Israel, A.B. Yehoshua wrote in his 1977 novel “The Lover,” is a “small, intimate country,” where “if you try hard enough you’ll discover links between the most distant people.”

Such a country makes it all the more difficult to live anonymously, which is perhaps why an unidentified victim of a suicide bomber becomes a source of fascination for the man charged with returning the dead woman’s corpse to her family in Mr. Yehoshua’s new novel, “A Woman in Jerusalem” (Harcourt, 237 pages, $25).

When her lifeless body remains unclaimed for days in a hospital morgue, a tabloid journalist, who purports to be concerned with “the anonymous living, not the undignified dead,” discloses that the victim is on the payroll of a large Jerusalem bakery. With the article’s publication pending, the bakery’s owner demands his human resources manager — he remains unnamed throughout the book; indeed the victim, Yulia Ragayev, is only character whose name readers are privy to — identify the victim, compensate her kin, and return her remains to them.

At “a time when pedestrians were routinely exploding in the streets, troubled consciences turned up in the oddest places,” Mr. Yehoshua writes in this sparsely worded novel.

It isn’t so much a crisis of conscience at the height of the bloody intifada that impels the company’s efforts on behalf of the woman it had briefly employed as an overnight cleaning woman. The 87-year-old bakery owner repeatedly laments the company’s perceived disregard for its workers — “What is left of us if we lose our humanity?” he asks the manager — yet is clearly more concerned that the forthcoming publicity could hurt bread sales.

The human resources manager, a 39-year-old recently divorced father, initially regards his task as a business transaction: Ms. Ragayev receives a dignified burial, and the company clears its name. But with each passing hour, he is increasingly consumed by his assignment and its deceased subject.

An archetypal Yehoshua hero, the manager is relentless in his quest for answers, and riveted by the notion of “the other.” In Mr. Yehoshua’s earlier fiction, the object of that fixation is Israel’s Arab neighbors; in “A Woman in Jerusalem,” it’s Ms. Ragayev, a non-Jewish émigré from a former Soviet republic.

The manager seeks not only to thwart allegations that his employer acted with abandon, but to understand how he himself could have failed to notice the exotic-looking woman, a trained engineer whom he had interviewed and hired to scrub the bakery. He is preoccupied with his “foibles of memory” and the implication of his lapses. What of his secretary’s assertion that he lived inside himself “like a snail,” that all he saw of beauty or goodness was its shadow?

Beginning with the bloodstained pay stub the victim was carrying at the time of the bombing, the manager launches his investigation into the woman’s quiet, modest life. He is determined to understand why Ms. Ragayev came to Jerusalem and, moreover, why she remained even though her son returned home amid escalating violence.

“What did you want from us, Yulia?” the manager wonders. “What did you hope to find in the hard, sad city that killed you? What kept you there when you could have gone home with your only son?”

In an attempt to solve the mystery of the good and beautiful woman whose death has so cast a shadow on his life, and on the religious capital where she died, the manager visits the tiny Jerusalem shack where the dead woman lived. As he surveys her scant belongings there, he is touched by her unfinished life, tenderly bringing in her rain-soaked laundry from the outdoor clothesline and tidying her unmade bed. “I’m not a lover, or a beloved,” he reflects, as he prepares to close up the shack. “I’ll just fold the blanket neatly and move on.”

Yet he cannot extricate himself from his grim, absorbing mission, acknowledging, “atonement was turning to lunacy.” That mission ultimately takes the manager in the dead of winter to Ms. Ragayev’s motherland, which Mr. Yehoshua does not identify.

He is accompanied, not only by the woman’s sealed coffin, but also by the journalist who wrote the initial exposé and a photographer, whom the bakery owner has sent to record the corporate mea culpa.

At the behest of the woman’s teenage son, who resembles his mother to a chilling effect, the manager agrees to traverse the cold, harsh country from where Ms. Ragayev hailed in order to deliver the corpse to her elderly mother. The circuitous journey ends with an abrupt plot twist that casts new light, and new hope on the “hard, sad city” that claimed Ms. Ragayev among its victims.