From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police , here is a hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them.

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 aunts family. Tomokos 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 familys pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomokos dignified and devoted aunt, her German grandmother, and her dashing, charming uncle who confidently sits as the familys patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomokos 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 Tomokos life, which she looks back on briefly from adulthood at the novels end. Behind the family's sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand—her uncles mysterious absences, her German grandmothers experience of the second world war, her aunts misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Minas Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.