From the award-winning author of The Memory Police and The Housekeeper and the Professor a
hypnotic novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets and their young
house guest who uncovers them. “A story of first enchantments and last gasps…Effervescent.” —
New York Times Book Review “A transfixing coming of age tale.” — TIME "One of the
literary events of the year." — Parade 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.
