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Literary Fiction
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| Critics: |
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.
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.
"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)
"[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)
"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
"Capturing a Japanese girl's adolescence in the early 1970s, this hypnotic book shimmers with eccentric enigmas." —Boston Globe
"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
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.
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