Yoko Ogawa’s novel Mina’s Matchbox, in a superb translation by Stephen B. Snyder, illustrates the enduring comfort of a fiction that presents childhood as a time of discovery—without the increased demands of adulthood.
Published as a serial in Japan in 2005, the story follows 12-year-old Tomoko, who spends a year with her aunt’s family in the mountains outside Osaka. She has never met these relatives, but knows that they live in a 17-room mansion and have connections to far-flung European countries. Her excitement builds when she arrives there in March 1972 and meets Pochiko, her cousin Mina’s pygmy hippopotamus.
The house has many other exotic touches, such as a “light bathroom” and a refrigerator full of Fressy, the “radium-infused soft drink” that Tomoko is only allowed to drink at home on her birthday. Her aunt’s family believes that these novelties will help Mina’s chronic asthma, which limits her activities and even forces her to drive Pochiko to school to avoid the fumes.
The girls share common interests and fleeting obsessions with world events, such as the Japanese volleyball team’s gold medal win at the Munich Olympics. Although she is a year younger, Mina is more precocious and has a vivid imagination “far beyond that of most sixth-graders.”
This creativity, perhaps spurred by her physical weakness, is most clearly manifested in fables she writes about the artwork on matchboxes, one of which she always carries in her pocket. Inspired by these images, such as an elephant on a seesaw or a frog playing the ukulele, the stories are “Mina’s only real chance of escape.”
Other members of the household also fascinate Tomoko. Her aunt hides, smoking and drinking while searching for typos in various documents. Her dashing uncle, the third in line to run the Fressy corporation, disappears for weeks at a time. Her 83-year-old German grandmother is the best friend of the 83-year-old housekeeper, who “lives like a family member to whom she was in no way related.” Even Mina’s 18-year-old brother becomes a mystery to be solved while he visits from school in Switzerland.
Snyder, who – like too many translators – is not credited on the book’s jacket, has translated several of Ogawa’s works into English, including 2019’s “The Memory Police,” which was nominated for both the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award. A prime example of why his work is deservedly praised is his insightful treatment of Tomoko’s discussion with Grandma Rosa about the characters spelling her name.
Snyder keeps these three characters in the text so that, as Rosa notes, English readers can recognize that the name Tomoko begins with “two identical characters lined up next to each other,” which would have been obvious to Japanese readers. Tomoko goes on to explain to us that the characters mean “friend” or “companion.” The seemingly esoteric linguistics leads Rosa to recount that she left a twin sister behind in Germany, a key to the novel’s message of connection.
