SEE: LOSS. SEE ALSO: LOVE.

A man’s death is the central event in a patchwork narrative of childhood, motherhood, and continuity as experienced by his wife.

An introspective frankness flavors much of this debut, delivered as Kyoko’s first-person account of her life before, during, and after the time she spent with Levi, an American who died in an accident while she and their 18-month-old son, Alex, were visiting her parents in Japan. Levi’s Jewish family, Kyoko’s Japanese heritage, the fabric of her marriage and its afterlife, and Alex’s development over the years are the themes in chapters that loosely and not always chronologically connect events and feelings into a fictional mosaic. Several chapters have been published as short stories. The product of a not especially wealthy family, Kyoko shares various early memories including watching an anime film with graphic scenes of a nuclear bomb’s impact. This wartime trauma connects to time spent under the roof of Levi’s brother, Ben, a man with military connections and a different, more rigorous and responsible outlook than his laid-back sibling. Ben and Levi’s mother, Bubbe, offers a sweeter, more available version of family. Her exploration of dating leads to a riff on loneliness, love, and need. For all Kyoko’s grief, she is unsentimental about her marriage and experiences some satisfaction in parenting independently. Elsewhere, she stresses about money. “You’re cheap, obsessive and sometimes sickly paranoid,” Bubbe tells her as they argue over the cost of banana cream pie. “But it’s not hard to love you.” Love—of family, friends, partner, and child—crops up frequently, sometimes comically, as in a chapter that has Kyoko obsessing about a now-teenage Alex’s sex life. Put together, the scenes, musings, and snapshots evoke a woman struggling with identity and connection in a manner variously arbitrary, quirky, and insightful.

A modest, discursive novel offers an unusual psychology, piecemeal.