Tomoko lost her father when she was six years old. Now that she’s twelve, she will spend a year living with her mother’s wealthy sister in Ashiya while her mother goes back to school to study dressmaking. Ashiya is a city about two hours east of her childhood home by the brand new shinkansen.
Mina’s Matchbox takes place in 1972. Author Yoko Ogawa herself was ten years old that year, and the entire novel reads with an especially personal and poignant atmosphere of nostalgia. The setting is lovingly-rendered and, with long episodes centered around the 1972 Japanese Olympic volleyball team and the Giacobini Meteor Shower that mysteriously never appeared that year, tangibly believable in a way few historical novels can match.
In Ashiya, Tomoko encounters family she has never met. First, she greets her impossibly handsome, half-German, Mercedes-driving uncle who has “a genius for making other people happy”. At his home, she meets her aunt as well as her uncle’s mother, Grandmother Rosa. Grandmother Rosa is a perfectly poised and coiffed 83-year-old German immigrant. The titular Mina, Tomoko’s cousin, is just a year younger. She is a frail elementary school student who will become Tomoko’s best friend for the year she spends in Ashiya. Ryuichi, her older, male cousin, is away at boarding school in Switzerland. Yoneda-san, also 83, is the family housekeeper and Grandmother Rosa’s best friend. Kobayashi-san is the family gardener. And, most surprisingly to Tomoko, Pochiko is the family pet—a pygmy hippopotamus.
The book jacket description promises “a family on the edge of collapse” that the novel doesn’t quite deliver. Yes, Tomoko comes to understand Mina’s family’s dynamics—even participates in bringing the family peace—but Mina’s family drama is really no more and no less exciting than the drama of any other family of her social class. Similarly, a cover featuring little more than Mina riding her pet hippopotamus may create the impression that the novel is much more whimsical than the actual story the pages contain. Mina does ride to school every day on Pochiko’s back, but that’s really the extent of the novel’s caprice.
Mina’s Matchbox is instead a truly beautiful coming-of-age novel written from a mature adult’s perspective. Tomoko, the narrator, occasionally breaks into the story at a chapter’s opening or close to add the benefit of her wisdom or hindsight. It’s her coming-of-age tale—but it’s Mina’s coming-of-age story, too.
Mina is by far the novel’s most interesting character. Small for her age and asthmatic, isolated from her peers, her cousin is her first real human friend. When Mina describes the asthma that has made her childhood so much more difficult, she could just as easily be talking about the feelings of an “old soul” more than ready for an adult’s body to match her adult’s mind:
It’s like having the exit blocked so you can’t get out… The air can’t go out, but it can’t get in either. Like being trapped in a tight space and you’re about to explode into a million pieces.
Tomoko reliably relays Mina’s thoughts and feelings to the reader—at least to the extent Mina shares them—but doesn’t always understand the depth of Mina’s feelings. Rather, the narrative reads like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, with Tomoko standing in for Scout Finch to Mina’s Jem.
Much of Mina’s sophistication comes from her love of reading, a joy that eludes Tomoko’s grasp. Mina has always been allowed to read adult books; Tomoko shares with the reader that there hadn’t been a single bookshelf in her mother’s home, and “the only printed materials [had been] the fashion magazines or sewing pattern books [her] mother used in her work.” In one particularly poignant scene, Mina and her family mourn the 1972 suicide of Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata when they learn about it in the morning newspaper. Mina’s grandmother has to explain to Tomoko
We didn’t know him. We hadn’t even met him. But Kawabata-san was a writer, a man who wrote books. We have some of them here in the house. He wasn’t a friend, but we were connected to him. Everyone reads his books; that’s why we’re so sad.
Mina, who is too frail to go for herself, sends Tomoko to the local library to check out some of Kawabata’s books. She has to include a list of the Kawabata books she has already read before to ensure she gets to read something new. Tomoko develops a small crush on the youthful librarian, relaying Mina’s literary analysis to him as though it is her own. Mina’s analysis is always remarkable for an 11-year-old, as in her remarks—in Tomoko’s words—about Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Garden Party, another coming-of-age story:
The ending of The Garden Party surprised me. At first, I thought it was just a boring story about a rich girl who feels sorry for a poor boy. But I was wrong…
What I mean is, it didn’t have anything to do with being rich or poor. It all comes down to the moment when Laura discovers beauty on the face of the man who died falling from the horse… Laura is struck by the nobility of someone who can accept death almost willingly, without rebelling.
The librarian comments that this is the analysis of someone who is, maybe, “something like Laura”.
Mina’s love of stories also shows itself in the compositions she secretly writes inside of boxes she stores under her bed. The stories are all elaborate explanations of advertising pictures from the front of matchboxes she collects with the help of a man who makes deliveries to her home. Tomoko provides examples of these pictures: “a frog playing the ukulele, a platypus swallowing a hammer, a baby chick smoking a pipe.” (The book covers for Mina’s Matchbox that seem to misrepresent the kind of story Ogawa has written instead depict the titular matchboxes, popular in Japan after World War II. In this aim, both designs, especially the Harvill Secker edition released in the UK and designed by Gérard DuBois, are notably successful.) Mina’s compositions are all touchingly sad; connecting them to the plot of the larger novel is one of the great pleasures of reading the novel.
In some ways, Mina’s Matchbox is a coming-of-age story for Japan as well. It’s difficult to ignore the pure opulence of Mina’s home, especially in comparison to the home in which Tomoko grew up. Consumer capitalism is everywhere. Riding in her uncle’s Mercedes-Benz—the nicest vehicle in which Tomoko has ever ridden—Tomoko notices that “a mere touch of the gearshift or the button on the heater turned them into objects of desire.” Tomoko’s uncle’s money comes from his position as heir to the company that produces Fressy, “a radium-fortified soft drink that was said to be beneficial to the digestion.”
But the high life that Mina’s family lives won’t last forever. Many non-Japanese think about Japan’s “great economic miracle” as a period spanning from around the end of the American Occupation in April 1952 until the Japanese real estate bubble burst in 1989. In truth, while Japan did experience sustained economic growth for the better part of four decades, the true “economic miracle” ended with the Arab oil embargo in 1973. After 1973, lifestyles like the one lived by Mina’s family were increasingly built on debt. Fifteen years after the novel takes place, they became completely out of reach for the overwhelming majority of Japanese families.
As always, the work of translator Stephen Snyder is excellent. Snyder, a prolific Japanese-to-English translator, is also responsible for almost all of Ogawa’s other work in English, including The Memory Police, The Housekeeper and the Professor, and the collection The Diving Pool, which includes Ogawa’s Akutagawa-winning “Pregnancy Diary”. Tomoko’s aunt finds typos as a hobby, and her hobby shows off Snyder’s skill. For example, he recreates a comic misunderstanding originally created, presumably, by incorrect kanji instead of English letters:
“Look here, on page 319. Instead of ‘nun’ they’ve written ‘gun.’”
“Oh, you’re right. ‘… in this instance, the only person speaking the truth is the gun.’”
“It makes you wonder what sort of truth they think would come out of a ‘gun.’” She chuckled as she poured herself a fresh drink.
Like a sepia-toned photograph beginning to curl at the edges, Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox is a wistful story of the blink-and-you-miss-it moment between childhood and adulthood set at an important but easily-overlooked moment in Japanese history. It’s also a gorgeous reminder for any reader of those great lessons of adolescence. Family is complicated. Beauty is not always simple. And the days left behind are never coming back.