Description

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Time Best Book of the Year, Mina’s Matchbox is an introspective, hypnotic novel from Yoko Ogawa, the award-winning, psychologically insightful author of The Memory Police.

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko boards a train alone from Tokyo, leaving her mother behind to stay with relatives in the prosperous coastal town of Ashiya, Japan. Arriving at the mansion of her mysterious aunt, she encounters a family living a carefully curated life that conceals troubling secrets beneath its beautiful exterior. Her aunt, an elegant outsider who has risen far above her working-class roots, lives in a sprawling home filled with imported German furnishings, lush gardens, and a quirky private zoo housing the family’s pygmy hippopotamus. Tomoko soon becomes fascinated by this peculiar household: her sophisticated and reserved aunt, her German great-aunt who quietly wrestles with memories of World War II, and her charismatic and successful uncle, a foreigner and president of a soft drink company whose unexplained absences cast a long shadow.

At the heart of the home is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious thirteen-year-old suffering from asthma, who quickly draws Tomoko into her imaginative, secretive world filled with elaborate stories and youthful infatuations. As their friendship grows, Tomoko begins to slowly unravel the underlying unhappiness and mysterious tensions permeating the family’s glamorous façade.

Masterfully captivating and elegant, Mina’s Matchbox invites readers into a crucial moment of Tomoko’s young life. Yoko Ogawa beautifully captures the fragile enchantments and complexities of youth while offering an insightful portrayal of a privileged family poised at the edge of collapse.