Mina’s Matchbox
This is a delicate domestic novel. The protagonist and first-person narrator is twelve-year-old Tomoko, who spends a year with her aunt’s family in a coastal Japanese city in 1972. In addition to her aunt, the family includes her uncle, her uncle’s German mother, her two cousins, two family servants, and a pygmy hippopotamus who provides transportation for one cousin’s trip to school. The home the family lives in is elegant with spacious grounds, which once included a zoo.
Tomoko recounts her stories about all of these family members thirty years after they occurred, but her memories are vibrant and absorbing. As she interacts with them in various circumstances, the plot slowly reveals all of these characters in exquisite detail. The truth behind the charming and successful uncle slowly unfolds. Grandmother Rosa’s youth in Germany is much more complicated than she has revealed in the past to her family. Tomoko is a careful and intelligent reporter; she watches and listens; she does not judge.
Tomoko is especially close to her slightly younger cousin Mina, a severely asthmatic girl who collects colorful matchboxes and invents elaborate stories about the illustrations on them. She describes Mina as a girl “whose body was too weak to travel but whose soul never stopped voyaging to the ends of the earth.” The two cousins share various adventures, some involving library books and interesting male figures such as Mr. Turtleneck and the “Young Man from Wednesday,” which are recounted with fresh candor and winsome humor.
Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award, and her work has been widely published in the United States. Mina’s Matchbox proves to be a quiet novel to savor!
