Picture a perturbed Japanese academic who specializes in American studies, c. 1950. He wakes up in the morning to find the house in disorder and the maid gossiping with his wife at the kitchen table. He wants to scold her, but when he opens his mouth to speak, a gentle question comes out: “Tokiko, that trip I told you about – you’re coming with me, aren’t you?’

Tokiko doesn’t answer. Instead, she turns to her maid and says, “Isn’t that precious? But why would I want to go with him? It won’t be any fun!”

Fun – that American invention – eludes Shunsuke Miwa. He has lived in the United States and gives lectures on the American way of life to Japanese housewives. He has written an article entitled “The Way of a Modern Couple.” But he cannot do fun.

Nobuo Kojima’s English-language debut, “Embracing Family” (Dalkey Archive Press, 162 pages, $21.95), translated by Yukiko Tanaka, tells a story of manners in crisis. Mr. Miwa tells Tokiko, “Sometimes I think things would be better if you just agreed to do whatever I told you. That would make me feel more confident. Don’t you think I’m right?” Mr. Miwa theorizes what he ought to intuit; Tokiko calls him “useless.”

Tokiko has no more gut feeling than her husband, though she believes she is sensual. Mr. Kojima makes her almost American, endowed with self-designed lacks. Lying in hospital, she tells a doctor, “Of course I want to eat, but you have to make me want to eat. How can I eat when you make me unable to eat?” She might have said the same thing to her husband.

When Tokiko has an affair with an American GI, a member of the U.S. occupation, Mr. Miwa has in his humiliation an opportunity to change, to reorganize himself in his maturity. He finds, however, that he and his modern household are already much too changed. He does not have the will to rule his family, and his wife has been spoiled by magazines that debase her modesty.

Mr. Miwa comes to see Tokiko as a formula into which he must plug the right values: “He must not make Tokiko angry, because if he does, everything will go down the drain, all of the effort he put in since the affair, all of the hard work he put into the house.”Tokiko may no longer play the old-fashioned, subservient wife; she aspires to something grander: the fussy modern appliance.

A colleague comes to Mr. Miwa for help with a translation. “My point,” he says, “is that these Western characters act logically here. That’s what I think. Compared to them, the Japanese are temperamental, vague, and opportunistic.”

Mr. Kojima pierces this stereotype as well as our own, converse stereotype. Mr. Miwa, trapped between an old culture and an invading one, is both logical and vague, careful and opportunistic. He fails when he tries to be liberal, and fails when he tries to be conservative. Mr. Koijma portrays him with disciplined exteriority, giving him bad intentions, good ideas, and fluid tendencies. Were Mr. Kojima’s dialog-filled novel staged, it would perplex and thrill American audiences. Despite its simple themes – an intruder in the family, a clash of cultures – it is a novel of rare complexity.

***

Culture clash plays a less subtle role in British writer Ali Smith’s Booker-nominated third novel, “The Accidental” (Pantheon, 320 pages, $22.95). The Smarts are summering in “sub-standard” Norfolk, when Amber insinuates herself into their household. Like Will Smith’s character in “Six Degrees of Separation,” Amber takes advantage of the Smarts’ elite instincts, teasing and tempting them with her blunt exoticism. Amber partakes of the ragamuffin chic that also animated Mary Gaitskill’s “Veronica”; she is “a bit of the rough,” as infatuated stepfather Michael Smart calls her.

Throughout her career, Ms. Smith has focused her writing on the depressing, prefabricated landscape of modern life; Amber stands against this landscape. She leads Astrid, the youngest Smart, on a quixotic crusade to stop freeway traffic and to baffle closed-circuit camera monitors in the village supermarket:

Personally Astrid thinks Amber should stop when she gets to the edge of a pavement or whatever. It is insane just to walk out. But that’s what Amber’s like. It is what her personality is like. It isn’t so much that she’s a retard about cars, it’s that she really believes that she has as much right to the road as they do, maybe even more.

Amber blows Astrid’s mind. Astrid’s mother asks herself, “Where had the strange air of celebration come from?” But although Amber cures the Smarts’ bourgeois blues, her recidivist critique doesn’t get far. The Smarts absorb her lessons, and then discard her, like a phase.

After Amber’s bold performance, the conciliatory conclusion – “Couldn’t it sometimes take an outsider to reveal to a family that it was a family?”- disappoints. Yet Ms. Smith’s formal achievements make her required reading for serious students of last year’s fiction. Her style – one of multiple viewpoints distinguished by eccentric verbal tics – resembles that of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” But where Mr. Foer strains our desire to admire him, Ms. Smith entertains. Her stream of consciousness is narrow, but it is swift and deep.

blytal@nysun.com