Weasels in the Attic

"Strange, short and pointless."

"“We live our lives in the groups we have—in our cities, our countries, even though we didn’t choose them. Know what I mean? We like to tell ourselves it’s love, that we’re choosing our own partners. But in reality, we’re just playing the cards we’ve been dealt.”<br/><br/>Weasels in the Attic is a surrealist social commentary about fertility, relationships, and masculinity. It is split up between three short stories which covers the same group of people as they progress in time. <br/><br/>One of the most prevalent theme is how fertility impacts relationships. It is told through the MC and his wife, who struggle to conceive, and his best friend who marries in the second story and has a child in the third story. <br/><br/>Another minor theme is how the author portrays the relationships between the characters that are involved. In each of the stories, the wife/significant other are the ones doing the bulk of the work, keeping the household running while the husbands/male significant sit around. This definitely seems to be commentary about gender roles in Japanese society.<br/><br/>I enjoyed the themes that were covered, would have loved a little more detail and it tried to cover them in a unique way that was let down by the novella length (around 70 pages). A unique book that if you want to try something different and something short that you can finish in a day, give it a shot"