Name: Mina's Matchbox
Price: 824.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Author: Ogawa, Yoko ; Snyder, Stephen B.
ISBN: 9780593316085

Type

Physical Book

Author

Yoko Ogawa

Translated by

Stephen B. Snyder

Publisher

Pantheon Books

Language

English

Pages

288

Format

Hardcover

Dimensions

21.0 x 14.0 x 1.9 cm

Weight

0.44 kg.

ISBN13

9780593316085

Synopsis "Mina's Matchbox"

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. 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.

Yoko Ogawa

(Author)

View Author's Page

Yōko Ogawa was born in Okayama, Japan, in 1962. She is a Japanese writer known for her delicate and disturbing style, which explores memory, loss, and the deepest human emotions. She studied Literature at Waseda University and since 1988 has published more than fifty works of fiction and non-fiction.
Her literary career began with "Disintegration of the Butterfly" (1988), and she gained international recognition with novels such as "The Housekeeper and the Professor", "The Memory Police", "Revenge", "The Diving Pool", "Hotel Iris", and "The Girl Who Went to School on a Hippopotamus". Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has been adapted for film and theater.
Throughout her career, she has received numerous awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Shirley Jackson Award. In 2020, "The Memory Police" was a finalist for the International Booker Prize.

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