Since childhood, reading has been more than just a hobby for me. You might say that I can’t find meaning in life without books. Since becoming a writer, I’ve had more occasion to read for work than for my own enjoyment, but I can’t say that has caused me any distress at all. Even if a book isn’t suited to my personal taste, there is always something to be gained by reading it, always some light that it will shed on my life from an unexpected angle.
― Yoko Ogawa, Interview, The New York Times
What booksellers are saying about Mina’s Matchbox
- I haven’t stopped thinking about these characters since I finished this book a week ago–each of them so wonderful and real. Ogawa has created a world replete with tenderness and wonder, tinged with melancholy but never subsumed by it. Mina and Tomoko’s friendship made me feel the thrill of childhood togetherness, that first sweetness of feeling totally safe with and understood by someone. It will be such a joy to recommend a book that centers happiness and belonging without a hint of schmaltz or cliche. And how could anyone resist a pygmy hippo named Pochoko?!
― Kristen Iskandrian from Thank You Books in Birmingham, AL | BUY
- This episodic historical novel is beautifully contemplative and delightfully whimsical, a bejeweled time capsule of childhood tinged with grief and secrecy. A deftly captivating tale that will leave readers entranced.
― Hannah DeCamp from Avid Bookshop in Athens, GA | BUY
- Slow and stepped in adolescent adventure and anguish, Mina’s Matchbox is an instant classic. Ogawa builds a whimsical world full of secrets that is impossible to put down.
― Alea Lopes from Oxford Exchange in Tampa, FL | BUY
- A lovely, poignant jewel box of a novel, Mina’s Matchbox is a warm, earnest and moving meditation on and celebration of memory. In conversation with and counterpose to Ogawa’s earlier novel The Memory Police, Mina’s Matchbox explores the uniquely human textures and valences that construct our memories and how while we make memories, our memories also help make us. An antidote to so many contemporary stories, Mina’s Matchbox is a coming-of-age story that illuminates and coxes warmth out of that which makes us human.
― Matt Nixon from A Cappella Books in Atlanta, GA | BUY
About Yoko Ogawa
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 Memory Police, The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas; The Housekeeper and the Professor; Hotel Iris; and Revenge. She lives in Ashiya, Japan.
