Mina's Matchbox

Books

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 Mina's 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 aunt's family. Tomoko'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 ...