Mina's Matchbox

 

Looking back at one’s life, recalling a special phase from it with the larger history of a city or country set in the backdrop, a little like James Hilton’s Goodbye Mr. Chips or Neela Padmanabhan’s Where the Lord Sleeps, that’s Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder; I would tell a friend who asks me what the book is about. 

The book opens beautifully with Tomoko recalling the first vehicle she rode, an elegantly designed baby carriage sourced from Germany, trips on her father’s bicycle clinging to him tightly until he died from stomach cancer. As a 12 yr old she’s sent away from home to stay with her maternal aunt and begin middle school and Tomoko recollects all that happened during this period 1972-73 when she stayed with her cousin Mina and her family in a big mansion at Ashiya. Though 30 years back in time, her memories of this year stay fresh and clear.

Tomoko’s quiet aunt who corrected typos, her half-German uncle who owned a beverages company, her frail and asthmatic cousin Mina who collected matchboxes and had a pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko for a pet are interesting characters. Along with grandmother Rosa who is German, Yoneda-san and Kobayashi-san who are more of family than mere caretakers, this endearing bunch gladly welcome Tomoko into their lives. Each one of them with their quirks, stories to share and secrets to safeguard make Mina’s Matchbox a character-driven, slice-of-life narrative marked by a sense of atmosphere and slow world build up.

Japanese author and Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s suicide, 1972 Munich Olympics and Giacobini meteor shower unravel in the backdrop. Quite a few reviews have lambasted the author’s treatment of the Munich Olympics massacre but from the viewpoint of two pre-teen girls who are passionate about volleyball and keen on seeing their national men’s team clinch Gold, I felt the references made here were in-place. 

The prose is lulling and the pacing remarkably slow in the first half but it turns incisive and agile respectively in the latter half. About two girls who are friends-for-life than cousins, not just their wallowing in nostalgia but as a coming-of-age journey, Mina’s Matchbox is both heartwarming and wholesome. 

Yoko Ogawa was born in Okayama and now resides in Ashiya (Tomoko shifts from Okayama to Ashiya for a year to stay with her cousin Mina's family) and would have been 10 yrs old during the 1972-73 period detailed in the book, so does the book tap a little into the memories of the author's childhood? 

Mina’s Matchbox is my first by Yoko Ogawa. I read a lot of reviews that stated how this book is different in terms of theme and tonality from the rest of her works. While a few who have read The Housekeeper and The Professor, Hotel Iris and The Memory Police have found this underwhelming, I felt it was a great starting point and I sure want to read the author more (And of course, the translator more). You may not highlight sentences and paragraphs as you read this book but the cumulative effect of the prose is gently illuminating. 

Sharing below a few favorite passages from the book - 

“If you wanted to describe Mina in a few words, you might say she was an asthmatic girl who loved books and rode a pygmy hippopotamus. But if you wanted to distinguish her from everyone else in the world, you’d say that she was a girl who could strike a match more beautifully than anyone.” 

“Mina would slide open the box and select a single match with her delicate fingers. Then she would close the box and hold the rounded, reddish-brown tip at a slightly odd angle against the striking surface. Up to this point, everything would happen in a relaxed, tranquil manner. Nothing forced or hurried. Her lips pressed together, her eyes lowered. Only the tips of the three fingers that held the match seemed animated with the knowledge of the deed they were about to do. Then, she would hold her breath for an instant and her fingertips would fly, followed by a sound so sharp that you wondered how such a frail girl could achieve this kind of velocity. I was captivated, realizing for the first time how transparent the flame of a match could be. If not for the slight odor of phosphorus, I might have been tempted to believe that Mina had produced the flame magically, out of thin air, or that, given the clarity of the light, it was her finger itself that was burning.”