Fault Lines

DEBUT Mizuki should be happy with her industrious husband, two adorable children, and enviable Tokyo apartment, but in the first pages of this fresh and surprising novel she describes how close she came to flinging herself off their 32nd-floor balcony. Maybe it’s because her husband, once good-natured and curious, is now always work-stressed and barely communicative, even stepping over her as if she were a dog while she kneels on the floor doing laundry and pleading for some help. Mizuki has lived and studied in New York and used to be a lounge singer, so she’s had some aspirations. But she traded what she saw as a going-nowhere job for marriage and now works as a cultural instructor for expats when she’s not striving to be the perfect Japanese mother—a role she keeps muddling even as the author delivers a brilliantly exact description of what it’s like to have children. On an outing with friends, Mizuki meets charming restaurateur Kiyoshi, which opens her to a different way of being.