Mina's Matchbox

A Novel

By: Yoko Ogawa, Stephen B. Snyder - translator

Narrated by: Nanako Mizushima

Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • 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.

“A story of first enchantments and last gasps…Effervescent."—New York Times Book Review

“Yoko Ogawa is a quiet wizard, casting her words like a spell, conjuring a world of curiosity and enchantment, secrets and loss. I read Mina’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.”—Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness

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.

©2024 Yoko Ogawa and Stephen B. Snyder (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from People, The Atlantic, TIME, Boston Globe, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly

A Best Book of August from the Christian Science Monitor

A Best New Book of the Week from Parade

“A story of first enchantments and last gasps…Effervescent…’We look at the world once, in childhood,’ Louise Glück 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

“Beguiling…The book is suffused with the transplant’s growing awareness of the ephemerality of her own innocence.”—The New Yorker

Very Enjoyable

This is a story of a short period in a young girls life when she, Tomoko, begins to understand the complexities of relationships. There are a lot of emotions that are too big for words and too great for a 13 year old to fully comprehend. I adored her relationship with her precocious cousin Mina. This book did not have the suspense and depth of The Memory Police but It was wonderfully visual. Imagining Mina as she rode to school on her pygmy hippo was a highlight.

The sweetness of the story

This was a foray into gentleness. A departure from most modern literature. It would be appreciated in any country world wise. All ages also would enjoy this book and its audio reading.