Publishers Weekly
★ 06/03/2024
In Ogawa’s captivating latest (after The Memory Police), a Japanese woman looks back 30 years to 1972, the year she stayed with her aunt’s family in the coastal town of Ashiya, and reflects on the secrets she uncovered there. Tomoko is 12 when she leaves her home in Tokyo while her widowed mother attends a course for dressmaking. In Ashiya, she’s dazzled by her handsome half-German, half-Japanese uncle, the owner of a soft drink company, who drives her from the train station to his magnificent house, where she’s charmed by her asthmatic cousin Mina, who collects matchboxes and writes stories based on their cover designs. Even more impressive than the family’s mansion is the pygmy hippopotamus they keep as a pet. Tomoko and Mina bond over the books Tomoko borrows for them at the local library and they share a devotion to the hippo, on whose back Mina rides to school. But Tomoko’s joy and wonder are tempered by Mina’s chronic health problems and by the discoveries she makes about her aunt’s secret drinking habit and where her uncle disappears to for days at a time. The revelations are described with cool and subtle precision, and Ogawa pulls off the rare feat of making childhood memories both credible and provocative. Readers will be hypnotized. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Mina's Matchbox
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
"This elegant, unusual novel full of eccentric personages is a Wes Anderson movie waiting to happen...A magical adventure."
—Oprah Daily
“A bittersweet coming-of-age tale…Dreamy and whimsical, Mina’s Matchbox traffics in the themes at which Ogawa always excels: memory, identity, and nostalgia.”
—Esquire
"A magnificent translation...A lovely epistolary epilogue allows readers to close the book contented that Mina’s Matchbox is almost a fairy tale. Its moral? Childish curiosity is as fleeting as the flame of a beautifully struck match—capture it before it’s gone and you can kindle a lifetime love of learning."
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"One of the literary events of the year."
—Parade
“The reader is immersed in [Tomoko’s] ardent love for her fragile cousin, and comes to appreciate how history seeps into every life, even the most sheltered ones.”
—The Atlantic
“A conspicuously gifted writer…To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state... She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance.”
—The Guardian
“A transfixing coming of age tale.”
—TIME
“Capturing a Japanese girl’s adolescence in the early 1970s, this hypnotic book shimmers with eccentric enigmas.”
—Boston Globe
“Unfurls like a dazzling and mysterious dream…In Stephen Snyder’s elegant translation, the tone is whimsical but never syrupy…Beautifully composed…Ogawa has turned a deceptively simple account of a year spent with exotic relatives into something closer to a universal fable about the precarious wonder of growing up.”
—Financial Times
"Gemlike...Ogawa’s storytelling is radiant."
—Christian Science Monitor
“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
“Elegant…A playground for Ogawa’s interest in particular details…Mina’s Matchbox feels more familiar in the tradition of Latin American magical realism, especially Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, with its enigmatic family lore and the rich, sophisticated practices of a fallen era…Intimate…[The novel] sparks the imagination toward faraway places.”
—The Japan Times
"Hypnotic, introspective."
—Daily Kos
“It’s the kind of transformative trip that makes for a powerful read at any time of year, but feels especially appropriate when you’re craving a (literary) summer sojourn.”
—Bustle
“An incredible novel that affirms Ogawa’s position as the great writer of fantastical literature today…Brighter in tone and detail…but somehow the tension and terror of living is always at the periphery. Ogawa has produced a world near and tender, but tough and bittersweet, like recognizing a lost loved one in the story told by someone new.”
—The Millions
“I just loved it. It’s an absolute delight of a book…A jewel-box of a novel. It’s wonderful.”
—Suzanna Hermans of Oblong Books on WAMC
"A delicate domestic novel...A quiet novel to savor!"
—Historical Novel Society
“Magnificently wrought…It is written in precious, tender prose yet maintains the reserved voice of an author who understands the need to keep certain things private…The beauty in Ogawa’s writing is her willingness not to answer our questions but rather keep them swirling about…Ogawa already knows the clandestine power magic moments can hold for us, if we are courageous enough to surrender to them.”
—World Literature Today
"Powerful in its nuanced details, Mina’s Matchbox is an immersive and poignant coming-of-age story...Curious and filled with wonder...Ogawa’s masterful descriptions, too, add depth and suggest simmering secrets that wait to boil over...An elegant and stirring work that captures the dreams of youth, and the lingering sweetness that can remain even after those dreams have faded."
—Bookpage, starred review
“Focusing on characters of an age when the world seems full of wonder and possibility, this engaging bildungsroman explores the friendship and mutual curiosity between two extraordinary young people… Facing complicated themes with deceptively simple language, she pulls off a neat trick here, painting everything in miniature and often in hindsight without losing the immediacy of Tomoko’s experiences. A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood’s ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“Captivating…Ogawa pulls off the rare feat of making childhood memories both credible and provocative. Readers will be hypnotized.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“In language as clean and delicate as a whisper, the cousins’ year of shared adventures frays as tragedies chip away at the public façade of the family’s private realities…Ogawa writes with exquisite artistry about the complications of a close-knit household whose members are quietly protective of its wounding secrets, as seen through the eyes of a young girl; the novel is beautifully translated by Snyder.”
—Library Journal, starred review
“[12-year-old] Tomoko proves to be a prodigiously astute observer, discovering truths behind closed doors…Remarkable is the timing of Snyder’s impressively seamless translation. Ogawa already brilliantly, deftly broadens her not-quite-quotidian family saga with pivotal world events.”
—Booklist, starred review
Library Journal
★ 07/01/2024
In 1972, the widowed mother of twelve-year-old Tomoko sends her to live with wealthy relatives in Ashiya for a year while she furthers her education in Tokyo. The family welcomes Tomoko, who bonds with her fragile cousin Mina, 11, whose needs drive the household's daily activities. Tomoko is an observant innocent—curious and charmed by Mina's collection of matchboxes and the stories tucked inside; by her uncle's frequent absences; by Mina's pygmy hippo whom she rides to school; by Great Grandmother Rosa, a Holocaust survivor; by Rosa's best friend, Yoneda-san, who has run the household for more than 50 years; by her removed aunt, an obsessive proofreader; and by the emotional distance between Mina's absent brother and his father. In language as clean and delicate as a whisper, the cousins' year of shared adventures frays as tragedies chip away at the public façade of the family's private realities. VERDICT Ogawa (The Memory Police), an award-winning novelist both in her native Japan and in the United States, writes with exquisite artistry about the complications of a close-knit household whose members are quietly protective of its wounding secrets, as seen through the eyes of a young girl; the novel is beautifully translated by Snyder.—Beth E. Andersen
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-05-31
A young Japanese girl spends the pastoral summer of 1972 with her asthmatic cousin.
Focusing on characters of an age when the world seems full of wonder and possibility, this engaging bildungsroman explores the friendship and mutual curiosity between two extraordinary young people. Our narrator is 12-year-old Tomoko, who has been sent to live with her aunt’s family in the wake of her father’s death as her mother studies dressmaking in Tokyo. In comparison to their young charge, the family is outsized—sophisticated and wealthy inheritors of a soft-drink empire, complete with a country estate—and includes Tomoko’s enigmatic aunt; her half-German uncle, who is more absent than not; and their charismatic 18-year-old son, Ryūichi, off studying at university. The center of Tomoko’s orbit is her younger cousin, Mina, an ailing bookworm who persuades Tomoko to raid the local library for her fix and eventually shares the secret of her hidden collection of matchboxes, given to her by a crush. This curious duo is lightly grounded by the inclusion of groundskeeper Kobayashi and cook Yoneda, who has curiously bonded late in life to Mina’s German grandmother, Rosa. If this weren’t enough to fill a Wes Anderson film’s worth of oddballs, there’s always Mina’s pet pygmy hippopotamus, Pochiko, the last survivor of a family zoo closed since World War II. While much of what we see on the surface is idyllic, Ogawa laces her narrative with real-life tragedies, among them the mysterious suicide of Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich. Facing complicated themes with deceptively simple language, she pulls off a neat trick here, painting everything in miniature and often in hindsight without losing the immediacy of Tomoko’s experiences.
A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood’s ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy.