Winner of the 2006 Tanizaki prize, Yōko Ogawa’s exquisitely-drawn exploration of impermanence deals with familiar themes - from the transient nature of existence to the loss of childhood innocence - but manages to render them fresh and vivid. The scenario at the centre of Ogawa’s variation on a coming-of-age novel is equally familiar: the outsider suddenly plunged into an entirely alien environment. Her novel’s narrated by Tomoko who’s recalling incidents from her childhood over 30 years earlier; reassuring recollections abruptly intermingled with more traumatic ones starting with the death of her father in 1966 - the first in a series of deaths that surface throughout Ogawa’s novel. Broader reflections on mortality and the fleeting nature of all things are underlined by the structure of Ogawa’s narrative which, like many Japanese stories, is organised by the passing of the seasons. All of this might give the impression this is a deeply serious, sombre piece – at times it is – but it can also be charming and funny as well as sinister and slightly surreal, laced with bursts of startling imagery.

The core of the novel opens in spring, time of new beginnings, it’s March 1972 and 12-year-old Tomoko is leaving her home in Okayama – where Ogawa grew up. Tomoko’s going to spend a year with her aunt’s family in Ashiya while her mother attempts to improve her employment prospects by studying in Tokyo. Tomoko’s aunt’s the family member who attracts the most gossip, married to the wealthy head of a beverage company, her half-German husband is considered a foreigner. But when Tomoko arrives in Ashiya she feels as if she’s entered an enchanted space. Her aunt and uncle live in a grand, Western-style mansion along with her younger cousin Mina, Mina’s German grandmother Rosa, cook Yoneda-san and gardener Kobayashi-san. Kobayashi-san has an unusual responsibility, he tends to the family pet a pygmy hippo known as Pochiko the last survivor of a zoo closed since WW2. Pochiko’s a key figure here, member of a species threatened with extinction, remnant of the past - his moods, his melancholy, his isolation mirror aspects of the family’s situation. Pochiko’s also been trained to carry fragile Mina to school and back, a task that confirms her family’s underlying eccentricity.

At first Tomoko feels as if she's a princess in a fairy tale. Outside Japan’s going through a particularly turbulent phase but the house seems part of some other, lost world. But as time passes Tomoko notices her handsome, hospitable uncle’s hardly ever around and the women rarely go out. Locked away in the house they read voraciously, inhabiting separate fictional realms. Each of them harbours secrets from Mina’s horde of vintage matchboxes and the unsettling stories she weaves around them to the uncle’s disappearances and what happened to Rosa’s sister left behind in Germany. Only Tomoko has any grounding in reality. But there are moments when the outside breaks through: the Munich Olympics and “Black September” connect Mina and Tomoko to an imagined community of TV viewers; news of Kawabata’s suicide plunges the household into mourning leading to a strange encounter with a librarian who somewhat perversely persuades Tomoko to borrow The House of the Sleeping Beauties.

As a writer Ogawa values visual images and a sense of place over plot. Ogawa’s chosen setting of Ashiya builds on personal knowledge of the area: the house’s based on a former local landmark; minor characters on people she knows there; Mina travelling on Pochiko’s back links to local stories about a private zoo and a boy who went to school by donkey. But it also allows Ogawa to play on associations conjured by Ashiya and its surrounds: its connections to a particular generation of bourgeois Japanese families and Hanshinkan modernism, and its fame as home to writer Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. Ashiya features in Tanizaki’s best-known work The Makioka Sisters. There are echoes of Tanizaki’s novel in Ogawa’s particularly his interest in declining cultures and the delicate interplay between individuals and wider historical events. But Tanizaki’s not the only influence on display here: Kawabata’s Snow Country, Anne Frank, Katherine Mansfield’s portraits of family life, and even Anne of Green Gables all have a part to play. Like a number of Japanese novels this started out in serial form so it’s fairly episodic and I won't claim Ogawa’s narrative doesn't have weaker moments - elements of Ogawa’s symbolism were a little too obvious and I wasn’t totally comfortable with her use of animals. But even so I was totally swept away by it. Translated by Stephen Snyder.