“A True Novel” is, in part, an updating and relocating of Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” to postwar Japan. That sounds like it could be quite awful, but Mizumura, avoids the trap of slavishly following Bronte, and in so doing makes her novel something different — not a copy of Bronte’s classic, but a commentary on it, and also on themes, most notably passion and social class, that also interested Bronte, but do not, of course, belong to her.

But there's another novel in A True Novel: one about the history of the modern novel in Japan. Its Japanese title, Honkaku Shosetsu, derives from the "true novel" that came to be seen as the ideal type in Japan after 1868, when the country was opened to the West—the complete fictional worlds of Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dickens, Brontë. Against the honkaku shosetsu was the shi-shosetsu, or autobiographical "I-novel," perhaps a more purely Japanese form in a land where the diary had been a respected genre for a thousand years. By the 1920s, critics were claiming that no successful honkaku shosetsu had been written in Japanese, opening a new round of challenge. Mizumura gives various linguistic theories to explain the form's problematic practice in Japan while stating that the controversy is no longer relevant—by acquiring a "history," the novel has been broken.

Mizumura’s great accomplishment is to weave a love story through a serious exploration of themes central to Japan’s political and literary life: the burden of influence from the West and the struggle to retain a Japanese identity. As narrator, she notes that as a girl she resisted learning English even though she was living in New York, and immersed herself instead in Japanese literary classics. And in a digression that is one of the few moments when the novel loses its narrative drive, she notes that Japanese writers have long struggled to balance a Japanese literary tradition of the autobiographical novel with the Western ideal of inventing a fictional world outside one’s own life.