Mina's Matchbox: A Novel

by Yoko Ogawa, Stephen B. Snyder (Translator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The compelling new novel from National Book Award finalist Yoko Ogawa is the story of a young girl's curiosity and courage, an unconventional family, and their pygmy hippo.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593316085
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/13/2024
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	31,691
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

YOKO OGAWA has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her works include The Memory Police, The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas; The Housekeeper and the Professor; Hotel Iris; and Revenge. She lives in Ashiya, Japan.

Read an Excerpt

The first vehicle I ever rode in was a baby carriage that had been brought across the sea, all the way from Germany. It was fitted out in brass and draped all around with bunting. The body of the carriage was elegantly designed, and the interior was lined with handmade lace, soft as eiderdown. The metal handle, the frame for the sunshade, and even the spokes of the wheels all glittered brilliantly. The pillow was embroidered in pale pink with the characters for my name: Tomoko.

The carriage was a gift from my mother’s sister. My aunt’s husband had succeeded his father as the president of a beverage company, and his mother was German. None of our other relatives had any overseas connections or had even so much as flown in an airplane, so when my aunt’s name came up in any context, she was always referred to as “the one who had married a foreigner”—as if the epithet were actually part of her name.

In those days, my parents and I were living in a rented house on the outskirts of Okayama City, and the carriage was more than likely the most valuable object among our possessions. A photograph from the period shows how out of place it looked in front of the old wooden house. It was far too large for the tiny garden, and it was far more eye-­catching than the baby herself, presumably the subject of the picture. I’m told that when my mother pushed the carriage in the neighborhood, passersby turned to look at it. If they were acquaintances, they’d invariably come up to touch it, commenting ecstatically on how beautiful it was before moving on, without any mention of the baby inside.

Unfortunately, I have no memory of riding in the carriage. By the time I became aware of what was happening around me, that is, by the time I’d grown too big to ride in the carriage myself, it had already been relegated to the storage shed. Still, though the lace had yellowed a bit and was spotted with milk I had spit up on it, the carriage had lost none of its former elegance. Even surrounded by kerosene jugs and tattered blinds, it still gave off the aroma of foreign places.

Breathing in that smell, I’d let my imagination stray in my childhood. I’d daydream that I was, in reality, a princess from a distant land, abducted by a treacherous servant who had subsequently abandoned me, along with the carriage, deep in a forest. If you unstitched the embroidered Tomoko on the cushion, you would no doubt find some trace of my real name—Elizabeth, or perhaps Angela . . . The carriage always played a starring role whenever I invented these sorts of stories.

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/03/2024

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. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Mina's Matchbox

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from People, The Atlantic, TIME, Boston Globe, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly

A Best Book of August from the Christian Science Monitor

A Best New Book of the Week from Parade

“A story of first enchantments and last gasps…Effervescent…’We look at the world once, in childhood,’ Louise Glück wrote in her 1996 poem ‘Nostos.’ ‘The rest is memory.’ Ogawa captures the enduring spark of that imprinting and its oracular glow. We revisit those moments when the match was first struck, when the future still felt like ours to ignite.”
—New York Times Book Review

"Ogawa evokes the secret crushes and crushing secrets of girlhood with charm and elegance."
—People

"This elegant, unusual novel full of eccentric personages is a Wes Anderson movie waiting to happen...A magical adventure."
—Oprah Daily

“A bittersweet coming-of-age tale…Dreamy and whimsical, Mina’s Matchbox traffics in the themes at which Ogawa always excels: memory, identity, and nostalgia.”
—Esquire

"A magnificent translation...A lovely epistolary epilogue allows readers to close the book contented that Mina’s Matchbox is almost a fairy tale. Its moral? Childish curiosity is as fleeting as the flame of a beautifully struck match—capture it before it’s gone and you can kindle a lifetime love of learning."
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"One of the literary events of the year."
—Parade

“The reader is immersed in [Tomoko’s] ardent love for her fragile cousin, and comes to appreciate how history seeps into every life, even the most sheltered ones.”
—The Atlantic

“A conspicuously gifted writer…To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state... She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance.”
—The Guardian

“A transfixing coming of age tale.”
—TIME

“Capturing a Japanese girl’s adolescence in the early 1970s, this hypnotic book shimmers with eccentric enigmas.”
—Boston Globe

“Unfurls like a dazzling and mysterious dream…In Stephen Snyder’s elegant translation, the tone is whimsical but never syrupy…Beautifully composed…Ogawa has turned a deceptively simple account of a year spent with exotic relatives into something closer to a universal fable about the precarious wonder of growing up.”
—Financial Times

"Gemlike...Ogawa’s storytelling is radiant."
—Christian Science Monitor

“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

“Elegant…A playground for Ogawa’s interest in particular details…Mina’s Matchbox feels more familiar in the tradition of Latin American magical realism, especially Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, with its enigmatic family lore and the rich, sophisticated practices of a fallen era…Intimate…[The novel] sparks the imagination toward faraway places.”
—The Japan Times

"Hypnotic, introspective."
—Daily Kos

“It’s the kind of transformative trip that makes for a powerful read at any time of year, but feels especially appropriate when you’re craving a (literary) summer sojourn.”
—Bustle

“An incredible novel that affirms Ogawa’s position as the great writer of fantastical literature today…Brighter in tone and detail…but somehow the tension and terror of living is always at the periphery. Ogawa has produced a world near and tender, but tough and bittersweet, like recognizing a lost loved one in the story told by someone new.”
—The Millions

“I just loved it. It’s an absolute delight of a book…A jewel-box of a novel. It’s wonderful.”
—Suzanna Hermans of Oblong Books on WAMC

"A delicate domestic novel...A quiet novel to savor!"
—Historical Novel Society

“Magnificently wrought…It is written in precious, tender prose yet maintains the reserved voice of an author who understands the need to keep certain things private…The beauty in Ogawa’s writing is her willingness not to answer our questions but rather keep them swirling about…Ogawa already knows the clandestine power magic moments can hold for us, if we are courageous enough to surrender to them.”
—World Literature Today

"Powerful in its nuanced details, Mina’s Matchbox is an immersive and poignant coming-of-age story...Curious and filled with wonder...Ogawa’s masterful descriptions, too, add depth and suggest simmering secrets that wait to boil over...An elegant and stirring work that captures the dreams of youth, and the lingering sweetness that can remain even after those dreams have faded."
—Bookpage, starred review

“Focusing on characters of an age when the world seems full of wonder and possibility, this engaging bildungsroman explores the friendship and mutual curiosity between two extraordinary young people… Facing complicated themes with deceptively simple language, she pulls off a neat trick here, painting everything in miniature and often in hindsight without losing the immediacy of Tomoko’s experiences. A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood’s ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“Captivating…Ogawa pulls off the rare feat of making childhood memories both credible and provocative. Readers will be hypnotized.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“In language as clean and delicate as a whisper, the cousins’ year of shared adventures frays as tragedies chip away at the public façade of the family’s private realities…Ogawa writes with exquisite artistry about the complications of a close-knit household whose members are quietly protective of its wounding secrets, as seen through the eyes of a young girl; the novel is beautifully translated by Snyder.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“[12-year-old] Tomoko proves to be a prodigiously astute observer, discovering truths behind closed doors…Remarkable is the timing of Snyder’s impressively seamless translation. Ogawa already brilliantly, deftly broadens her not-quite-quotidian family saga with pivotal world events.”
—Booklist, starred review

From the Publisher

★ 07/01/2024

In 1972, the widowed mother of twelve-year-old Tomoko sends her to live with wealthy relatives in Ashiya for a year while she furthers her education in Tokyo. The family welcomes Tomoko, who bonds with her fragile cousin Mina, 11, whose needs drive the household's daily activities. Tomoko is an observant innocent—curious and charmed by Mina's collection of matchboxes and the stories tucked inside; by her uncle's frequent absences; by Mina's pygmy hippo whom she rides to school; by Great Grandmother Rosa, a Holocaust survivor; by Rosa's best friend, Yoneda-san, who has run the household for more than 50 years; by her removed aunt, an obsessive proofreader; and by the emotional distance between Mina's absent brother and his father. In language as clean and delicate as a whisper, the cousins' year of shared adventures frays as tragedies chip away at the public façade of the family's private realities. VERDICT Ogawa (The Memory Police), an award-winning novelist both in her native Japan and in the United States, writes with exquisite artistry about the complications of a close-knit household whose members are quietly protective of its wounding secrets, as seen through the eyes of a young girl; the novel is beautifully translated by Snyder.—Beth E. Andersen

Library Journal

★ 2024-05-31
A young Japanese girl spends the pastoral summer of 1972 with her asthmatic cousin.

Focusing on characters of an age when the world seems full of wonder and possibility, this engaging bildungsroman explores the friendship and mutual curiosity between two extraordinary young people. Our narrator is 12-year-old Tomoko, who has been sent to live with her aunt’s family in the wake of her father’s death as her mother studies dressmaking in Tokyo. In comparison to their young charge, the family is outsized—sophisticated and wealthy inheritors of a soft-drink empire, complete with a country estate—and includes Tomoko’s enigmatic aunt; her half-German uncle, who is more absent than not; and their charismatic 18-year-old son, Ryūichi, off studying at university. The center of Tomoko’s orbit is her younger cousin, Mina, an ailing bookworm who persuades Tomoko to raid the local library for her fix and eventually shares the secret of her hidden collection of matchboxes, given to her by a crush. This curious duo is lightly grounded by the inclusion of groundskeeper Kobayashi and cook Yoneda, who has curiously bonded late in life to Mina’s German grandmother, Rosa. If this weren’t enough to fill a Wes Anderson film’s worth of oddballs, there’s always Mina’s pet pygmy hippopotamus, Pochiko, the last survivor of a family zoo closed since World War II. While much of what we see on the surface is idyllic, Ogawa laces her narrative with real-life tragedies, among them the mysterious suicide of Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich. Facing complicated themes with deceptively simple language, she pulls off a neat trick here, painting everything in miniature and often in hindsight without losing the immediacy of Tomoko’s experiences.

A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood’s ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy.

Kirkus Reviews