Mina’s Matchbox: A Novel by Yoko Ogawa
New York. Pantheon. 2024. 288 pages.
Yoko Ogawa’s magnificently wrought novels have won her every Japanese literary award. Many of these novels are about remembering a distant past while immersed inside some sort of specialness that long ago vanished. In Mina’s Matchbox, we are taken into the turbulent yet exuberant lives of two girls on the cusp of adulthood trying to navigate the blows life has already given them. It is written in precious, tender prose yet maintains the reserved voice of an author who understands the need to keep certain things private.
We are immediately drawn to the voice of her first-person narrator, Tomoko, who has been sent to her cousin Mina’s resplendent home in Ashiya. Tomoko’s father died unexpectedly, and her mother needed to go learn a trade so she could support Tomoko. Her extremely wealthy sister graciously agreed to let Tomoko come and live with them for a year. We discern immediately that Tomoko is an astute observer of all that goes on around her and senses she is in a crumbling home but is unsure what is happening. It seems her cousin Mina, who is around her age, is distraught by her German father’s constant disappearances, which are never addressed, and this seems to aggravate her asthma, which has already landed her in the hospital a few times. Tomoko speaks to us from thirty years hence, in an act of remembering that is startling in its intensity, recall, and visceral feel. Tomoko is now in her early forties but can’t really forget that seminal year in 1972 when life changed forever. Ogawa (b. 1962) has frequently played with time and memory, as well as disappearances and reappearances, and she does so again with great dexterity here.
Though Tomoko recently lost her father and became separated from her mother, she seems imbued with a resilience that allows her to carry on without fuss. Mina is a book lover who swallows books whole. The rest of this eccentric half-German, half-Japanese family each carry their burdens silently, but Tomoko is adept at finding the safe spaces within each one of them that allow her access. Still, questions remain unanswered. Where does Mina’s father go when he evaporates into thin air? Why does no one speak of it? What is happening to Mina’s Japanese mother, whose quiet reserve now seems to have morphed into something scarier? Why does Mina’s German great-aunt Rosa seem filled with a melancholy that feels impenetrable, no matter how hard Tomoko tries? The beauty in Ogawa’s writing is her willingness not to answer our questions but rather keep them swirling about. She accepts the mysteries that inhabit each family as a given. Ogawa is as wedded to knowing as to not knowing; both are necessary if one is to find any semblance of balance.
The girls escape to the light room thought to relieve Mina’s asthma and talk for hours. Mina reveals she has a secret hobby. She collects fancy matchboxes with elaborate drawings on them and writes stories that correlate with the sketches shown. The drawings Mina loved most were full of whimsy: a frog playing a ukelele, a platypus swallowing a hammer, a baby chick smoking a pipe, and even a Santa Claus bathing in a spring. A delivery boy would bring the matchboxes and slip them to Mina surreptitiously while never speaking a word to her. Tomoko senses Mina is smitten with the young man, imagining him to be “a traveler arriving on a magic carpet. A traveler who moved freely from the meadow where the elephant played on his seesaw to a starry sky filled with floating seahorses, who carried with him a single matchbox for a young girl every time he rang the bell at the service entrance.” That was until he disappeared after being rerouted elsewhere. Again, Ogawa shows us how a disappearance can derail a life.
Mina is soon in the hospital again for her asthma, and the family is more distraught than ever. Mina finally comes home an avid volleyball fan certain Japan will take the 1972 Olympic gold medal. She reads voraciously about the mechanics of the game of volleyball, perhaps thinking it has within it hidden answers that might relieve her suffering.
Tomoko grows up but doesn’t distract us with the mundane events of what seems to be her ordinary life. In 1972 she stays with her cousin in the grand home in which she lived for a time. It saddens her that the family home is no longer there, but Tomoko insists that “nothing in the world can dim my memories. My uncle’s house still stands in my mind and the members of the family, those who have grown old as well as those who have died, live on there as they once did.” Tomoko has no desire to cast judgment, nor does she make any final proclamations about lessons learned. She lets her weightless and unadorned prose fall quietly upon us and catch us unaware. Because Yoko Ogawa already knows the clandestine power magic moments can hold for us, if we are courageous enough to surrender to them. Even if they eventually disappear.
Elaine Margolin
Merrick, New York
