Humanity is hurtling into outer space, creating new states of matter and developing ever-creepier forms of artificial intelligence — one of which I consulted to help compose this sentence — and yet still hasn’t solved child care.
“The Tokyo Suite,” the first novel by the Brazilian writer Giovana Madalosso to be translated into English, confronts this big problem in a tense, taut not-even-200 pages. The narrative toggles between the perspective of a live-in nanny, Maju, who has kidnapped her 4-year-old charge, Cora, and that of the girl’s distracted mother, Fernanda, the newly promoted executive producer at a TV channel. They are the same age, 44, and each evokes horror and sympathy in equal measure.
No one in the book is going anywhere near Japan; the action ranges from São Paulo to the Amazon. The Tokyo suite is a grand nickname Fernanda has given to the room she’s renovated and stocked with a mini-fridge and TV for the nanny, “so I could feel less colonial in my role as her boss.” Maju adds romance novels, hoarded chopsticks and the family’s artificial tree. It’s like a modern, grown-up version of the garret in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “A Little Princess” — or a smartly decorated prison cell.
Their own mothers are unavailable, and the men in their lives recessive and disappointing. Fernanda is married to Cacá, who spends his days at home fussing at terrariums with tweezers, and is the one to remember the name of Cora’s stuffed sheep, monitor the lice situation at school and get forms notarized. “He was born to care for things, whatever they were,” thinks his high-flying, cigarette-smoking, irritably boweled wife, who hired Maju but doesn’t even know her full name.
Naturally, their intimate relations have suffered (the marital fiction of the 2020s seems terminally clouded by ennui), and Fernanda has found herself in a hot affair, both sexual and emotional, with Yara, a female director of nature documentaries. They imitate the mating practices of bonobo apes and muse on the beauty and cruelty of alligators and other animal species, including, of course, humans. Reluctantly entering the third circle of hell, a.k.a. a children’s birthday party, Fernanda notes how “undermining other mothers helps lessen the constant feeling that we’re doing a terrible job” — then checks for texts from her new paramour.
In matters of love as well as money, Maju has been far less fortunate. Her virginity was taken violently at 17 by a janitor, “all fours” here losing all of the privileged, playful inflection that Miranda July gave the phrase last year. She develops a loving relationship with a cabdriver named Lauro, but he abandons her after she takes the 24-7 job with Fernanda, who only allows monthly “conjugal visits,” with the promise of a better financial future for their baby, should they have one.
It’s a terrible deal, with one twisted compensation: Maju develops a close, quasi-maternal bond with Cora, whom she calls her “Chickadee” and — once they’ve hit the road via double-decker bus — instructs to choose a new name for her impending new life, Ana. Stuck in a love motel with porn on the TV instead of cartoons, she devises games that make the little girl howl with laughter.
“I passed by her like a cumulonimbus,” Fernanda tells Cacá regretfully when they’ve realized, all too late, that their daughter and her caretaker are missing (the rise of location tracking, a calming aid or massive invasion of privacy depending on whom you consult, is largely elided in the book). “I only gave birth to Cora. To be a mother, you need to adopt the child after birth.”
Their fleeting time together has been frittered away at inappropriate locales like a bikini wax center. “It’ll be OK, mom,” the little one reassures her — parentifying, as it’s now called. During an ayahuasca trip, unaware of Cora’s disappearance, out of cellphone range and “beyond the reach of Starbucks,” she imagines her child in an Alice in Wonderlandish situation, grown to 10 times her size and trying to open a tiny door.
I’d been trying mightily to watch the third season of “The White Lotus” and gotten impatient with its fetishization of leisure, the hooting monkeys and poolside high jinks. Checking into “The Tokyo Suite” scratched some of the same itch for stories of class struggle. Sharp and smoky, to be inhaled rather than binged, it’s a novel for the working woman, in every sense of that redundant phrase.
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