Mina's Matchbox

(Hardback, Large Print Edition)

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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 aunts family. Tomokos aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent homeand handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink companyare symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the familys pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansionTomokos dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the familys patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomokos 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 Tomokos life.Behind the family's sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understandher uncles mysterious absences, her great-aunts experience of the Second World War, her aunts misery.Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Minas Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in timeand a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.

Reviews

A story of first enchantments and last gaspsEffervescentWe look at the world once, in childhood, Louise Glck wrote in her 1996 poem Nostos. The rest is memory. 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 Book Review

"Ogawa evokes the secret crushes and crushing secrets of girlhood with charm and elegance."

People

"Theres such an elegance to the way Minas Matchbox unfolds...The world Yoko Ogawa builds is quiet, warm and it should feel comforting. But there are peculiarities about the whole thing that keep you on the tips of your toes."

NPR

BeguilingThe book is suffused with the transplants growing awareness of the ephemerality of her own innocence.

The New Yorker

"This elegant, unusual novel full of eccentric personages is a Wes Anderson movie waiting to happen...A magical adventure."

Oprah Daily

Author Bio

YOKO OGAWA has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared inThe New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her works includeThe Memory Police, The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas; The Housekeeper and the Professor; Hotel Iris; andRevenge. She lives in Ashiya, Japan.