What Do We Want From Love? For These Couples, It’s Not Sex.

DON’T LAUGH AT OTHER PEOPLE’S SEX LIVES, by Nao-Cola Yamazaki; translated by Polly Barton BEAUTIFUL DISTANCE, by Nao-Cola Yamazaki; translated by Charlotte Goff

The gap that yawns between lovers at the start of a relationship — the sexual fumbling, the emotional pratfalls — foreshadows the deepening gulf at the end of a life, when grief transfigures the beloved into an object of awe. Who is this person I’m just getting to know? Who is this body I’ve spent a life with?

In a pair of pocket-size novels newly published in English, Nao-Cola Yamazaki attempts to untangle both ends of this story.

In the archly titled “Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives,” published in Japan in 2004, a young art student falls for his professor, and the sketching quickly turns into sex. Seduction isn’t the right word for what happens between them; their relationship is oddly unerotic and unthreatened. Even when her husband finds them together in his apartment, the only consequence is that he makes them deep-fried chicken and shu mai dumplings. (The food in both of these novels is sexier than the bodies.)

The hook isn’t whether this couple will stay together — we know from the beginning that they won’t — but the more fundamental question of what draws humans together at all. Despite some hokey declarations of sentiment (“Was there any point in living if your heart wasn’t on fire?”), Yamazaki’s answer is more opaque. The shape of the lover can surprise us; romance may not be that romantic.

From the start of one relationship — awkward, stuttering, selfish — Yamazaki moves, 12 years later, to the end of another — respectful, graceful, if also frustratingly incomplete.

In her 2016 novel “Beautiful Distance,” a man in his 40s processes the rapid decline of his wife from cancer, a word he rarely allows himself to vocalize. Their relationship has developed over 15 years, and its success has little to do with desire. These lovers have fully realized lives apart from each other — he’s an insurance salesman, she’s the chef at an artisanal sandwich shop for whom the gift of a fresh tomato in the hospital is transporting.

“Our idea of being a couple,” the husband narrates, “has always been two individuals choosing to spend their lives together side by side.”

Attention to his wife’s body has slid from acquisitiveness to care: He moisturizes her face, trims her eyebrows, braids her hair. “How have I never realized how good it could feel, just to cut the nails of the person you love?” (This is the lover I’d want.)

Yamazaki is attuned to the differences between what we say we want from love and what it looks like in reality, unkempt and unsatisfying. Reading the books together, you can feel the writer maturing through her prose. Polly Barton, the translator of “Don’t Laugh at Other People’s Sex Lives,” mentored Charlotte Goff, who translated “Beautiful Distance,” and both capture Yamazaki’s laconic simplicity.

In “Sex Lives,” the callow 19-year-old narrator’s observations about life are as vapid as his criticisms of his 39-year-old paramour’s appearance: “Boobs are just the best things”; women’s “feelings were forever changing”; “relationships were always about the time you spent one-on-one with the other person.” The reader has to sift through the pile of maxims to locate the amorphous desire pulsing at the center of this rather undignified hero. Is it a desire for this woman, or just to be a person capable of loving?

“Beautiful Distance” asks a much more compelling question: How do we bridge the worlds of the living and the dying? In one, we’re attached to social expectations, to a highly ordered work culture, to forward-moving timelines. But once we encounter the other, time begins to spread like a leak behind a wall.

When he finally — resentfully — learns his wife’s life expectancy from a doctor, the narrator is still clutching the promise of a future with both fists. Daydreaming about another season of cherry blossoms, he proposes a picnic with his wife “this time next year,” though they both know she won’t be around. He immediately regrets saying it, but “if there’s a way to live happily without thinking about the future, I haven’t found it yet.” Where the art student beholds his teacher with an adoration verging on narcissism, the husband exhibits a kind of paralyzing respect: “Standing and facing her now feels like standing and facing a god.”

What should we ask from the experience of attachment? These slight but bruising novels don’t claim to know, but Yamazaki suggests that intimacy is a totem we carve over time, with our own coarse tools — and one that never quite resembles what we hoped for.

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