Mina's Matchbox

From the International Booker Prize–shortlisted author of The Memory Police comes a hypnotic tale of friendship, family secrets, and coming of age set in 1970s Japan.

In the spring of 1972, after the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent by her mother to live for a year with her wealthy aunt and uncle. It is a year that will change her life.

Her aunt’s family lives in a magnificent colonial mansion surrounded by sprawling gardens and the remnants of an old zoo, where the family’s pet pygmy hippopotamus still resides. The family is as beguiling as their home, but beneath their sophistication and charm lie darker undercurrents that Tomoko struggles to understand—her aunt’s misery, her handsome foreign uncle’s curious absences, her German great-aunt’s experience of the Second World War. At the centre of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious asthmatic girl who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling, including the strange tales inspired by the illustrated matchboxes she collects beneath her bed. The two girls share confidences and enthusiasms, encounter heartache, and have their eyes opened to the workings of the adult world.

In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko’s life. Beautifully atmospheric, and rich with the mystery and magic of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is a tenderly elegiac depiction of two girls poised on the brink of adulthood, and of a family on the edge of collapse.