At some point in our lives, we’ve read books on teenage angst. But I’ll bet you a bowl of udon noodles you’ve never encountered one that includes a friendship between teenage girls and a Japanese pygmy hippo. (FWIW, pygmy hippos seem to be a thing right now.)
In “Mina’s Matchbox,” Yoko Ogawa’s novel set in 1972 Japan, 12-year-old Tomoko has been sent by her poor widowed mother to live with well-to-do relatives in Ashiya, a coastal town not far from Osaka. There she encounters a branch of the family mired not only in wealth but secrecy.
The most curious of these relatives is Tomika’s 11-year-old cousin Mina, who is will-o’-the-wisp dainty but dogged by asthma. As she is also prone to car sickness, Mina commutes to public school on the back of Pochiko, a grouchy pygmy hippo. Mina’s father has made his fortune running a Japanese soft drink company called Fressy. With his riches, he has built a mansion on land that used to be the city zoo. The zoo is gone but dad has retained the hippo.
Mina’s mother is a closet alcoholic whose obsession is to comb through published works and find typos. Mina’s grandmother Rosa is from Germany and can barely speak Japanese. How did she wind up thousands of miles from home?
Meanwhile both Mina and Tomoko have a secret crush on the “Man from Wednesday”, the handsome young delivery man who brings the family their weekly supply of Fressy. He also brings Mina oddly designed matchbooks which she tells no one about but her cousin.
The novel takes place over a 12-month period and includes a section on the 1972 Munich Olympics. This sparks the girls’ interest in Japan’s volleyball team, whose journey to a gold medal parallels the girls’ own journey to young adulthood.
Other than that, events of the outside world (e.g., the murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972 and the failed Giacobini meteor shower in Japan) are rarely touched upon. Most of the action takes place within the confines of the family—which tends to make the story somewhat confining and a bit twee.
Nevertheless, Ogawa, a writer for The New Yorker, has won every major literary award in Japan so she seems to know what she is talking about. If teenage angst is your cup of matcha, then kampai!
Like this review? Follow me at “What Does Aug Think?” at acsntn.substack.com. Thank you
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Books: “Mina’s Matchbox” by Yoko Ogawa
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At some point in our lives, we’ve read books on teenage angst. But I’ll bet you a bowl of udon noodles you’ve never encountered one that includes a friendship between teenage girls and a Japanese pygmy hippo. (FWIW, pygmy hippos seem to be a thing right now.)
In “Mina’s Matchbox,” Yoko Ogawa’s novel set in 1972 Japan, 12-year-old Tomoko has been sent by her poor widowed mother to live with well-to-do relatives in Ashiya, a coastal town not far from Osaka. There she encounters a branch of the family mired not only in wealth but secrecy.
The most curious of these relatives is Tomika’s 11-year-old cousin Mina, who is will-o’-the-wisp dainty but dogged by asthma. As she is also prone to car sickness, Mina commutes to public school on the back of Pochiko, a grouchy pygmy hippo. Mina’s father has made his fortune running a Japanese soft drink company called Fressy. With his riches, he has built a mansion on land that used to be the city zoo. The zoo is gone but dad has retained the hippo.
Mina’s mother is a closet alcoholic whose obsession is to comb through published works and find typos. Mina’s grandmother Rosa is from Germany and can barely speak Japanese. How did she wind up thousands of miles from home?
Meanwhile both Mina and Tomoko have a secret crush on the “Man from Wednesday”, the handsome young delivery man who brings the family their weekly supply of Fressy. He also brings Mina oddly designed matchbooks which she tells no one about but her cousin.
The novel takes place over a 12-month period and includes a section on the 1972 Munich Olympics. This sparks the girls’ interest in Japan’s volleyball team, whose journey to a gold medal parallels the girls’ own journey to young adulthood.
Other than that, events of the outside world (e.g., the murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972 and the failed Giacobini meteor shower in Japan) are rarely touched upon. Most of the action takes place within the confines of the family—which tends to make the story somewhat confining and a bit twee.
Nevertheless, Ogawa, a writer for The New Yorker, has won every major literary award in Japan so she seems to know what she is talking about. If teenage angst is your cup of matcha, then kampai!
Like this review? Follow me at “What Does Aug Think?” at acsntn.substack.com. Thank you
!