Mina's Matchbox

[A] beautifully composed novel… [and] elegant translation… Ogawa has turned a deceptively simple account of a year spent with exotic relatives into something closer to a universal fable about the precarious wonder of growing up * Financial Times *
A conspicuously gifted writer…To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state… She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance’ * Guardian *
A transfixing coming of age tale set in early 1970s Japan. [Tomoko] uncovers a host of secrets that force her to question her family’s complicated history * Time Magazine, Summer Reads *
Dreamy and whimsical, Mina’s Matchbox traffics in the themes at which Ogawa always excels: memory, identity, and nostalgia * Esquire *
This elegant, unusual novel full of eccentric personages is a Wes Anderson movie waiting to happen * Oprah Daily *
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 *
One of Japan’s most acclaimed authors * Time Magazine *
Ogawa, an award-winning novelist both in her native Japan and in the United States, writes with exquisite artistry about the complications of a close-knit household whose members are quietly protective of its wounding secrets, as seen through the eyes of a young girl; the novel is beautifully translated by Snyder * Library Journal *
If you loved The Memory Police, you’ll be excited for Ogawa’s “hypnotic, introspective novel” … Tomoko and her cousin Mina decipher the world around them: the family’s strange dynamics, her uncle’s absences, her aunt’s misery, and her great-aunt’s experience of the Second World War, in a coming-of-age story that’s sure to be transformative * Lit Hub *
This engaging bildungsroman explores the friendship and mutual curiosity between two extraordinary young people…Facing complicated themes with deceptively simple language…A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood’s ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy. * Kirkus *

Yoko Ogawa

Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. Her works include The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris, and Revenge. Her dystopian novel, The Memory Police, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.

Stephen Snyder

Stephen Snyder is a translator and professor of Japanese Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA. He has translated works by Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, and Miri Yu, among others. His translation of Natsuo Kirino’s Out was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 2004. His translation of Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011, and The Memory Police was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020.

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