Mina's Matchbox

Mina's Matchbox - Hardcover

$28.00
$28.00
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Mina's Matchbox
  • Mina's Matchbox
Mina's Matchbox - Hardcover

Mina's Matchbox - Hardcover

by Yoko Ogawa
$28.00
$28.00
Format
Hardcover $28.00 Paperback $17.00

Book Overview

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police, a hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them.

"A story of first enchantments and last gasps...Effervescent." --New York Times Book Review

"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." --Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt's family. Tomoko's aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home--and handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company--are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family's pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion--Tomoko's dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the family's patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko's cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.

In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko's life. Behind the family's sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand--her uncle's mysterious absences, her great-aunt's experience of the Second World War, her aunt's misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina's Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time--and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.
ISBN9780593316085
Author Yoko Ogawa
PublisherPantheon Books
GenreLiterature
FormatHardcover
PublishedAugust 2024
LanguageENG- English
Pages288
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

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More by Yoko Ogawa

Mina's Matchbox

Mina's Matchbox - Hardcover

Mina's Matchbox - Hardcover

By Yoko Ogawa

About Yoko Ogawa

Yoko Ogawa is the author of Mina's Matchbox, The Memory Police, Hotel Iris, The Diving Pool, and The Housekeeper and the Professor. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Since 1988 she has published more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction and has won every major Japanese literary award. Her novel The Housekeeper and the Professor was adapted into the 2006 film The Professor's Beloved Equation. She lives in Ashiya, Japan, with her husband and son. Stephen Snyder teaches Japanese literature at Middlebury College. His translations include works by Kenzaburō Ōe, Ryu Murakami, Natsuo Kirino, and Miri Yu.

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