Mina's Matchbox [Large Print]

By Yōko Ogawa

Book Overview

This large print edition features an easy-to-read larger type size while preserving the complete text of the original edition.

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.

• Format: Library Binding
• Large Print: Yes
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1420519808
• ISBN13: 9781420519808
• Release Date: December 2024
• Publisher: Thorndike Press Large Print
• Length: 390 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.4"