A Separation by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books)

When a mother worries about her son Christopher who has gone silent during his lengthy Greek vacation, she naturally calls the man’s wife. Not so naturally, the wife doesn’t tell her mother-in-law that she hasn’t spoken to her husband in weeks. In fact, they’ve been separated six months. Instead she accepts the offer of a ticket to Greece and sets off to find the hotel address that her husband had given his mother.

In the wife’s last conversation with Christopher, he had asked her to tell no one that they were separated and she is bound to that promise, almost as if it’s an extension of the wedding vows that the two of them have broken. She has moved in with her husband’s best friend and Christopher is a “careless flirt” who long ago had blithely discarded any thoughts of marital fidelity. Still, the wife says, “It was no small thing, dismantling the edifice of a marriage.” Going to Greece and confronting Christopher with her decision to divorce him is the way to end to their failed attempt at monogamy.

When she reaches the spot where her husband stays, she finds a gated resort property, surrounded by a herd of stray dogs in a scorched landscape. The area still smolders from recent wildfires, the nearby village is charmless, the sea seems designed for suicides rather than swimmers, and Christopher is nowhere to be found. The only person who seems to care about this is the hotel receptionist with whom he has had an affair and the only trace of him is uncovered just as his wife is preparing to leave Greece--he was seen the day before with another woman in another town. 

Then his body is found, dead and bleeding in a charred ditch. Since his wallet is missing and recent charges to his credit cards have been made after he died, it’s an easy matter to declare him a victim of a mugging. However when Christopher’s parents arrive, they demand more closure than that. So, in an unexpected change of heart, does his wife.

This is a mystery novel but the mystery lies in the marriage, not the murder. For five years Christopher and his wife lived in “a good and optimistic marriage” that was finally shaken by his inability to remain faithful. As the wife examines the facts of her husband’s life and death, she realizes that “between two people, there is always room for failures of imagination.” In Christopher’s “empty and ridiculous death,” she discovers that the mystery of how he died makes a mockery of “till death do us part.” That she might never know the reason why her husband was killed prevents their parting. It leaves the killer and the killed locked in an intimate relationship while husband and wife are stuck in a bond of “instability and turbulence.”

Katie Kitamura, as she did in Audition (Asia by the Book, April 2025), gives A Separation a narrator who is nameless, “foreign,” and diamantine, with sharp, bright thoughts in an enigmatic setting. It seems impossible to finish either of these novels in the customary fashion, by turning the last page. Kitamura’s ideas and puzzles refuse to go away, seeping into the lives of those who encounter them.~Janet Brown