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A Novel
by Yoko Ogawa
Book Reviewed by: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.
Mina's Matchbox is narrated by Tomoko thirty years after its events take place, and this distance allows the novel to explore complex, adult themes while still being about the activities and preoccupations of childhood. Tomoko sees glimpses of darkness behind her family's veneer of wealth and glamor—her aunt's drinking; her uncle prolonged disappearances; her cousin Ryuichi's distance from the family—but doesn't yet understand their full significance. The novel takes the form of a series of vignettes, and is less about plot and more about evoking the feelings of childhood, a certain awe and sense of limitless possibility. Each new character and each minor event feel to the reader as monumental and immediate as it would have to a sheltered twelve-year-old...continued
Full Review
(634 words)
(Reviewed by Rachel Hullett).
In Mina's Matchbox, a book filled with quirky characters, Yōko Ogawa introduces one of her most memorable creations yet: Pochiko, a 35-year-old pygmy hippopotamus. Flying in the face of the species' reputation as aggressors, Pochiko has a sweet temperament, charming the novel's protagonist and the readers alike. But she is far from the first hippo to beguile readers.
There have, unsurprisingly, been many children's books to feature hippos: Hippos Go Berserk! by Sandra Boynton, The Hiccupotamus by Aaron Zenz, George and Martha by James Marshall, The Truth About Hippos by Maxwell Eaton III, and more. But hippos have also been featured in books, poems, and short stories for adult readers.
Frank L. Baum's 1901 short story ...
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