Reviewed by Sho Spaeth

Inheritance comes in many forms, not all of them easy entries in a grim tally of money in or money out. For the death of a parent, the stakes are even higher. In the days and months before they die, in the weeks and years after they are no longer alive, the child will weigh on a different scale the benefits they have been bequeathed by birth—ethics, aptitudes, relative station in society—against the defects that have come to them by blood—congenital illness, self-destructive tendencies, a feckless family. Grief masks what some kin feel as survivor’s guilt, even as they sense a lingering, atavistic dread that some sins, too, are hereditary.

The bleakness of this perspective is undeniable in the first chapter of Minae Mizumura’s Inheritance from Mother, translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter. The protagonist, Mitsuki, considers what she has been left with on the night of her mother’s death. There is the relatively meager amount of money she and her sister will split; there is the simple fact that they are both middle-aged women in an aging nation in decline; there is the romantic, grasping desire to want a beautiful life, a predilection that Mitsuki likens to a congenital defect, passed along from one generation of her family to the next; finally, there are the ruins of her own personal and professional circumstances, left unattended as she has been obliged to take care of her mother. And so the novel begins with a character who has long thought her mother’s death would mark a release, and instead finds herself mired in the messy reality of living, suffering under constraints of a different kind...