BookBrowse Reviews Mina's Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa

Yōko Ogawa's 2006 novel Mina's Matchbox, recently translated into English from the Japanese, follows twelve-year-old Tomoko over the course of a formative year, as she leaves her single mother in a Tokyo suburb and goes to live with her extended family in a small coastal town. As she gets off the train at the beginning of the novel, Tomoko is stunned by the sight in front of her: a grand house with seventeen rooms, owned by her German uncle, the president of a lucrative soft drink company. It isn't long before Tomoko is enamored by her wealthy new family and surroundings, including their 35-year-old pygmy hippopotamus, Pochiko, the last survivor of a family zoo that closed during World War II.

But no one captures Tomoko's heart more than her cousin, Mina, a precocious yet sickly girl slightly younger than Tomoko, "who could strike a match more beautifully than anyone." Mina ...