From the award-winning psychologically astute author of The Memory Police here is 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 grandmother 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 which she looks back on briefly from
adulthood at the novel’s end. Behind the family's sophistication are complications that Tomoko
struggles to understand—her uncle’s mysterious absences her German grandmother’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.
