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Japan was teetering on the high heels of history, poised uncertainly between East and West, tradition and modernity, the tatami and the Twist. It was the early 1960s and, after a traumatic American occupation, the country was irreversibly democratic, newly prosperous and thoroughly confused.

Out of that fog stepped Nobuo Kojima, already one of Japan's leading writers, with a novel that caught the mood of the nation. Hoyo Kazoku, or Embracing Family, sold briskly, won the prestigious Tanizaki Junichiro Literary Prize—and then, much like Kojima, sank into obscurity. Now, 41 years later, the book is being published in English. It offers a frank look back at a pivotal moment in modern Japanese history and at the author who helped define it.

Embracing Family is the story of Shunsuke Miwa, a 45-year-old Tokyo academic whose marriage, household and sanity are buffeted by unwelcome winds, most of them from the U.S. Trouble beckons from the novel's opening lines: "Ever since Michiyo had become their maid, the Miwa household looked worse than ever. Shunsuke, the man of the house, was not pleased. The living room was a mess from the night before, and Michiyo, instead of straightening it up, was having tea in the kitchen with his wife, Tokiko, talking and laughing."

They were laughing at him. A man of traditional views and settled habits, he is comically out of step with the new age. His children would rather watch television than heed his commands on deportment, and even the dog no longer takes him seriously. His wife, fed up with his aloof dignity, has a one-night fling with an American soldier. Determined to regain her affection, Shunsuke goes heavily into debt to build a modern, American-style house. That pile becomes a metaphor for the marriage and much else. The roof leaks. Plants die on the sunbaked veranda. And when the Japanese-made air-conditioning system breaks down, Shunsuke learns he could have had a superior American version for a fraction of the price. "What we've learned from the West is often in conflict with our traditions," he tells a colleague. "We suffer from the outcome of those conflicts in our homes."

The irony is that Shunsuke is supposed to be an expert on the U.S.: he spent a year teaching Japanese literature there, and now gives lectures on "the American way of life." Yet, like those early Japanese electrical goods, he has appropriated the West imperfectly. To his wife's demands for autonomy, he suggests, "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?" Her view: "You are useless."

Kojima himself translated the works of William Saroyan and J.D. Salinger during a teaching career that began in the late 1940s. Embracing Family is the only one of his 30-plus volumes of fiction and criticism to be published in English. With his focus on family and changing times, Kojima quickly became a star of the "third generation" of Japanese novelists. Along with Shusaku Endo, Shotaro Yasuoka and others, he absorbed the staid realism of the prewar generations and added new energy and introspection. Now 91, Kojima lives quietly in Tokyo.

His rediscovery is the latest in a line of literary good deeds by the Dalkey Archive Press, which is becoming a major force on the global literary scene. Based in Normal, Illinois, the nonprofit publishing house has been unearthing lost treasures for two decades. Founded by American critic John O'Brien, the Dalkey Archive takes its name from a 1964 novel of that title by the late, hard-drinking Irish writer Flann O'Brien (no kin), one of the firm's early reprints. The surviving O'Brien and his team have since uncovered more than 300 new and out-of-print literary classics.

Embracing Family is one of their more inspired finds, with a treasure of nuance and yearning packed into Kojima's unadorned prose. Shunsuke is simultaneously dazzled and exasperated by his wife's quest for satisfaction, admiring and despairing of American exuberance, fascinated and thwarted by modern gadgetry. The harder he tries to accommodate the new world, the more it punishes him. His wife becomes deathly ill, his children rebel, his friends snicker behind his back. "We're all together and our lives are filled with pain," he insists when the going gets roughest. That's only half right: at some moment between the occupation and the semiconductor, the Japanese ideal of togetherness faded. Now, as Kojima's sad, perceptive masterpiece instructs, it's every Everyman for himself.

• Don Morrison
• A rediscovered classic by Nobuo Kojima captures Japan's confusion as it lurched toward modernity