Book of the Month December 2024
To round out 2024, Quizlit’s Book of the Month December 2024 is Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa. A hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them.
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Book of the Month December 2024
Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa
After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life.
The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle’s magnificent colonial mansion opens up a new and unfamiliar world for Tomoko; its sprawling gardens are even home to a pygmy hippo the family keeps as a pet. Tomoko finds her relatives equally exotic and beguiling and her growing friendship with her cousin Mina draws her into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.
As the two girls share confidences their eyes are opened to the complications of the adult world. Tomoko’s understanding of her uncle’s mysterious absences, her grandmother’s wartime experiences and her aunt’s unhappiness will all come into clearer focus as she and Mina build an enduring bond. Rich with the magic and mystery of youth, 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.
“Haunting…The clever Ogawa, whose previous work The Memory Police drew wide acclaim in the literary world, has woven together a number of strands in her bold new effort…Mina’s Matchbox attains something like the eloquent sadness of Philip Larkin’s 1947 novel A Girl in Winter, another story of dashed dreams. But a more useful analog may be a short poem by the twelfth-century Japanese courtier Fujiwara No Kiyosuke, which Kenneth Rexroth translated into English and included in his One Hundred Poems From the Japanese: ‘I may live on until / I long for the time / In which I am so unhappy, / And remember it fondly.’…[Ogawa’s] social commentary is as astute as her writing is elegant and vivid.”
—Book and Film Globe
“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
“Elegant…A playground for Ogawa’s interest in particular details…Mina’s Matchbox feels more familiar in the tradition of Latin American magical realism, especially Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, with its enigmatic family lore and the rich, sophisticated practices of a fallen era…Intimate…[The novel] sparks the imagination toward faraway places.”
—The Japan Times
Best Yoko Ogawa Books in English
The Housekeeper and the Professor
Each morning, the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to one another. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant mathematical equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles – based on her shoe size or her birthday – and the numbers reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her ten-year-old son. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.
Revenge
Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders – locked in the embrace of an ominous and darkly beautiful web, their fates all converge through the eleven stories here in Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge. As tales of the macabre pass from character to character – an aspiring writer, a successful surgeon, a cabaret singer, a lonely craftsman – Ogawa provides us with a slice of life that is resplendent in its chaos, enthralling in its passion and chilling in its cruelty.
The Diving Pool
A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster-brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool – sparking an unspoken infatuation that draws out darker possibilities.
A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, but rather than a story of growth the diary reveals a more sinister tale of greed and repulsion.
Driven by nostalgia, a woman visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo. There she finds an isolated world shadowed by decay, haunted by absent students and the disturbing figure of the crippled caretaker.
The Memory Police
To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.
When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn’t forget, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?
if you enjoyed our Book of the Month December 2024, check out our profile of the wonderful Yoko Ogawa here
