Home » Japan » Yōko Ogawa » ミーナの行進 (Mina’s Matchbox)
Yōko Ogawa: ミーナの行進 (Mina’s Matchbox)
Our heroine/narrator is Tomoko. She is seemingly around thirteen and this novel, recounted from many years later, tells of a key year in her life. Her father has died and her mother is struggling to make ends meet. She (the mother) decides that if she is to make a career as a dressmaker she needs to study. The mother’s sister had married a rich man, the head of Fressy, an energy drinks company. The family had already sent Tomoko’s mother a luxury pram for Tomoko when she was a baby and, as with other means of transport in this book, it will continue to have an effect on her and even has her imagine strange stories associated with it.
The aunt had married not only a rich man but a man who was half-German. His mother, Rosa, had fled the Holocaust – as we learn later many of her family were sent to Auschwitz – and had ended up in Japan.
Tomoko is sent off to this family where she soon meets another means of transport, her uncle’s Mercedes-Benz. She is welcomed into the family. In addition to her uncle and aunt, there is her cousin, the eponymous Mina, Grandmother Rosa, Yoneda-san, the maid, though it is she who runs the house and Kobayashi-san, the gardener/handyman who did not live in the house.
Tomoko soon learns about the family. Mina reads a lot but also suffers from frequent debilitating asthma attacks, for which she has to be taken to hospital. The father has two peculiarities. Firstly he loves repairing things. Anything that is broken is left on his desk and he will mend it. Secondly, he frequently disappears for days on end. The matter is not discussed. Tomoko is mystified but eventually, with a bit of sleuthing, finds out what is going on. Rosa still struggles with Japanese, particularly kanji. And as everyone has to have a quirk, the aunt spends her time spotting misprints in books , on TV and in signs and writing letters to the offenders.
There is a final member of the household I have not mentioned whom Tomoko sees through the window. She is Pochiko and she is a thirty-five year old pygmy hippopotamus. Unlike her larger cousins, she does not attack humans and, indeed, is very friendly. She is yet another means of transport as Mina rides her to school, aided by Kobayashi-san. She had been a present for the uncle when he was ten and,indeed, there had been a zoo here but it closed after an accident, leaving only Pochiko.
As Tomoko is a bit older, she goes to different school from Mina and she is able to walk there. We learn relatively little about her schooling as the focus is on the household. As mentioned Mina is a keen reader and she soon enlists Tomoko to go to the library and get books for her. This is initially prompted by the suicide of Yasunari Kawabata, Japan’s first Nobel Prize winner. Tomoko goes to the library to get some of his books that the household does not have. At the library, she meets the librarian, whom she nicknames Mr,. Turtleneck, because of his apparel and will speak to him often, Eventually, of course, she gets books not just for Mina but for herself.
One odd thing is that Mina seems skilled at is the use of matches, e.g. to light the gas heater, candles and so on. tShe was a girl who could strike a match more beautifully than anyone. Accordingly she has become a collector of matchboxes. She gets most of them from the young man who delivers the Fressy every week.
One other key event in their lives is the Olympics. These are the 1972 Olympics and the two girls are enthusiastic fans of the Jaapanese volleyball team on whom high expectations are placed. They follow the build-up and the games and Tomoko even gets her mother to send her a volleyball so that the two girls can play. Of course the Olympics are disrupted by the Munich massacre and Tomoko then learns more about the Holocaust and even gets a book from the library about it.
The other key event is that Mina’s brother Ryūichi comes home from school in Switzerland which changes the dynamics of the household. A few other relatively minor events occur before Tomoko’s mother comes to take her back and we get a brief summary as to what happened to the house and family from the perspective of many years later.
While this is a pleasant enough story, it is somewhat low key with no fireworks, only a few minor mysteries and not much really happening.
Publishing history
First published in 2006 byChuokoron-Shinsha
First English translation in 2024 by Harvill Secker
Translated by Stephen Snyder