02923cam a2200397 i 4500 1799542067 TxAuBib 20241211120000.0 240724s2024||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2023054198 9780593316085 hardcover 0593316088 hardcover (OCoLC)1449647328 TxAuBib rda eng jpn Ogawa, Yōko, 1962-, author. Mīna no kōshin English. Mina's matchbox / by Yoko Ogawa ; translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. New York : Pantheon Books, [2024] 389 pages ; 22 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier Originally published in serialized form in Japan as Mina no Koshin by Yomiuri Shimbun in 2005. Originally published in paperback in Japan as Mina no Koshin by Chuokoron-Shinsha, Inc., Tokyo, in 2006. "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 grandmother, 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, which she looks back on briefly from adulthood at the novel's end.? Behind the family's sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand-her uncle's mysterious absences, her German grandmother's experience of WWII, and 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"-- Provided by publisher. 20241211. Families Fiction. Cousins Fiction. Friendship Fiction. Social classes Fiction. Japan Fiction. Psychological fiction. Fiction. Snyder, Stephen, 1957-, translator. TXKPL