• Japan

Many rich families seem to keep skeletons in the closet. This October, familial wealth and intrigue show up in Japanese and Palestinian novels tracing generations and revealing startling secrets in the process. These aren’t ghost stories, but they may still end up haunting you.

Mina’s Matchbox: A Novel

Yoko Ogawa, trans. Stephen B. Snyder (Pantheon, 288 pp., $28, August 2024)

The month before Moo Deng, the little pygmy hippopotamus in a Thai zoo, took over the internet, a novel partly centered on the same animal was finally translated into English: Mina’s Matchbox, written by Japanese author Yoko Ogawa.

Originally published in 2006, Mina’s Matchbox is equal parts whimsical and haunting. It follows 12-year-old Tomoko as she spends a year at her aunt’s home in coastal Japan in 1972. Her aunt’s husband is half German; whenever she “came up in any context, she was always referred to as ‘the one who had married a foreigner’—as if the epithet were actually part of her name.” It’s not just this family’s wealth that entices Tomoko, but their foreignness. Many of the status symbols in the Spanish colonial-style villa are imported from Germany—appliances, furniture, a golden carriage, a Mercedes-Benz. Yet the household’s greatest luxury comes from Liberia: Pochiko, the pygmy hippo, who takes Tomoko’s sickly cousin Mina to and from school and is “the most expensive vehicle in the house.”

Mina’s Matchbox is a much more domestic tale than The Memory Police, Ogawa’s brilliant dystopian novel that was a finalist for the 2020 International Booker Prize. But still the outer world encroaches on the family’s life. Tomoko is entranced by her half- and quarter-Asian relatives’ looks; she notes their chestnut hair, “deep recesses” around her uncle’s eyes, a “rich shadow” cast by the bridge of Mina’s nose. Tomoko and the family she is living with have clear pride in their country, but bygone European grandeur seems to hold a certain draw for all of them.

The war is mentioned only in passing. Yet we slowly learn more about Tomoko’s German great-aunt, who begins to speak her native language as the family follows that year’s Summer Olympics in Munich. Much of the book unfolds as a series of small mysteries like this, rendering a coming-of-age tale utterly engrossing. Somehow Ogawa’s book, translated by Stephen Snyder, captures both the petty concerns of adolescence and also the allure, and horrors, of the wider world.—Chloe Hadavas

The Coin: A Novel

Yasmin Zaher (Catapult, 240 pp., $27, July 2024) 

Palestinian writer Yasmin Zaher does not name the narrator and protagonist of her debut novel, The Coin, which follows an ultrawealthy Palestinian woman who moves to New York City to become a teacher at an all-boys school. She is woefully underqualified for the job, having obtained it via connections, and proves a reckless educator—pocketing money students raised at a charity bake sale and regularly holding what she calls a “free class,” where students sit around and do nothing.

But above all, the narrator is obsessed with cleanliness. “In New York I saw the dirtiest people I had ever seen,” she explains, “I came from Palestine … and the women in my life placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives.” She details the grime she sees everywhere in the city, devoting hours each week to what she calls a “CVS Retreat” to rid her body of the dirt it has amassed. Eventually, her disgust leads her to abandon her Burberry trench coat, only to become ensnared in a multinational luxury bag reselling scheme after she encounters an unhoused man wearing the jacket weeks later.

Throughout this experience, the narrator suffers—and inflicts on others—fraud and abuse, yet she is ultimately able to escape the scheme. But what she is not able to run from is her past.

Early in her cleaning routine, the narrator wakes to feel a discomfort in her body. She is convinced that it is a coin—an Israeli shekel she once accidentally swallowed while on vacation as a child. “I was convinced that [the coin] was the cause of everything, that need for a tight grip on the universe, and especially the dirt,” she recounts.

Seeking to recover from her misadventures in the city, she travels to upstate New York and reflects on her childhood in Palestine. The result is an unconventional, absorbing, and deeply literal tale of Palestinian generational trauma.

“I thought about metal … and the landscape of my childhood, how it was saturated with coins,” the narrator says. “Roman coins, gold Abbasid coins, ancient Judean coins. There were shekels, mils, and drachmas. Emperors, gods, and queens. They didn’t decompose. They just stayed there, in the ground. And the coin in my body, it was going to stay there, until I died, and long after.”—Allison Meakem 

October Releases, in Brief

Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, famed for his autofiction, forays into the fantastical in The Third Realm, translated by Martin Aitken. In her debut novel Love Can’t Feed You, Cherry Lou Sy explores the fissures of family life caught between the United States and the Philippines. French enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq’s 2022 novel Annihilation, which considers political and moral decay in a near-future France, is translated into English by Shaun Whiteside. A queer coming-of-age tale in New York and Shanghai veers into the surreal in Mike Fu’s Masquerade. Anglo-Nigerian author Nikki May’s This Motherless Land, set between Somerset and Lagos, puts a decolonial spin on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

John Edgar Wideman traces the geographical and psychological journeys of enslaved Africans and Black Americans in the genre-bending Slaveroad. In Our Evenings, Booker Prize-winner Alan Hollinghurst explores class, race, and sexuality at an elite British boarding school and beyond. A Brazilian student at a New England college tries to sustain a relationship with her mother back home in Blue Light Hours, by National Book Award-winning translator Bruna Dantas Lobato. Argentinian novelist Rodrigo Fresán’s 2022 book Melvill, an invented biography of Herman Melville and his father, is translated into English by Will Vanderhyden. And in Italian author Paolo Giordano’s semiautobiographical Tasmania, translated by Antony Shugaar, a disillusioned writer seeks out human connection amid great environmental and political upheaval.—CH