill A Cat? Rather ironic that once I'm done with this book, I found a leak on my roof that just smells so suspiciously and thought, was it perhaps the Weasels in the Attic? Though of course, I did not do what Saki and Yoko were advised to do. Dig as deep as you want, disagree with me if you will, but I found this to be an exception to Cervantes's rule: “There is no book so bad…that it does not have something good in it.”

Home Remedy for Getting Rid of a Weasel | Hunker Home Remedy for Getting Rid of a Weasel | Hunker

Larger weasels, like the long-tailed weasel that’s found in North America, and the tropical weasel that inhabits South America have been documented to grow between 10 and 12 inches in length. Born in Hiroshima in 1983, Hiroko Oyamadawon the Shincho Prize for New Writers for The Factory, which was drawn from her experiences working as a temp for an automaker’s subsidiary. Her novel The Holewon Akutagawa Prize. From the acclaimed author of The Hole and The Factory, a thrilling and mysterious work that explores fertility, masculinity, and marriage in contemporary Japan.What have I contemplated though? I'm not sure I'm getting it. This sounds like a collection of carelessly chosen phrases that failed to convey any figurative meaning. Similar to the denouement —there have been numerous interpretive deconstructions because it was so unconstrained, consequently made the novella appears to be as obscure as its subject matter. Is it about patriarchy? motherhood? or simply weasels in the attic? I guess I'll never catch it. Clearly fertility is the key theme, Both Urabe and Saiki have shown little interest in marriage and sex but, when they do marry, a child is produced fairly promptly, while our narrator and his wife struggle throughout the book to have a child, though the fact that they are older may be an issue. The fish and weasels seem to have few problems in this area. Despite its elements of surrealism and the understated but constant senses of uneasiness it manages to convey, I find the writing a tad too sparse to be effective. Weasels are natively found in woodlands coniferous forests. Within that same domain, you can find their predators like owls, foxes, snakes, hawks, and eagles lurking around to catch a solid furry meal.

Weasels in House? (Helpful Guide and Facts) How to Get Rid Of Weasels in House? (Helpful Guide and Facts)

Despite his desire for a child, the narrator later seems surprised to see how fatherhood has changed his friend. When Yoko says that Saiki “does everything from morning to evening” except feed the baby, the narrator exclaims, “Wait, so he changes her diapers?” “The Saiki I knew wasn’t the type who voluntarily took care of any child—even his own. I was pretty sure he didn’t like kids,” he comments, possibly jealous, given that unlike Saiki he does like children and, when he was younger, helped take care of his sisters’ children, playing with them and singing them lullabies. The narrator then laughs when Saiki, speaking to his baby daughter, refers to himself as “dada.” The narrator does not say whether his surprise is that any man should claim such a name for himself or that Saiki in particular is claiming this name. As for Saiki, he views the name practically: “It’s too hard for her to say anything else. I’m going to be ‘dada’ until she can actually talk.” Here’s a helpful tip: weasels dig their den near a prominent source of water like a river, pond, or stream, and where there is an abundance of rodents and bugs to feast on.

We see this imbalance of gender present again in the second story. What initially appears to be a simple tale about Saiki dealing with a weasel-infested attic soon evolves into a critique of men’s passivity, as compared to women’s dynamism. Every trap Saiki sets for the weasels only catches the babies, which he then takes out to the mountains. The weasels seem to have foiled Saiki’s efforts to get rid of them, they keep breeding (again bringing up ideas about fertility) and will not leave his attic. Saiki has his whole life in the countryside disrupted by these tiny animals that have made a home in his attic. While he eventually decides to give up and co-exist unhappily with the weasels, an interesting solution is offered by our unnamed narrator’s wife, who is also not given a name. Rather than being known or referred to as a friend as the unnamed narrator is, his wife is simply referred to as “wife”. Thus, her personhood is only asserted by her relationship with her husband. Again, this reinforces the collections critique of how women are treated in Japanese society, at once required to do all the housework and childrearing yet not allowed to have their own interests or personalities, or in this case a name. These are three stories involving more or less the same cast of characters. The stories evolve in that in the first story we meet an old friend of the narrator and his new wife. In the second story another friend has also married. In the third we meet the second friend and his wife, plus the new addition to the family. These tunnels are used for general traveling from one side of the terrain to the other, or as a stealth passageway into local residential structures…like your yard or farm.! In The Hole, the bland formality of corporate life has spread, like an infection, to the family home. In Weasels in the Attic, it extends to the bedroom. When forty-year-old married couples are forced to discuss intimate matters with each other, they speak with the stilted bashfulness of middle schoolers in sex-ed class: At first, it would be a game of cat-and-weasel, simply chasing and running around. Until the cat somehow corners the weasel. And with its life on the line, the weasel will do everything in its power to outsmart the cat.