Mina's Matchbox: A Novel

From the International Booker Prize–shortlisted author of The Memory Police comes a hypnotic tale of friendship, family secrets, and coming of age set in 1970s Japan.

In the spring of 1972, after the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent by her mother to live for a year with her wealthy aunt and uncle. It is a year that will change her life.

Her aunt’s family lives in a magnificent colonial mansion surrounded by sprawling gardens and the remnants of an old zoo, where the family’s pet pygmy hippopotamus still resides. The family is as beguiling as their home, but beneath their sophistication and charm lie darker undercurrents that Tomoko struggles to understand—her aunt’s misery, her handsome foreign uncle’s curious absences, her German great-aunt's experience of the Second World War. At the centre of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious asthmatic girl who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling, including the strange tales inspired by the illustrated matchboxes she collects beneath her bed. The two girls share confidences and enthusiasms, encounter heartache, and have their eyes opened to the workings of the adult world.

In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko's life. Beautifully atmospheric, and rich with the mystery and magic of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is a tenderly elegiac depiction of two girls poised on the brink of adulthood, and of a family on the edge of collapse.

YOKO OGAWA has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her works include The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas; The Housekeeper and the Professor; Hotel Iris; Revenge; and, most recently, The Memory Police, which was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the International Booker Prize.

ISBN: 9780771019913
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: July 01, 2025

Named a Best Book of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews and NPR • One of Indigo's Top 100 Books of 2024 • One of Oprah Daily’s Best New Novels of Fall • One of Time’s Best New Books to Read This Summer • A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from the Globe and Mail, The Atlantic, TIME, Boston Globe, Esquire, Lit Hub, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly • One of Kobo CA's Best Historical Fiction Ebooks of 2024

“A story of first enchantments and last gasps. . . . Ogawa evokes the snow globe of the girls’ adolescence, the crushes, obsessive hobbies and books with which they nurture each other’s emerging interests and desires. . . . Ogawa captures the enduring spark of that imprinting and its oracular glow. We revisit those moments when the match was first struck, when the future still felt like ours to ignite.”

—New York Times

"A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood's ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy."

—Kirkus Reviews