Placeholder text

Go to cart

Mina's Matchbox

By Yoko Ogawa

Product Image: Mina's Matchbox

Mina's Matchbox

By Yoko Ogawa

0 - Default Title
Description
From the award-winning author of The Memory Police and The Housekeeper and the Professor, a hypnotic 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 “A transfixing coming of age tale.” —TIME "One of the literary events of the year." —Parade 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 gardens and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s 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 Tomoko's life. Behind the family's sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand—her uncle's mysterious absences, her great-aunt's experience of the Second World War, her aunt's misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina's Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Number of Pages:
280
Release Date:
2025-07-01
Publication Date:
2025-07-01
Publisher:
Random House LLC US
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
0593313410
ISBN13:
9780593313411
GPSR Manufacturer Reference:
[email protected]
Weight:
290 g
Height:
127 cm
Width:
199 cm
Thickness:
22 cm
Buy on Amazon
Currently sold out