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.

Two new novels explore familial wealth and intrigue.

Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa 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, and Tomoko is fascinated by her half- and quarter-Asian relatives' looks. She notes their chestnut hair, “deep recesses” around her uncle's eyes, and a “rich shadow” cast by the bridge of Mina’s nose. Tomoko and the family she is living with have clear pride in their country, but bygone European grandeur seems to hold a certain draw for all of them.

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher follows an ultrawealthy Palestinian woman who moves to New York City to become a teacher at an all-boys school. She is woefully underqualified for the job, having obtained it via connections, and proves a reckless educator—pocketing money students raised at a charity bake sale and regularly holding what she calls a “free class,” where students sit around and do nothing. But above all, the narrator is obsessed with cleanliness. “In New York I saw the dirtiest people I had ever seen,” she explains, “I came from Palestine … and the women in my life placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives.”

She details the grime she sees everywhere in the city, devoting hours each week to what she calls a “CVS Retreat” to rid her body of the dirt it has amassed. Eventually, her disgust leads her to abandon her Burberry trench coat, only to become ensnared in a multinational luxury bag reselling scheme after she encounters an unhoused man wearing the jacket weeks later.