“The first vehicle I ever rode in was a baby carriage that had been brought across the sea, all the way from Germany,” remembers Tomoko in the opening sentence of Mina’s Matchbox. The carriage she describes is an elegant, old-fashioned European perambulator with brass fittings and bunting. It is lined with handmade lace, and inside is a small pillow “embroidered in pale pink with the characters for my name: Tomoko.” The carriage was an extravagant present from her maternal Aunt, who married into a wealthy German-Japanese family. Tomoko thinks it was likely the most expensive item in the rented wooden house she shared with her parents. Long after she was too big to ride in it, the carriage became the fodder for the kinds of childish daydreams we’re all familiar with as readers – romantic fairytales of having been secretly switched at birth. “If you unstitched the embroidered Tomoko on the cushion, you would no doubt find some trace of my real name – Elizabeth, or Angela.” Without meeting them, Tomoko feels connected to her distant relatives through their extraordinary gift. So, when she is sent to live with her Aunt’s family at age 12, she is more excited than concerned. Tomoko’s father is dead, and this one-year visit was arranged so her mother could take a dressmaking course in Tokyo.
Mina’s Matchbox is the follow-up to the 2019 English translation of Yoko Ogawa’s 2004 novel, The Memory Police. It, too, is a book about memory. But it’s also about family, childhood, and something else that is difficult to pinpoint. Narrated by an adult Tomoko 30 years after the events she describes, the telling generates the sense of a woman intently observing herself as a child, trying to recapture something lost. And of a young Tomoko who is, in turn, closely observing those around her, seeing more than she understands or can articulate. While there’s no shortage of stories about young children sent away to live with wealthy and eccentric relatives, Ogawa’s version beautifully captures the intricate emotions of a child who desperately wants to belong. And how relatively short intervals of our childhood can take on an outsized significance.
To be fair, there is something magical and larger than life about the residents of the house in Ashiya. Tomoko’s handsome, charming, but frequently absent Uncle is beloved and doted on by the women of the family, his “princesses” for whom he organizes lavish surprises; her Aunt spends much of her time alone in the study, smoking, drinking, and obsessively searching for typographical errors; Yoneda-san, the devoted housekeeper to whom everyone defers is both the true matriarch of the household and best friends with Grandmother Rosa, who came to Japan as a young bride and lost her entire family in the Jewish holocaust. Less prominent but still present is Kobayashi-san, the male gardener who cares for Pochiko, the family’s pet pygmy hippopotamus. And there is Pochiko, the sole survivor of the family zoo that once sat adjacent to the house.
But the most magical of all is Mina, a year younger than Tomoko but seemingly much more sophisticated. “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 always has a box of matches rustling in her pocket. She collects unusual matchboxes and writes strange stories about the pictures on their covers, which she only shares with her cousin (and the reader). She and Tomoko quickly become best friends, like sisters. The entire family in Ashiya embraces Tomoko as one of their own.
Mina’s Matchbox, titled Mina’s Procession when initially published in Japan, might be considered a family drama, except that the events Tomoko recounts result in very little drama. A lot happens but is not presented as we’ve been conditioned to expect. Mina and Tomoko face their share of obstacles and adventures, both small and large. There are trips to the hospital, romantic crushes, and the potential for heartbreak. The girls become obsessed with the 1972 Japanese Olympic Volleyball Team and the Giacobini Meteor Shower. There’s even a fire. But, Tomoko also stumbles upon adult secrets and protects Mina from them. The Aunt drinks. The Uncle is gone for long stretches. Which came first, or how one connects to the other, is never considered. The stones Ogawa throws become feathers before they reach her characters. At the very least, we expect bruises, but Tomako, Mina, and the family all seem to emerge unscathed and unfazed. They are already on the other side of the events Tomoko is describing. But, in the meantime, our unrealized expectations create a not insignificant amount of tension. We’ve been trained to expect some emotional manipulation from our novels, which Ogawa repeatedly sets us up for but never actively delivers. Instead, everything in the text, including the assemblage of objects that so fascinates Ogawa and which she always includes in her books – baby carriages, school uniforms, the eponymous matchboxes, a pygmy hippotamus, cases of “radium-fortified” soft drinks, etc. – becomes portent. From them, we can build an entirely different story than the one Tomoko is telling us.
Children are out of scale with their environments – they are too small, and the world too big. They don’t understand the significance of what they know. Tomoko writes her mother a letter asking for a volleyball. “You once wrote that if I needed anything, clothes or pens or whatever, to match Mina’s, you could send it to me. Well, I’ve thought of something: could you send me a volleyball? … It doesn’t have to be an expensive one … I hope this doesn’t sound selfish. When you’ve saved enough Y10 coins, please call again …” The subtext of what is being said is lost on the child writing it.
Mina’s Matchbox was first released as a serialized version in a Japanese magazine, and the flow of the chapters – many of which end too abruptly, even when the story continues into the next – reflects that. And yet, the episodic structure accounts for much of the charm. It lacks the fantastical premises/underpinnings of much of Ogawa’s other work that’s been translated into English: The Memory Police, The Housekeeper & the Professor, and her short story collection Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales — all of which are translated by Stephen Snyder, who consistently captures the straightforward yet somehow wistful character of Ogawa’s prose. Instead, the novel calls to mind the gentle rhythm of the domestic novels of Junichiro Tanizaki (Mina’s Matchbox won the 42nd Tanizaki Prize in 2006) and the work of her contemporaries Hiromi Kawakami and Kazuo Ishiguro – writers interested not only in our complicated relationships to memory but also each other. Ogawa tends to leave more for the reader to work out should they choose.
In some ways, Ogawa gives us a tale of two perambulators. Tomoko discovers a second baby carriage in an old storeroom while Mina is hospitalized after a particularly bad asthma attack. Mina’s baby carriage (because, of course, it is hers) is not the same as Tomoko’s. It is “more like a jewel box than anything that could be accounted for by a name as simple as ‘baby carriage'”:
“Mine had been lined with cotton lace, but this one was fitted out in silk from end to end, with luxurious drapings all around, decorated with several layers of frills and satin ribbons. The down pillow had been sweetly embroidered with images of a monkey, a goat, a peacock, and Pochiko herself, as if to make plain that the carriage belonged to the baby of the Fressy Zoological Garden.”
Rather than brass, the fittings are gilded gold. It has a music box built-in that plays Schumann’s lullaby at the turn of a little key. When Tomoko breaks into tears, she insists it wasn’t because she was jealous of Mina’s carriage but because she was angry at her Uncle for being away when Mina needed him most. She recalls how her Uncle took her to pick out her school uniform, his attention to the tailoring so it fit her perfectly, and how he treated her to crepes Suzette afterward. An outing she’d described earlier in the book as one of her happiest memories suddenly becomes something else:
“The woman at the store must have secretly thought that we made an odd pair. She must have known that a man as handsome as my Uncle would never have a daughter with a face as plain as mine. And the waiter who’d brought the crepes Suzette had been polite on the surface, but what had he really been thinking deep down?”
At the end of the year, Tomoko leaves the house in Ashiya. We get a bit of an epilogue recounting what has happened since then. Tomoko receives a letter from Mina, who now lives in Cologne, asking her to visit. We learn that Tomoko and Mina rarely saw each other in the intervening years, yet they kept in touch. Grandmother Rose and Yoneda-san passed away within a year of each other. The house in Ashiya was sold. Her Uncle and Aunt are still together. She last saw them at his 77th birthday party. Mina asks after Tomoko’s mother. In the end, they are a typical family.
Mina’s Matchbox can be more than a frozen memory of an idyllic childhood. Or it can be just that. As always, Ogawa leaves clues the reader can choose to follow. Twins and sisters weave their way through the narrative — Grandmother Rose and Yoneda-san, Tomoko’s mother and Aunt, Tomoko and Mina. We learn that two of the kanjiis that form Tomoko’s name are identical, two moons. She explains to Grandmother Rose, “It means ‘friend’ or ‘companion’”:
“What a wonderful thing, a great friendship. And they’re just the same size, not one above the other but lined up together. That’s the lovely part. Equal and not alone.”
It’s a beautiful sentiment. But, as we know, that’s not always how the world works.
[Published by Pantheon on August 13, 2024, 288 pages, $28.00 hardcover]