Two of Oyamada Hiroko's best-known works are her proletariat debut novella "The Factory" (Kojo, 2013) and her Akutagawa-prize winning novella "The Hole" (Ana, 2014). Scholars are only beginning to shift their focus to Oyamada, and as of yet, little scholarly work has been dedicated to analyzing the animals that are characteristic of her writing. In my thesis (Hayley Gerlach), I examine the liminal space between human and nonhuman worlds in Oyamada's speculative fiction and what these spaces say about societal and environmental responsibility.
