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Yōko Ogawa (author), Stephen B. Snyder (translator), Mina’s Matchbox, Pantheon Books, 2024. 288 pages.

In Yōko Ogawa’s previous novel, The Memory Police, set on a mysterious unnamed island, the memory police gradually remove people’s recollections of everything from birds and rose petals to photographs. We do not know how they achieve this, but it seems impossible to prevent these memories from disappearing, except for the few strong enough to resist this erasure.

Mina’s Matchbox, ostensibly a book about a woman reflecting on a special year of her childhood from a distance of 30 years, is also a treatise on memory and its preservation or loss. The cover of my copy of the book, depicting a young girl riding on a pygmy hippopotamus, initially led me to think it was simply about growing up, and I unfavourably compared it to The Memory Police, as described above. However, on reflection, the novel offers profound insights into how we strive to preserve and refresh memories.

In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and her handsome Eurasian husband, the president of a soft drink company (“Fressy”)—symbolise elite status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings, sprawling gardens, and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides.

The family is as unusual as their mansion: Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt; the German grandmother; and the dashing, charming uncle, who periodically disappears and is the enigmatic head of the family. At the centre of the household is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen, described as a “child of light,” who draws Tomoko into a world full of fascinating experiences and elaborate storytelling.

Everything in the house is described in exquisite detail, with every object in its designated place, except for the books:

Even if Mina left a book sitting open on the table in the sunroom, Yoneda-san would never presume to move it or put it away. Beyond the page lay an unknown world, and the open book was a portal to that world that should not be thoughtlessly disturbed, lest Mina be unable to find her way back. Or so Yoneda-san believed. In the house at Ashiya, books were considered more precious than any sculpture or piece of pottery.

Perhaps that reverence explains the aunt’s unusual hobby of searching for typos in books:

Needless to say, for her, the goal of searching for typos was not to receive gifts of thanks. Nor did I really believe that my aunt was so meticulous she found it impossible to overlook the tiniest mistake. No, she was content simply to journey through the desert of characters, searching for every single typo buried at her feet. They were jewels glittering in a sea of sand, she said, and if no one dug them up, they would always remain hidden. If no one noticed them, they would be trampled underfoot and left behind—something my aunt couldn’t bear.

These typos could form a kind of Freudian slip, for example: “Instead of ‘nun’ they’ve written ‘gun,’” and “… in this instance, the only person speaking the truth is the gun.” I am uncertain why the aunt developed this obsession. Perhaps she felt that everything must be “perfect” and viewed these “imperfections” as “jewels” to be remembered, reflecting her belief that memory should encompass both flaws and beauty, as perfection is rarely attainable.

The uncle, often absent, is seen as the “fixer” of the broken:

They attached no notes, put nothing in a bag, but simply placed their offerings on the absent owner’s neatly arranged desk and left the study. They clearly believed that simply by doing so, their broken objects would be restored to their original state.

Late in the novel, when Tomoko discovers the uncle’s secret, this “fixing” of objects to their “original state” takes on a poignant irony, underscoring the hidden brokenness within the family.

Mina’s obsession is collecting matchboxes, which she glues to the bottom of larger boxes and uses as inspiration for stories. She hides these boxes under her bed and shares the stories exclusively with Tomoko. Mina is also responsible for lighting matches to heat the bath, illuminate oil lamps, or light candles during power outages or special dinners.

Although Mina collected used matchboxes, the matches themselves held great significance. In her hands, matches became “a kind of silent ritual, a devout prayer.” Lighting a match with her “delicate fingers” meant that “the darkness that had filled the room until that moment would recede like an outgoing tide. Such are the things we see in the light.” This could symbolise the illumination of stories or memories, making the unseen visible.

Towards the end of the novel, Mina declares it is time to stop her matchbox collecting and storytelling: “I start middle school next month, and the Young Man from Wednesday isn’t coming back [he delivered matchboxes to her]. I think this may be a good time to stop.”

Tomoko protests, “But you can’t get rid of the stories you’ve written. You know how much I love them.” Mina replies, “I’ll be sure to keep them. I’ll put them in a box and write on the lid: ‘Here lie stories that had only one reader.’” Perhaps these memories matter more to Tomoko than to Mina, who acts as a conduit for memory-keeping and knowing when to let go. This marks the end of a significant chapter in the girls’ lives.

In my view, this would have been the perfect point to conclude the novel; however, the postscript reveals what the protagonists are doing many years later. While this epilogue demonstrates the resilience of memory, it somewhat diminishes the narrative’s emotional impact.

And yet, with the passage of time, even as the distance has increased, the memories of the days I spent with Mina in Ashiya have grown more vivid and dense, have taken root deep in my heart. You might even say they’ve become the very foundation of my memory.

I wonder whether “vivid” and “dense” imply that these memories are accurate, or if they are seen through rose-tinted glasses. Mina’s Matchbox transforms a deceptively simple account of a year with exotic relatives into a meditation on the wonder of experience, the process of growing up, and the necessity of memory. This book delves deeply into storytelling, illustrating that memory serves as a vessel for unresolved emotions that carry over from childhood and adolescence into adulthood, profoundly shaping our futures.

How to cite: Eagleton, Jennifer. “Memory-keeping: Yōko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 8 Jan. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/01/08/mina-matchbox.

Jennifer Eagleton, a Hong Kong resident since October 1997, is a close observer of Hong Kong society and politics. Jennifer has written for Hong Kong Free Press, Mekong Review, and Education about Asia. Her first book is Discursive Change in Hong Kong (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and she is currently writing another book on Hong Kong political discourse for Palgrave MacMillan. Her poetry has appeared in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, People, Pandemic & ####### (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), and Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art (Cart Noodles Press, 2023). A past president of the Hong Kong Women in Publishing Society, Jennifer teaches and researches part-time at a number of universities in Hong Kong. [All contributions by Jennifer Eagleton.]