Mina's Matchbox

Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching

Paul Auster,on THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR

One of Japan’s most acclaimed authors

Time Magazine

A conspicuously gifted writer…To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state... She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance'

Guardian

A masterpiece...a novel that makes us see differently

Guardian, on THE MEMORY POLICE

Strange, beautiful and affecting

Sunday Times, on THE MEMORY POLICE

Yoko Ogawa is a quiet wizard, casting her words like a spell, conjuring a world of curiosity and enchantment, secrets and loss. I read Mina’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.

Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness

A transfixing coming of age tale set in early 1970s Japan. [Tomoko] uncovers a host of secrets that force her to question her family’s complicated history

Time Magazine, Summer Reads

This engaging bildungsroman explores the friendship and mutual curiosity between two extraordinary young people...Facing complicated themes with deceptively simple language...A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood’s ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy.

Kirkus

Ogawa pulls off the rare feat of making childhood memories both credible and provocative. Readers will be hypnotized

Publishers Weekly

Ogawa, an award-winning novelist both in her native Japan and in the United States, writes with exquisite artistry about the complications of a close-knit household whose members are quietly protective of its wounding secrets, as seen through the eyes of a young girl; the novel is beautifully translated by Snyder

Library Journal

Dreamy and whimsical, Mina’s Matchbox traffics in the themes at which Ogawa always excels: memory, identity, and nostalgia

Esquire

If you loved The Memory Police, you’ll be excited for Ogawa’s "hypnotic, introspective novel" ... Tomoko and her cousin Mina decipher the world around them: the family’s strange dynamics, her uncle’s absences, her aunt’s misery, and her great-aunt’s experience of the Second World War, in a coming-of-age story that’s sure to be transformative

Lit Hub

A timely if disconcerting reminder of all that swirls beneath seemingly placid water

ArtReview

Evokes the secret crushes and crushing secrets of girlhood with charm and elegance

People

Immersive and poignant. . . filled with wonder

Bookpage

Mina’s Matchbox, in a magnificent translation by Stephen B. Snyder, demonstrates the abiding comfort of fiction that envisions childhood as a time of discovery

Minneapolis Star Tribune

This elegant, unusual novel full of eccentric personages is a Wes Anderson movie waiting to happen

Oprah Daily

[A] beautifully composed novel… [and] elegant translation… Ogawa has turned a deceptively simple account of a year spent with exotic relatives into something closer to a universal fable about the precarious wonder of growing up

Financial Times

Utterly engrossing

Foreign Policy