Mina's Matchbox

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 MinaÂ’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.” —Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and EmptinessIn 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 auntÂ’s family. TomokoÂ’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 familyÂ’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—TomokoÂ’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the familyÂ’s patriarch. At the center of the family is TomokoÂ’s cousin Mina, a precocious
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