Mina's Matchbox
A Novel
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4.3 • 28 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police, a hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them.
“A story of first enchantments and last gasps…Effervescent." —New York Times Book Review
“Yoko Ogawa is a quiet wizard, casting her words like a spell, conjuring a world of curiosity and enchantment, secrets and loss. I read Mina’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.” —Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness
In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.
In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko’s life. Behind the family's sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand—her uncle’s mysterious absences, her great-aunt’s experience of the Second World War, her aunt’s misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The youthful wonder of discovering a bigger world imbues Yoko Ogawa’s imaginative historical novel. In 1972, Japanese tween Tomoko is sent to live with her wealthy aunt’s family while her mother attends a job-training program. During the yearlong stay, she observes her relatives closely and bonds with her slightly younger cousin Mina, who collects matchboxes and fills them with stories. Ogawa builds her narrative as carefully as a museum diorama, reveling in whimsical details like the pygmy hippopotamus that transports Mina to school. We see everything through Tomoko’s inquisitive but not fully comprehending eyes, so Mina’s ongoing health problems, her aunt’s hidden drinking, and her handsome uncle’s long absences are all open to interpretation. We also loved how the young cousins’ relationship is juxtaposed with the fascinating friendship between Mina’s German grandmother and the family cook, Yoneda. Just like the book’s namesake, Mina’s Matchbox reveals something delightfully unexpected upon closer inspection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Ogawa's captivating latest (after The Memory Police), a Japanese woman looks back 30 years to 1972, the year she stayed with her aunt's family in the coastal town of Ashiya, and reflects on the secrets she uncovered there. Tomoko is 12 when she leaves her home in Tokyo while her widowed mother attends a course for dressmaking. In Ashiya, she's dazzled by her handsome half-German, half-Japanese uncle, the owner of a soft drink company, who drives her from the train station to his magnificent house, where she's charmed by her asthmatic cousin Mina, who collects matchboxes and writes stories based on their cover designs. Even more impressive than the family's mansion is the pygmy hippopotamus they keep as a pet. Tomoko and Mina bond over the books Tomoko borrows for them at the local library and they share a devotion to the hippo, on whose back Mina rides to school. But Tomoko's joy and wonder are tempered by Mina's chronic health problems and by the discoveries she makes about her aunt's secret drinking habit and where her uncle disappears to for days at a time. The revelations are described with cool and subtle precision, and Ogawa pulls off the rare feat of making childhood memories both credible and provocative. Readers will be hypnotized.
Customer Reviews
Love letter to the Summer Vacation feeling
Best way to describe this book’s magic is by just remembering a summer vacation you had when you were a child and then come to a understand that was indeed the best time of your life as the adults say.
Excellent
Meditative yet enthralling. A gorgeous book of connection, growth, and inevitable loss. This book will stick with me for quite a while as will Pochiko.