A Nanny on the Run With Someone Else’s Daughter

THE TOKYO SUITE, by Giovana Madalosso; translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato

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.