Yuko Tsushima wrote over thirty-five novels in her lifetime, but only a handful are available in English. The celebrated Japanese writer is largely known in the Anglosphere for her early work – three sharp novels about single mothers living in 1970s Tokyo. Wildcat Dome, published in Japan three years before Tsushima’s death in 2016, is the first novel we have from her later career. It is at once a more political and imaginative work.  

Mitch and Kazu are not quite brothers, the abandoned offspring of Japanese women and American GIs. Yonko is their almost-cousin, the would-be niece of a Catholic woman who adopted the boys from an orphanage. The novel opens in 2011, just after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. An elderly Mitch, who fled Tokyo decades ago, has returned to find the place ‘essentially unchanged’. He calls up Yonko, who’s refusing to evacuate. Their conversation is followed by the outline of a shared memory (‘Was that how it happened – or not at all?’) of a young girl’s death, which Mitch, Kazu and Yonko witnessed.

What ensues makes gradual sense of this enigmatic beginning. Tsushima is associated in Japan with short stories as well as with novels, and each of the eleven chapters here has a concentrated quality. Exposition is kept to a minimum. Most of the time, the trio’s thoughts combine in Tsushima’s third-person