Mina's matchbox A novel

Review by Booklist Review

On March 16, 1972, 12-year-old Tomoko went to live with her maternal aunt while her widowed mother spent a year in Tokyo studying in hopes of improving their future. Tomoko's uncleby-marriage, whose mother is German, had inherited his father's beverage company and the 17-room family mansion with grounds that formerly housed a zoo; only 35-year-old pygmy hippopotamus Pochiko remains as the family pet. Among the human inhabitants is Tomoko's one-year-younger cousin, Mina; Mina's older brother is away at a Swiss boarding school. Tomoko quickly settles into her extended family, growing especially close to Mina, who counters her debilitating asthma with reading stories, imagining stories, and making stories inspired by the art of unique matchboxes. Tomoko proves to be a prodigiously astute observer, discovering truths behind closed doors. Thirty years later, Tomoko's memories "have grown more vivid and dense" and ready to reveal. Ogawa's latest was serialized in her native Japan in 2005. The timing of Sydney's impressively seamless translation is remarkable. Ogawa already brilliantly, deftly broadens her notquite- quotidian family saga with pivotal world events, but what disturbingly, ironically stands out in 2024 are references to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, Auschwitz, and Israel's founding. How Ogawa might (re)write the novel--and would she?--almost two decades later is a question to ponder.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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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. Excerpted from Mina's Matchbox: A Novel by Yoko Ogawa All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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