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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS'' CHOICE A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 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 Minas 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 aunts family. Tomokos aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent homeand handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink companyare symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the familys pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansionTomokos dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the familys patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomokos 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 Tomokos life.?Behind the family''s sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understandher uncles mysterious absences, her great-aunts experience of the Second World War, her aunts misery.?Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Minas Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in timeand a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.
