A Very Special Book: Hollow Inside by Asako Otani

I joined NetGalley recently, which is a really cool website where you can request Advance Reader Copies of books in exchange for reviews. Since I've been both reading a lot more since late last year, and writing a lot more since committing to my beautiful blog at the beginning of January, I thought, yes, this is my time to get really into reviewing books.

Of course, the prospect of a delicious new book that isn't released to the public yet also whet my appetite. I need those juicy, secret books. I need to be special and ahead of the curve. As a sidenote, I just looked up where the word "whet" comes from, because I realised I had no idea, and it turns out it comes from knife sharpening. You know, like a whetstone - what you whet your wheapon whith. You get it. Very good.

The first ARC (this is techno-speak for Advanced Reader Copy, as mentioned above) I picked up from NetGalley was this enticing, short Japanese debut novel - Hollow Inside, by Asako Otani. It's out now in the UK, and won't be published in the USA until the 5th of May, but I read it January. Because I'm very special.

I chose it partly because this cover spoke to me - the open dog head with two little people inside, yes, okay, nice and sinister, slightly reminiscent of some of the promotional material for Severance - and partly because it's a brisk 112 pages. I thought I should try a short book first and get to grips with the NetGalley experience, and I'm glad I did, because I ran into my first technical mishap immediately: this book was only available as a PDF. As you probably know, reading a PDF on your phone is what we like to call "hellish". PDFs aren't formatted for that sort of the thing. So, thankfully, the length of this novella made it bearable, but in the future I will be looking for gorgeous epubs only. I have learned. I am a fighter.

Without further ado though, let's talk about the book.

 

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FEMINISM AND PLASTIC ANIMALS. HERE WE GO. 

There's a bit of a trend at the moment for short, crunchy Japanese novels that concern themselves with pissed off and alienated women. I read Emi Yagi's Diary of a Void and loved it. I thought Convenience Store Woman was pretty cool. And here is a new entry into the canon - a novella about a middle-aged woman who moves in with another middle-aged woman, and feels kinda bad about it.

Here they are. The books.

Hirai is an office worker grappling with the subtle ways judgement manifests in her life. She worries about her mother's expectations for her romantic life, and she worries that her co-workers would think it's super weird for her to live with a female friend at her age. 

Them.

She's 38, and so the pressure she feels to have children is coming to a head. This is all expressed in a wonderfully tentative, suppressed way. Hirai's thoughts are clearly in turmoil - she doesn't WANT to get a boyfriend or have a little baby - but she can't quite accept them. Instead she lies down on her bed periodically and pretends to be dead in these frank, tiny moments of desperation.

"I let all the strength drain from my body. I gave myself over to gravity and sharpened all my awareness right up to my fingertips. I lay on the bed not moving an inch. Pretending to be dead. I sometimes did this.

I was dead. Nothing in this world had anything to do with me. I thought about the dead dogs. The dead dogs that had been doted on by their owners. They had left fake bodies in the world as figurines, and their souls were running around the other world wagging their tails. My soul joined them frolicking there."

I love these perfect little expressions of a hopeless need for escape. I love the latching on to these dogs as adequately and vividly loved. Her roommate, Suganuma, makes 3D-printed custom sculptures of people's dead dogs, and this is used as a very fun metaphor for brokenness and acceptance.

"I picked up what looked like a reject figure that was lying on the floor. It was of a chihuahua, hollow inside and surprisingly light. The threadlike filament had become tangled around its body, as though enveloping it in a spider's web."  

That's right, the book title gets namedropped. There we go! It's Hollow Inside, baby!

The book is, for the most part, very straightforward. Nothing much happens, but there are these pockets of sweetness that I found so touching. There are also some good moments of humour, and I like that often when Hirai expresses an emotion, it's kind of intense, like it needs to burst out of her. She has this incredible disgust for men, finds them so physically repulsive that she can't help but be disgusted by women who touch them, and I just love the way this is explored. She feels so trapped in heterosexual expectations that she wants to THROW UP when a man looks at her. It's so, so good. Just the sheer magnitude of this caged animal reaction to the world.

There's something special nestled into this unassuming, simple story.

Four out of five defective dogs

★★★★☆