Mina's Matchbox

My eye was drawn to a copy of Mina’s Matchbox on a shelf at Chepstow Books and Gifts during my last visit there. It’s the latest novel by Yōko Ogawa to appear in English. My first taste of this author’s work was her collection of ingeniously-interlinked short stories Revenge, which still remains my favorite book of hers. I was less impressed by the last of Ogawa’s books I’d sampled – The Memory Police – which had given me the impression of a thought-experiment left to run on for too long. My naive impression had been of an enjoyable earlier work and a weaker later one, but of course translations don’t always appear in the same order as their originals, and I’ve just now realised that Revenge was published four years later than The Memory Police in Japan.

As for Mina’s Matchbox, I liked it. I found it charmingly sweet, but not cloyingly so; and relatively light without being insubstantial. In tone it resembled The Housekeeper and the Professor more than Ogawa’s other works in English.

In 1972, twelve year-old Tomoko leaves home to spend a year living with her aunt’s family, while her widowed mother completes a course in Tokyo. The aunt had married a wealthy businessman, and they were living in fine and somewhat eccentric style in a substantial country house with their fragile, asthmatic daughter (the titular Mina), the uncle’s German mother, their two servants, and a highly-unusual pet. Tomoko is warmly accepted by the family and she and Mina become very close. I’d half-expected some kind of intense drama to intrude before the end, but the story is lower-key than that, more a slice of (unconventional) life. It’s a well-paced, characterful and easy-to-read novel with enough depth to lend it some satisying emotional weight.