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From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police, here is a hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them.. 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 devoted aunt, her German grandmother, and her dashing, charming uncle who confidently sits as the family's patriarch.