By Ilze Duarte
The Tokyo Suite by Brazilian author Giovana Madalosso, translated from Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, is an ambitious novel. It explores and questions gender roles and expectations in marriage and caregiving, the very structure of traditional marriages, the demands and complexities of motherhood, the contradictions of life in the big city, and the inequities inherent in capitalism—a vast territory that Madalosso covers expertly. The story even includes a trip to the Amazon, which the beautiful book cover alludes to.
In The Tokyo Suite, Madolosso has made the unusual and fortunate choice to have two women from different social classes and in unequal positions of power as the protagonists of the story. The chapters are narrated alternately by Fernanda, a TV producer living and working in São Paulo, and Maju, an experienced nanny whom Fernanda employs to take care of her toddler, Cora. The novel’s structure gives these remarkable women equal status as storytellers, which they very much deserve. It also lays bare the contrasts between these two lives: an upper-middle-class woman who has paid a price for choosing both a high-powered career and motherhood, and an underprivileged, capable woman from a small town who has paid a price for choosing, albeit unwittingly, better pay and a better life over motherhood.
Even though Fernanda’s husband, Cacá, is a stay-at-home dad, the couple still have a maid and a nanny, and it is the nanny, Maju, who spends the most time with Cora. When Fernanda is up for a promotion that will keep her away from home even longer than she already has to be, she offers Maju higher wages to take care of Cora practically around the clock, with the exception of a few days a month. Maju accepts the offer. To make Maju’s living conditions more appealing, Fernanda redecorates the “quarto de empregada” (maid’s room) with several new amenities and calls it “the Tokyo suite”—tiny but luxurious. Maju is approaching middle age and unlikely to conceive a child. Her attachment to Cora intensifies and reaches a critical point when she makes the ill-advised decision to take the child away from her family to live with her in the far-away town where she grew up. This is not a spoiler, though, since the novel opens with Maju’s confession: “I’m kidnapping a child.”
Through her descriptions of the goings-on in Fernanda’s and Maju’s lives, Madalosso provides a vivid, often humorous portrait of life in São Paulo, with its stark contrasts of wealth and struggle, comfort and hardship, safety and danger. For example, Maju carries in her purse packets of sugar, salt, and condiments she collects here and there, a habit likely developed from years of deprivation, whereas Fernanda buys a new luxury car on a whim when she goes to a dealership offering yellow-fever vaccines, also a luxury at the time, to those who stop by for a test-drive.
Madalosso’s sharp critique of the excesses of the privileged comes in several other well-placed episodes, some bordering on the preposterous. On Maju’s day off, Fernanda and Cacá take Cora to the mall, a trip Fernanda would rather not make but, as a mother who doesn’t have a lot of time with her daughter, she feels compelled to endure. At the mall, they come across a dog costume contest, which delights Cora and tests Fernanda’s patience. Fernanda feels particularly emotional on this day due to certain matters of the heart, which I will not spoil here. Madalosso deftly weaves comedy and pathos in Fernanda’s description of her experience at this event:
The following contestant was a dog wearing a hat and a clown nose, followed by the rumba dancer we’d met. And then a small and aloof mutt, wearing a black wig with a curly tuft of hair and a white blazer studded with colorful stones. I don’t know why but the Elvis costume made me cry. A cry triggered by the sadness of that contest but also filled with so much more, as all crying tends to be, rip tides taking everything with them. (141)
Fernanda’s and Maju’s stories, indeed, teem with the laughable and the poignant. Maju grapples with the possibility she may never become a mother, the comedy of errors that her abduction of Cora turns out to be, and the pain of loving so deeply a child that can never be hers. Fernanda struggles with the feeling that she may not be fit for motherhood, that she may lose an important relationship, that she may lose her greatest love of all—her daughter.
Madalosso provides a careful examination of the joys, demands, and challenges of motherhood through Fernanda’s and Maju’s varying points of view. Smart, determined, and conflicted, these two women are keenly aware of the roles they play in Cora’s life and each other’s lives. They make each other’s lifestyle possible. Here is Fernanda on the value, to her, of having Maju as a nanny:
If only Maju had been smarter and had just asked me for more money. She couldn’t have known, but at that moment I would have given her everything: how much for you to stay here all the time, six times the minimum wage plus the gold ring on my finger? Consider it done, I’ll sign you on a video editor’s salary, because you’re much more valuable to me than a video editor. (29)
And here are Maju’s musings on a day she believes Fernanda might fire her and she would never see her beloved Cora again:
I loved Cora in a way it had never happened with another child. That day, I went to the tiny window in my room and looked out. I thought that forbidden love between baby and nanny was also Mrs. Fernanda’s fault. She had left that child in the corner of her life, and in that corner was me. (137)
Here and throughout the story, Fernanda’s and Maju’s reflections on their relationship to Cora suggest that their mothering roles are in opposition to each other as much as they are complementary, and the reader may wonder, as I did, if they are sustainable in the long run.
Fernanda’s and Maju’s struggles are emblematic of the conundrum women face in most urban environments around the world: how to participate in the local economy and at the same time fulfill other chosen roles such as spouse and parent. Without a support system, how are women going to succeed personally and professionally without paying an exorbitant price for their success in both areas of their lives? These are questions Madalosso addresses with subtlety, without proselytizing, and therefore to great effect.
Bruna Dantas Lobato’s translation captures brilliantly the various modes of this multilayered story—its levity and profundity, humor and sorrow—and renders Fernanda’s and Maju’s voices with sensitivity and precision. A good example is the term of endearment Maju uses to refer to Cora, even if only in her thoughts. In the original text, the term is “picochuca,” a made-up word that sounds to me like a combination of “little one” (“pequena,” pronounced “piquena” in some parts of Brazil) and the informal suffix -uca, used as a diminutive. Instead of making up a word, in her translation Lobato used “Chicadee,” an apt choice that conveys Maju’s affection for Cora and the child’s delicate little body and bright spirit. Also excellent is Lobato’s choice of “Mrs. Fernanda” and “Mr. Cacá”, since in Brazil we often address each other by our first names, even when there are differences in age or social status, and use forms of address such as “dona” for women (Dona Fernanda) and “seu” (Seu Cacá) for men to signal respect and deference.
The Tokyo Suite is a welcome addition to contemporary Brazilian literature in translation. The relevance and urgency of its themes, the realistic and engaging styles of both narrators, the honesty and depth with which Madalosso addresses the issues she chose to explore, and Lobato’s expert translation all make The Tokyo Suite a rich, gratifying read.
Madalosso, Giovana. The Tokyo Suite. Translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato. New York: Europa Editions, 2025.
Ilze Duarte is a Portuguese-to-English literary translator. Her essays appear in Hopscotch Translation and her translations in Words Without Borders, Michigan Quarterly Review, MAYDAY Magazine, Asymptote Journal, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Sundial House Literary Translation Award, which included the publication in 2024 of her translation of Marilia Arnaud’s short story collection The Book of Affects. She is seeking a publisher for her translation of Arnaud’s award-winning novel O Pássaro Secreto/The Secret Bird.