Elegiac memories from a young girl in Japan …
Mina's Matchbox
by Yoko Ogawa
Translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder
(Read in hardcover. 280 pages. Published in 2024 by Pantheon Books.)
Friend Susana suggested this book absolutely ages ago. It's finally been read. In fact, my wife read it aloud to me, which was lovely. If you don't actively read aloud in your home, I encourage you to do so.
Here are three benefits of reading aloud:
It improves memory.
It enhances social connections.
It's enertaining.
Back to our book. It's 1972 and 12-year-old Tomoko goes to stay with her aunt's family. She becomes fast friends with her similarly-aged cousin Mina who rides the family's pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko. Mina also collects matchboxes.
Tomoko spends a year with Mina and her family in the big house with the small hippo (it lives in the back garden where there's a pond). There are secrets and backstories that are only partly revealed. They're revealed as a 12-year-old girl might try to understand them.
Lots happens during Tomoko and Mina's year together. But the mysteries and romances are modest and gentle, viewed by Tomoko decades later, in fact. It's a discrete, formative year for Tomoko (and Mina).
Mina's Matchbox is a sweet book to be savored. It's not an action-packed adventure, nor a teary tragedy. It's a slice of life for girl on the edge of maturity. The feelings of endings and new beginnings are evocatively shared.
"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)
