Mina's Matchbox

[A] beautifully composed novel… [and] elegant translation… Ogawa has turned a deceptively simple account of a year spent with exotic relatives into something closer to a universal fable about the precarious wonder of growing up

[A] beautifully composed novel… [and] elegant translation… Ogawa has turned a deceptively simple account of a year spent with exotic relatives into something closer to a universal fable about the precarious wonder of growing up

A conspicuously gifted writer…To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state... She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance'

A transfixing coming of age tale set in early 1970s Japan. [Tomoko] uncovers a host of secrets that force her to question her family’s complicated history

Dreamy and whimsical, Mina’s Matchbox traffics in the themes at which Ogawa always excels: memory, identity, and nostalgia

This elegant, unusual novel full of eccentric personages is a Wes Anderson movie waiting to happen

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.

One of Japan’s most acclaimed authors

Ogawa, an award-winning novelist both in her native Japan and in the United States, writes with exquisite artistry about the complications of a close-knit household whose members are quietly protective of its wounding secrets, as seen through the eyes of a young girl; the novel is beautifully translated by Snyder

If you loved The Memory Police , you’ll be excited for Ogawa’s “hypnotic, introspective novel” ... Tomoko and her cousin Mina decipher the world around them: the family’s strange dynamics, her uncle’s absences, her aunt’s misery, and her great-aunt’s experience of the Second World War, in a coming-of-age story that’s sure to be transformative

This engaging bildungsroman explores the friendship and mutual curiosity between two extraordinary young people...Facing complicated themes with deceptively simple language...A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood’s ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy.

Yoko Ogawa (Author)
Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker , A Public Space and Zoetrope . Her works include The Diving Pool , The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge. Her dystopian novel, The Memory Police , was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Stephen Snyder (Translator)
Stephen Snyder is a translator and professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA.

He has translated works by Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu, among others. His translation of Natsuo Kirino’s Out was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 2004, his translation of Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011 and The Memory Police was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020.