It's the 1970s, and Tomoko's mother sends her to live with her aunt and uncle for a year while her mother enrolls in a program to retrain for a new career.

Tomoko is understandably amazed by this family she has never met before.
-Her uncle is an attractive, appealing man with a sense of humour and flair. He is president of a soft drink company, and is often away on business.
-Her aunt drinks and smokes too much while having little to do with the running of the family. She also is constantly on the lookout for typos in written materials.
-Tomoko's uncle's mother, Grandmother Rosa, has lived for many years in Japan after leaving Germany. Her written and spoken Japanese is still not great, but she's kind, has mobility issues, and has a great, many-years long relationship with the housekeeper.
-Yoneda-san is the housekeeper, and her word is final in all matters in the house. She's not a dictator, but she manages everyone and everything competently.
-Minako "Mina" is a little younger than Tomoko. She's small, delicate, and suffers serious asthmatic episodes. Her older brother Ryūichi is much older, and is away at school in Switzerland.
-Pochiko is the most unusual inhabitant of the house. She is a pygmy hippopotamus, and wanders the garden, which is the site of a former zoo maintained by the soft drink company. The whole family obsesses over everything Pochiko does.

“Mina's Matchbox” follows Tomoko and Mina as they become close as they play, discuss books, admire Pochiko's activities, and experience their first infatuations. The prose conveys a sense of calm throughout the story, while author Yōko Ogawa gives us some insight into a specific time in the town of Ashiya (incidentally where the author lives.)

The girls bond over the year, and it's a transformative time for them, as Tomoko, who is relating these events looking back over them thirty years later, shows how the unusual perspectives of this family, and their oddities and quirks opened her mind to new ways of seeing things and being.

The relationships are key in this slow moving story, and the one between Grandmother Rosa and Yoneda-san filled me with delight. Though not able to fully converse, the two women have found ways to comprehend one another. This is highlighted when they harmonize beautifully together while singing. Also, Grandmother Rosa opens her heart to the shy Tomoko.

Though Mina is younger than Tomoko, she shows a wisdom and knowledge beyond her years, reading complex literature and developing her ideas and philosophies on life from them. She also gets Tomoko to get her tomes out of the library, where Tomoko becomes a little obsessed with a guy working there. Mina, meanwhile, becomes enamoured with a delivery driver from the soft drink company who gives her a matchbox with an intriguing picture on it each time he stops by.

The girls also come up with activities based on Mina's readings, or in the case of the upcoming Munich Olympic games, a fascination with the Japanese volleyball team. It was amusing watching the girls get obsessed with the players, and techniques of the game, speaking authoritatively of moves, despite Mina's inability to play because of her health.

Years later, Tomoko reflects on how affecting her time at the house in Ashiya was, and how she still retains small items she collected while there. There is fondness in her remembrances, and an understanding of how important this time was in her own development into adulthood. Childhood experiences affect us for years after, and Ogawa shows how they can both support us, but also change our views on the people we care about and about life in general. Ogawa's novel is a moving, thoughtful and sensitively rendered story of an important time in a girl's life.

Thank you to Netgalley and to Penguin Random House Canada for this ARC in exchange for my review.

Book review: 4/5 ⭐️
Genre: retrospective fiction
Themes: childhood, family secrets, disillusionment
📖 Read if you like: Bewilderment, The Book Thief

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book, which you can now find in bookstores everywhere.

This was a quiet retrospective of a young girl’s memory from a time and place full of wonder. Twelve-year old Tomoko is sent to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle while her mother completes a course in Tokyo. There she discovers a world unknown. German made furnishings with a German made grandmother, black marble and strained glass, a mansion with a view of the sea and a Pygmy hippopotamus Pochiko. While everyone is kind and welcoming to her, she cannot but view them with an air of elegance, as though removed from normality. There is the charming uncle, enigmatic aunt, sweet grandmother lost in memory, housekeeper who manages the house and the family, and a beautiful young cousin named Mina.

Mina is the centre of the household. An ailing girl suffering from asthma, but who is remarkable in intelligence and imagination. She seeks to understand loss and death through her own stories, while forming a special sisterly bond with Tomoko. Told through the remembering of a child, there is an innocence to her perception as she unwittingly discovers the family has its own collection of secrets. A unique variation on the coming of age story, written with a certain panache.

A snapshot of time that defines Tomoko’s future, this is a beautiful matchbox of stories. A slower paced book, but one that I thoroughly enjoyed. The prose was easy to fall into with a lyrical quality and insightful narrative that was age appropriate. I felt transported both in time and place.

Yoko Ogawa is an outstanding writer, and this is an outstanding translation. The story is emotionally moving, beautifully nostalgic, and very well crafted.

Mina's Matchbox is a charming read. I enjoyed both the glimpse into life in 1970s Japan and the opportunity to meet a cast of unique, warm, and memorable characters (including a hippo!).

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the opportunity to read a digital copy in advance of publication.

This is a beautiful, whimsical tale of a 12-year-old Japanese girl who stays with her wealthy cousin for a year.

Set in 1972, Tomoko’s father has died, and her mother must spend a year in Tokyo in school. When she arrives to spend a year at her cousin Mina’s house in rural Osaka, she is amazed: they are rich owners of a company that makes the popular drink Fressy and live in a mansion. The novel is simply about what happens that year.

I loved this book! Tomoko and Mina are friends and co-conspirators in a world where the family drinks sugary Fressy every single day (and considers it essential for healthy living), the pet is a placid pygmy hippo named Pochiko, and the cure for what ails you is a “light bath” in a tiled room filled with orange, rotating lights. But in this whimsical world, not all is well: Mina is frail with severe asthma, her aunt prefers cigarettes and alcohol as a coping strategy, and her uncle’s mysterious disappearances leave the family on edge.

There are some writers who have a sort of magic pen that can make the mundanities of everyday life so very *interesting*. Ogawa does this well. I always welcomed coming back to the book to see what Mina and Tomoko were up to. And how is it that I was on the edge of my seat to know the fate of the Japanese men’s volleyball team at the 1972 Olympics, holding my breath as the girls watched the games on their TV?

Mina has a morbid edge to her, in a good way. She makes up fantastical stories about the pictures on matchboxes that she collects, and they often end in death, perhaps a way to channel her fear of her own fragility. Ogawa impressed by taking this story in a direction that I didn’t expect, a narrative choice that again emphasised the quotidian.

Thanks to Penguin Random House Canada and NetGalley for a gifted copy.

My second book by Ogawa and my new favourite of the two.

Thought the story and writing are simple it had this beauty sense of nostalgia and tenderness that I found addictive. There were all these simple pleasures of life highlighted reminding the reader of the good things in life and to cherish even the mundane.

Wonderful translation as well.

This book will stay with me for a long time. This is the kind of book where you’ll still be thinking about it months after you read it.

I loved this story by Ogawa -- her books never fail to be creative, unique and enrapturing. Set in 1970s Japan, Tomoko is sent by her mother to live with her aunt, uncle and his mother (Grandma Rosa of Jewish German descent) and eccentric cousin Mina for the school year where she spends time and adventures with her Mina and the family pet pygmy hippopotamus, Pachinko. I loved the Pachinko (the pygmy hippopotamus) that helped create a uniqueness to the story from the start. The writing was fabulous you got invested in all the characters right from the beginning -with strong character building- a book focused on childhood memories, family relationships -and growth as we enter teenagehood. This is a great work of literary fiction - highly recommend it!

Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada | McClelland & Stewart for this ARC. This is my honest review.

A beautiful coming of age story — set in 1972 suburban Japan — Mina’s Matchbox follows two cousins as they bond over first loves, literature, and a pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko. Translated from the Japanese original, there’s a slightly stiff formality to the writing, but author Yōko Ogawa paints a vivid picture of the time and place, and by the novel’s end, I felt totally immersed and emotionally invested. Ogawa captures something true and universal about this transitional time of life and I believed everything she writes about the long-term effects of childhood experiences, family ties, and being disappointed by the ones we most admire. I loved this, rounding up to five stars.

Mina's Matchbox is literary fiction at it's finest. The story is about one year in the life of a young girl, Tomoko, who is sent to live with her wealthy Aunt and Uncle. While this is not an action packed, quick paced story, it is full of discovery and bittersweet moments meant to be savoured slowly, a bit at a time.

Thank you to Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.