From the award-winning author of The Memory Police and The Housekeeper and the Professor, a hypnotic novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them. 'A story of first enchantments and last gasps...Effervescent.' --New York Times Book Review 'A transfixing coming of age tale.' --TIME 'One of the literary events of the year.' --Parade In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt's family. Tomoko's aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home--and handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company--are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family's pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion--Tomoko's dignified and
