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.

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

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.

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........

© Foreign Policy