Mina's Matchbox
A Novel
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Named a Best Book of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews and NPR o One of Indigo's Top 100 Books of 2024 o One of Oprah Daily's Best New Novels of Fall o One of Time's Best New Books to Read This Summer o A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from the Globe and Mail, The Atlantic, TIME, Boston Globe, Esquire, Lit Hub, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly o One of Kobo CA's Best Historical Fiction Ebooks of 2024
From the International Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Memory Police comes a hypnotic tale of friendship, family secrets, and coming of age set in 1970s Japan.
In the spring of 1972, after the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent by her mother to live for a year with her wealthy aunt and uncle. It is a year that will change her life.
Her aunt's family lives in a magnificent colonial mansion surrounded by sprawling gardens and the remnants of an old zoo, where the family's pet pygmy hippopotamus still resides. The family is as beguiling as their home, but beneath their sophistication and charm lie darker undercurrents that Tomoko struggles to understand--her aunt's misery, her handsome foreign uncle's curious absences, her German great-aunt's experience of the Second World War. At the centre of the family is Tomoko's cousin Mina, a precocious asthmatic girl who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling, including the strange tales inspired by the illustrated matchboxes she collects beneath her bed. The two girls share confidences and enthusiasms, encounter heartache, and have their eyes opened to the workings of the adult world.
In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko's life. Beautifully atmospheric, and rich with the mystery and magic of youthful experience, Mina's Matchbox is a tenderly elegiac depiction of two girls poised on the brink of adulthood, and of a family on the edge of collapse.
About this 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 Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas; The Housekeeper and the Professor; Hotel Iris; Revenge; and, most recently, The Memory Police, which was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the International Booker Prize.
Reviews
Named a Best Book of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews and NPR o One of Indigo's Top 100 Books of 2024 o One of Oprah Daily's Best New Novels of Fall o One of Time's Best New Books to Read This Summer o A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from the Globe and Mail, The Atlantic, TIME, Boston Globe, Esquire, Lit Hub, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly o One of Kobo CA's Best Historical Fiction Ebooks of 2024
"A story of first enchantments and last gasps. . . . Ogawa evokes the snow globe of the girls' adolescence, the crushes, obsessive hobbies and books with which they nurture each other's emerging interests and desires. . . . 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
"A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood's ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy."
--Kirkus Reviews
"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 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
"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
"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
"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
"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 Reviews (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)
"In Stephen Snyder's elegant translation, the tone is whimsical but never syrupy. The incomprehensible lives of adults shadow the girls' curious outlook: traces of infidelity, estrangement and mortality, even the echoes of war, can be discerned in the background of their adventures. . . . 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."
--Christian House, Financial Times
"Not only a compelling tale, but it is also beautifully written and constructed. The prose is clear, graceful, and engaging. Ogawa deftly weaves various motifs and themes throughout the novel."
--Ariel Balter, New York Journal of Books
"A magnificent translation. . . . Almost a fairy tale."
--Cory Oldweiler, Star Tribune
"[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)
"Powerful in its nuanced details, Mina's Matchbox is an immersive and poignant coming-of-age story. . . . curious and filled with wonder. . . . Translated by Stephen B. Snyder, Mina's Matchbox is 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)
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