CANR
WORK TITLE: Mina’s Matchbox
WORK NOTES:
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CITY: Ashiya
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COUNTRY: Japan
NATIONALITY: Japanese
LAST VOLUME: LRC 2014
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PERSONAL
Born March 30, 1962, in Okayama, Japan; married; children: one son.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Waseda University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Actress in the movie Okoge, 1992.
AWARDS:Kaien Prize, 1988, for Agehacho ga kowareru toki; Akutagawa Prize, 1990, for Ninshin Karenda; Yomiuri Prize, 2004, for Hakase no aishi ta sushiki; Izumi Prize, 2004, for Burafuman no maiso; Tanizaki Prize, 2006, for Mina no koshin; Shirley Jackson Award, 2008, for The Diving Pool; American Book Award, 2020, for The Memory Police; Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon, Emperor of Japan, 2021.
WRITINGS
Also author of Agehacho ga kowareru toki, 1989; Rokukakukei no sho heya, 1994; Yasashi uttae, 1996; and Umi, 2006. Contributor of numerous short stories to periodicals, including the New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Author’s works have been translated into English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, and nineteen other languages.
Hakase no aishita sushiki was adapted as a film of the same title, 2003; the film L’Annulaire (The Ringfinger) was based in part on Kusuriyubi no hyohon, 2005; The Housekeeper and the Professor was made into the film The Professor’s Beloved Equation.
SIDELIGHTS
Prolific author Yoko Ogawa has been successfully publishing novels in Japan since the late 1980s. Over the years, she has won several major Japanese literary awards, including the Kaien Prize, Akutagawa Prize, Yomiuri Prize, Izumi Prize, and the Tanizaki Prize. Her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. As Ogawa’s popularity has grown, her work has started to appear in English translation. One such work, Hakase no aishita sushiki, was adapted as a film of the same title in 2003. The book has also been translated into English as both The Gift of Numbers and The Housekeeper and the Professor. The story is about a single mother and a well-known professor of mathematics. The professor was in an accident that left him with amnesia, and the single mother is hired on as his caretaker. The story portrays their growing relationship as the mother and her son learn to understand their mysterious employer.
Ogawa’s most widely reviewed work in English translation to date is The Diving Pool: Three Novellas. The collection, published in 2008, features novellas titled “Dormitory,” “Pregnancy Diary,” and “The Diving Pool.” All of the stories are set in urban Japan and feature female protagonists in their late teens or early twenties. The book’s title novella portrays Aya as she falls for Jun, who is essentially her foster brother. Aya’s parents run an orphanage, and she is raised alongside her parents’ charges. Aya’s complicated love for Jun is also offset by her cruelty towards Rie, the youngest girl in the orphanage. In “Pregnancy Diary,” Ogawa tells the tale of a woman who tracks her sister’s pregnancy in her journal. The woman’s sister endlessly craves homemade grapefruit jam, which in the end, may turn out to be poisonous to the fetus. The third novella, “Pregnancy Diary,” features the landlord of a college dormitory. The landlord, an amputee, is fascinated by the students’ intact limbs. When one of the students goes missing, the landlord becomes the main suspect.
Aside from the similarity of the settings and protagonists in each story, critics remarked that all three novellas are suspenseful and strange tales. Furthermore, the work was universally acclaimed, and critics lamented that Ogawa’s work has not been more widely translated. They also looked forward to additional translations amid Ogawa’s growing popularity in the United Kingdom and the United States. Although Victoria James, writing in the London Independent, felt that the stories are “perhaps too similar in structure and conceit,” she nevertheless called the book “a welcome introduction to an author whose suggestive, unsettling storytelling speaks volumes by leaving things unsaid.” Joanna Briscoe, writing in the London Guardian, was also pleased by the tales. She noted that “women in Ogawa’s work are essentially impassive, numbed, even dazed. … Their disconcerting inertia in response to their restricted roles is counterpoised with eruptions and vicious twists.” Furthermore, Briscoe added, Ogawa’s “exquisite, controlled prose avoids becoming brittle through her depth of emotional understanding. To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state tinged with a nightmare, and her stories continue to haunt. She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance.”
Reviewers in the United States were just as impressed as those in England. Indeed, Cherie Thiessen, reviewing The Diving Pool in January, remarked that “the three pithy works contained in this new publication are … sleek and muscular.” She also stated: “Lucky this book is slim. It’s a collection you are probably going to be driven to read more than once.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor also applauded the book, calling it “a masterfully twisted triptych of dark novellas [that] marks the American debut of a critically acclaimed Japanese fiction writer.”
Ogawa’s Hakase no aishita sushiki was translated and published as The Housekeeper and the Professor, a story “about chosen family, relationships, mathematics and baseball (okay, baseball is a small part of it, but I loved this added bonus),” explained Rachel Baker on the Old Musty Books Web site. “While reading this book, I was simply amazed at how enticing mathematics could be.” The characters are nameless (they are known simply as “the Professor,” “the Housekeeper,” and “Root,” the housekeeper’s young son). “Names are inconsequential because so few characters play within the plot,” wrote Karen D. Haney on the Curled Up with a Good Book Web site. “After a devastating accident,” Baker explained, “the professor only has eighty minutes of short term memory. This means, every single morning, the Housekeeper has to reintroduce herself to the Professor before she can go into his house. One would think there would be no way to build a relationship with this sort of setback. This book shows it’s possible.” “Feelings intertwine with numbers,” Haney stated, “and before readers know it, they feel the same fascination with mathematics that the Professor and the Housekeeper come to cherish together as her own interest in numbers draws her to him.”
“They also bond over baseball,” explained Jim Higgins in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Root is nuts about it. The Professor, too, is a fan. He has never seen a game, but he has a tin of prized baseball cards, including his favorite player, left-handed Hanshin Tigers pitcher Yutaka Enatsu, whose perfect number twenty-eight is so pleasing.” “Dive into Yoko Ogawa’s world (she is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction) and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen,” declared Dennis Overbye in the New York Times Book Review. “What is the problem with all the men in the housekeeper’s life? Who is the woman in the photograph buried under baseball cards in a tin on the professor’s desk? Can the professor love somebody he can’t remember?” “Ogawa never minimizes the professor’s limitations or the difficulty of caring for him, but she has a sublime sense of his value, his enduring capacity for affection and his ability to illuminate the world of numbers,” stated Ron Charles in the Washington Post Book World. “Of course, befriending a man who forgets who you are every day inspires a heart-breaking kind of pathos, but the housekeeper never dwells on that sadness. She’s more impressed by the professor’s special insight into the mathematical underpinnings of the universe.”
“Soon, the satisfaction taken in mathematics creates a soothing music between all three characters, echoing that of their relationship, which finds ways, like an equation, to restate, strengthen, correct and balance itself against various trials,” declared Joan Frank in the San Francisco Chronicle. “As the professor ages he grows frailer, and what remains of his memory begins to sputter.” “The smart and resourceful housekeeper … falls under the spell of the beautiful mathematical phenomena the Professor elucidates,” stated Booklist contributor Donna Seaman. “The trio begins to resemble a family,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “with an unspoken understanding of each other that transcends language and convention.” Ogawa’s account of their “eccentric relationship,” concluded the Kirkus Reviews contributor, “reads like a fable, one that deftly balances whimsy with heartache.”
“The book as a whole is an exercise in delicate understatement, of the careful arrangement of featherlight materials into a surprisingly strong structure. The pure mountain air of number theory blows gently through all its pages,” wrote Steven Poole in the London Guardian. “Only at length does the reader wonder whether the touching illusion that Ogawa creates—of a lasting friendship with a man whose memory only lasts eighty minutes—was just that, an illusion.” “There are also severe narrative drawbacks in placing a character with anterograde amnesia at the centre of a story,” wrote Spectator reviewer Charles Cumming. “But Ogawa largely overcomes these through the clarity of her prose and the originality of her approach.” “I adored this wonderfully book. It’s certainly one of my favourites this year and probably one of the best books I’ve ever read,” declared a contributor to the Daisy’s Book Journal Web site. “To say it’s beautifully written is an understatement.”
In Ogawa’s next novel, Hotel Iris, a seventeen-year-old named Mari helps her mother run a shady seaside hotel. Mari becomes strangely attracted to a man who was thrown out of the hotel for loudly abusing a prostitute, and who also may or may not have killed his wife. Soon enough Mari becomes involved in a sadomasochistic relationship with the man, and she is also dragged into his web of lies.
Reviewing the work for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, contributor Maureen Corrigan put forth: “This is a novel you find yourself reluctantly transfixed by. Ogawa is a writer capable of seducing readers against their will. … Using spare strokes and macabre detail, Ogawa creates an intense vision of limited lives and the twisted ingenuity of people trapped within them. You’ll be glad you read Hotel Iris and also glad to check out.” M.A. Orthofer, a contributor to the Complete Review Web site, remarked: “ Hotel Iris moves along and comes together in an intriguing fashion, but ultimately feels underdeveloped, just like its protagonist. The physical is presented in graphic (and shocking) detail, but the psychological is not explored nearly enough.” London Independent contributor Daniel Hahn opined: “It’s brave territory for Ogawa, and she manages it with sharp focus; she creates moments of breathtaking ugliness, often when least expected.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor reported: “Minimalist Ogawa … trades the eccentric relationships of her debut novel for a much darker affair in her latest plumbing of human experience.” A Publishers Weekly contributor labeled the work a “haiku-like fable of love contorted into obsession.”
Departing again from long-form fiction, Ogawa shows her narrative power and precision in Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, a collection of short stories translated by Stephen Snyder. The subject matter of these closely linked stories can be grim, macabre, even tragic and sad, but reviewers repeatedly commented on how her literary style and writing skills make the unusual into unlikely examples of narrative excellence. “Perhaps what makes the world of Ogawa’s fiction tolerable is precisely its quality of nightmare, tinged with bleak comedy and marked by surrealistic images,” observed Toronto National Post reviewer Philip Marchand.
The stories establish an assortment of atmospheric settings and emotional responses. In “An Afternoon at the Bakery,” a grieving mother stops by to purchase strawberry shortcake for a son who died years earlier, suffocated in an abandoned refrigerator. The mother, possibly driven insane by grief, discovered her son’s body, she reveals, and never had the chance to eat cake with him before he died. “Old Mrs. J” describes how the narrator, a struggling writer, discovers that the landlady grows carrots in the shape of human hands. A traffic accident covers the road with spilled tomatoes in “The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger.” In “Sewing for a Heart,“ a master bag maker is asked to create a container to hold a woman’s heart, which grows outside of her body.
Interconnected objects and images recur in these stories. The tomatoes in “The Last Hour of the Bengal Tiger” reappear in “Tomatoes and the Full Moon,” in which a woman picks up some of the fruits from the deadly accident site and offers some of them to a fellow resort guest. The characters in “Fruit Juice” eat strawberry shortcake from the same bakery featured in “Afternoon at the Bakery.“ “By linking these ‘eleven dark tales,’ Ogawa makes a powerful case for the interrelatedness of discrete instances of horror, crime, and passion,” commented Rhoda Feng in a Huffington Post review.
In this collection, “Ogawa is peerless at exploring the prismatic significance of the minutest activities and occurrences of prosaic life, making them the portal to horrid secrets in the lives of her characters. She delivers little shocks of grotesque and otherwise unnerving detail specially calibrated to disturb our sense of the quotidian,” remarked Feng. “Ogawa’s writing is simple and effective, and her technique for merging the tales demonstrates her mastery of the written word,” observed a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, found Ogawa’s collection to be a “delectably fantastic, endlessly intriguing tales of obsession, revenge, and unforeseen interconnections.”
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Ogawa’s 1994 novel Hisoyaka na kessho was finally translated into English by Stephen Snyder and published in 2019 as The Memory Police. As Ogawa discussed in an interview with Nippon, her novel was an homage to Anne Frank: “For me, reading The Diary of a Young Girl was the reason I became an author.” In Ogawa’s novel, the narrator is a writer living on an island where objects start disappearing. Most of the island’s inhabitants do not even notice, but those who remember live in fear of the Memory Police, who barge into people’s homes and arrest anyone who can remember the lost objects. The woman learns that her editor is one of those who is in danger, and she builds a secret room to hide him in her house, but the Memory Police are closing in.
“A dark and ambitious novel,” wrote a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. They called it a “dystopian tale about state surveillance” and a “searing, vividly imagined novel by a wildly talented writer.” They praised Ogawa for expanding her range “into something even deeper.” Julian Lucas, in the New York Times Book Review, called the book an “elegantly spare dystopian fable.” Lucas described reading the novel as the equivalent of “sinking into a snowdrift: lulling yet suspenseful.” He also noted that the story is more aptly compared to the work of Samuel Beckett in its “surreally escalating diminishment” rather than the dystopian novels of Fahrenheit 451 or The Handmaid’s Tale.
Michael Morrison, writing in World Literature Today, praised the book for how it uses “calm, chilling understatement that repeatedly catches us off guard.” He lauded “the beauty and simplicity” of Ogawa’s writing and the “mood of elegiac sadness that blankets the twists and turns of the story.” The result, for Morrison, is a “singularly unforgettable” novel defined by “subtly poetic imagery” and the “strangely compelling nature” of its “leisurely plot.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews described Ogawa’s writing as “quiet” and “poetic.” They praised the story for how it “considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.”
Mina’s Matchbox, the English translation of Ogawa’s 2006 novel Mina no koshin, was published in 2024, also with a translation by Stephen Snyder. Set in 1972, it features a twelve-year-old girl who goes to live with her aunt and uncle in a mansion on the coast. Her uncle is half-German, half-Japanese, and their house reflects his German background. Mina connects with her cousin, who loves telling stories and riding the family’s pygmy hippopotamus to school, and the book describes their year of youthful and strange experiences.
“Readers will be hypnotized,” predicted a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. They praised Ogawa for pulling off “the rare feat of making childhood memories both credible and provocative.” Writing in Library Journal, Beth E. Andersen praised Ogawa for writing “with exquisite artistry” and using language as “clean and delicate as a whisper.” She also highlighted Snyder’s translation, as did Terry Hong in Booklist. “A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood’s ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy” is how a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews described the story. They praised the book for tackling “complicated themes with deceptively simple language.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2008, Ray Olson, review of The Diving Pool: Three Novellas, p. 26; January 1, 2009, Donna Seaman, review of The Housekeeper and the Professor, p. 46; December 15, 2012, Donna Seaman, review of Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, p. 19; July, 2024, Terry Hong, review of Mina’s Matchbox, p. 26.
Economist, January 26, 2013, “Slightly Off: New Japanese Fiction,” review of Revenge,, p. 75.
Guardian (London, England), August 2, 2008, Joanna Briscoe, review of The Diving Pool; May 2, 2009, Steven Poole, “Prime Reading.”
Independent (London, England), August 8, 2008, Victoria James, review of The Diving Pool; June 28, 2010, Daniel Hahn, review of Hotel Iris.
January, January, 2008, Cherie Thiessen, review of The Diving Pool.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2007, review of The Diving Pool; December 1, 2008, review of The Housekeeper and the Professor; March 15, 2010, review of Hotel Iris; November 15, 2012, review of Revenge; June 1, 2019, review of The Memory Police; July 1, 2024, review of Mina’s Matchbox.
Library Journal, April 1, 2009, Victor Or, review of The Housekeeper and the Professor, p. 71; July, 2024, Beth E. Andersen, review of Mina’s Matchbox, p. 88.
Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2009, Susan Salter Reynolds, review of The Housekeeper and the Professor.
Mainichi Daily News, April 27, 2007, “Novelists Yoko Ogawa, Hiromi Kawakami to Join Akutagawa Literary Prize Nomination Committee.”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 15, 2009, Jim Higgins, review of The Housekeeper and the Professor.
National Post (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), February 15, 2013, Philip Marchand, “Open Book: Revenge, by Yoko Ogawa, ,” review of Revenge.
New Yorker, February 9, 2009, review of The Housekeeper and the Professor, p. 109; February 25, 2013, review of Revenge,, p. 81.
New York Times Book Review, March 1, 2009, Dennis Overbye, “You Must Not Remember This,” p. 9; September 8, 2019, Julian Lucas, “We’re Being Watched,” review of The Memory Police, p. 12; August 18, 2024, author interview, p. 6.
Publishers Weekly, October 29, 2007, review of The Diving Pool, p. 30; November 17, 2008, review of The Housekeeper and the Professor, p. 40; February 8, 2010, review of Hotel Iris, p. 28; November 12, 2012, review of Revenge, p. 41; June 24, 2019, review of The Memory Police, p. 144; June 3, 2024, review of Mina’s Matchbox, p. 88.
San Francisco Chronicle, March 15, 2009, Joan Frank, review of The Housekeeper and the Professor.
Spectator, June 6, 2009, Charles Cumming, “Strength in Numbers,” p. 36.
Washington Post Book World, February 15, 2009, Ron Charles, “Infinite Loop: A Woman Cares for a Mathematician Who Never Remembers Who She Is,” p. 6.
World Literature Today, Summer, 2019, Michael A. Morrison, review of The Memory Police, pp. 84+.
ONLINE
Complete Review, http://www.complete-review.com/ (December 19, 2009), M.A. Orthofer, review of Hotel Iris.
Curled Up with a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/ (October 7, 2009), Karen D. Haney, review of The Housekeeper and the Professor.
Cyberhobo.net, http://www.cyberhobo.net/ (October 7, 2009), review of The Housekeeper and the Professor.
Daisy’s Book Journal, http://lazydaisy0413.blogspot.com/ (October 7, 2009), review of The Housekeeper and the Professor.
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (March 7, 2013), Rhoda Feng, review of Revenge.
January, http://januarymagazine.com/ (October 7, 2009), Cherie Thiessen, review of The Diving Pool.
Man Asian Literary Prize Web site, http://www.manasianliteraryprize.org/ (April 28, 2014), biography of Yoko Ogawa.
National Public Radio, Fresh Air, http://www.npr.org/ (April 14, 2010), Maureen Corrigan, “In a Seaside Town, Hidden Desires Surface.”
National Public Radio Website, http://www.npr.org/ (February 18, 2013), Alan Cheuse, “Under Ogawa’s Macabre, Metafictional Spell,” transcript of All Things Considered radio review of Revenge.
Nippon, https://www.nippon.com (March 27, 2020), “Writer Ogawa Yoko’s Stories of Memory and Loss,” author interview.
Old Musty Books, http://www.oldmustybooks.com/ (October 7, 2009), Rachel Baker, review of The Housekeeper and the Professor.
Words without Borders, http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/ (April 28, 2013), Mithili G. Rao, review of Revenge.*
Yôko Ogawa
Japan (b.1962)
Yoko Ogawa is a Japanese novelist, born in Okayama prefecture in 1962. She won one of the most important prize in 1988 with her debut novel, "Agehachou ga kowareru toki (When the swallowtail breaks)" and since then she became one of the leading novelist in Japan.
Awards: Jackson (2009) see all
Genres: Literary Fiction, Science Fiction
New and upcoming books
August 2024
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Mina's Matchbox
Novels
The Housekeeper and the Professor (2007)
aka The Gift of Numbers
Hotel Iris (2010)
The Memory Police (2019)
Mina's Matchbox (2024)
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Collections
The Diving Pool (2008)
Revenge (2013)
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Non fiction hide
Color in Fashion (1989)
Writer Ogawa Yōko’s Stories of Memory and Loss
Culture Arts Books Mar 27, 2020
Translated 25 years after it was originally written in Japanese, Ogawa Yōko’s The Memory Police has become a big hit in the English-speaking world. Here she discusses her influences and reactions to the work, as well as her latest novel in Japan.
Ogawa Yōko
Born in Okayama Prefecture in 1962. Recipient of many literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize for Ninshin karendā (Pregnancy Calendar) in 1991 and the 2006 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō Prize for Mīna no kōshin (Mina’s March).
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The Memory Police, a 2019 translation of an Ogawa Yōko novel first written 25 years earlier, has brought fresh attention to a book that, perhaps surprisingly, is being seen as speaking particularly to our twenty-first century times. Stephen Snyder’s version of Ogawa’s 1994 Hisoyaka na kesshō was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and at the time of writing has reached the longlist stage of the International Booker Prize. It has won new readers as a universal tale of memory and loss, while also being interpreted within the trend for dystopian fiction in the English-speaking world.
Recounting her experience in American media interviews, Ogawa says that while she felt the essence of the work had been thoroughly conveyed through the translation, she was surprised at the links reporters made to the current US political situation. “They were asking me political questions that nobody did 25 years ago. I had no intention of depicting a near-future setting as a political statement—it was meant to be more like the past, before I was born. But when I reread the book for the first time in ages, I was shocked that I’d included a tsunami, and it’s frightening to think that rather than getting further away from the world I created in the book, contemporary readers are connecting it with the near future.”
A Homage to Anne Frank
The Memory Police takes place on an island beset by the quiet disappearance from people’s remembrance of everything from birds and flowers to photographs and calendars. The vanishings are matched by changes in the natural world, and secret police destroy any items that remain. Once they are gone, most of the islanders are not even aware of what they have lost, but those residents who can remember are hunted down by the police and taken away. One day the narrator, an author, hides her editor in an underground room.
The story is indeed relatable to today’s anxieties over the surveillance society, media manipulation, and authoritarianism. When writing it, however, Ogawa felt she was paying tribute to Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, which made a strong impression on her when she read it as a teenager. One thing it taught her was that she had been given the freedom to express in words what she was feeling inside.
“For me, reading The Diary of a Young Girl was the reason I became an author. On the day the editor moves to the secret room, it’s raining heavily. This was the same for Anne Frank and her family. As everyone lowered their heads and hurried through the downpour, nobody challenged their rapid pace toward the hiding place. My scene was meant to pay homage to Anne.”
Ogawa wanted to put Frank’s experience into her own story. By writing about someone who had so many things taken from her for no good reason, she thought the oppressive nature of the society would naturally reveal itself. At the same time, she wanted to write about vanished memories. Initially these were separate ideas, but at some point they became connected, and she decided to create a story with an island setting.
“In the story, the vanishings lead to despair, but as an author I found satisfaction in writing those scenes—for example, when the birds fly off into the distance or when the river is covered with fallen rose petals. These moments of disappearance came to me vividly, and the enjoyment of setting them down helped me keep writing to the end of the book.”
Lost Children
For Ogawa, when starting a novel, images and a sense of place are more important than plot. “If I think about it, I’ve always written stories about people shut in small spaces,” she says. Closed-off locations like hospital rooms, museums, and libraries play a major role in her works. “This may be connected with Anne, but I have this feeling that small spaces are safe. My latest novel is based around the idea that souls cannot be harmed if kept within the confines of a box.”
Published in Japan in 2019, Kobako (Little Boxes) is set in a world in which there are no more children. The narrator lives in a former kindergarten. In the main hall, rows of small glass boxes are filled with items from parents corresponding to how much their children have “grown.” These range from plush toys, candy, and kanji study books to acne products and even alcohol. In the season when the west wind blows, adults wear earrings with small instruments, like harps strung with the children’s hair or wind chimes containing nails and baby teeth, and climb to high ground where the wind is strongest. There they are each moved by their solitary music.
This motif derives from a local tradition Ogawa observed during a 2013 trip to Tōhoku, in which parents dedicate ema (wooden votive tablets) with wedding scenes or glass cases with dolls representing bride and groom to temples, so that their dead children can marry in the afterlife. She also saw glass cases with toys and stationery. In the past, many parents would dedicate ema on behalf of sons who had died in war, while recently they are frequently used for children who have died from accidents, illnesses, or disasters like the 2011 tsunami.
While resistance is a repeated element in The Memory Police, in Little Boxes there is an overwhelming sense of resignation. “When people lose something precious to them through natural means, I think they’re able to accept it. Even the loss of children is part of a natural providence, which includes death. By dedicating various things in the boxes to their children’s souls and communicating with them through the music they hear, they try to live with that providence. It might be that the artificial, political vanishings in the world of The Memory Police create an entirely different sense of loss from that in Little Boxes.”
The Memory Police was published in Japanese in 1994. The following year the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake caused more than 6,000 fatalities, and the Aum Shinrikyō cult launched a shocking gas attack on Tokyo subway lines. In 2001, the September 11 terrorist attacks sent global tensions soaring. Then the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 killed more than 18,000 people and led to a major nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Ogawa says that the past 25 years have shown her the vulnerability of the everyday world, leading her to a belief that death does not mean a breaking off of ties with loved ones. This is why she chose to write about bereaved parents who get through each day by believing that their children continue to grow after they have died.
Writing for the Dead
Ogawa read children’s literature from around the world from her elementary school years onward, and Anne Frank’s diary resonated with her in high school. Finally, she began to read widely in Japanese literature, and at Waseda University, she was influenced by authors like Kanai Mieko, Ōe Kenzaburō, and Murakami Haruki. Then translations by Murakami and the literary scholar Shibata Motoyuki reignited her interest in foreign writing. She says that US author Paul Auster made a particular impact on her. “Auster writes a spoken literature—it feels like he’s written down a story someone told him, rather than creating it himself. Shibata’s translation was also very important, but when I read Moon Palace I thought ‘This is how I’d like to write.’ Like I’m just a medium for transferring a story from the world outside.”
There was a time in her youth, says Ogawa, when she wanted to convey her inner voice, but she recalls a gradual shift in interest to other people. “There were many stories from outside me that I needed to put into words and tell the world. Even without knowing what I was doing, I was deciphering these stories that were buried like fossils—I realized I was able to write naturally in this way.”
Some years after she made her debut as a novelist, she came to feel that all of the characters in her books were “dead” in some sense. “Even if they are greatly shocked or are treated outrageously, they cannot describe it in words. For example, when people can’t express a thought like ‘Why did my child have to die?’ you could say that I’m working to give them words through my story. Naturally, there is also physical death, but these characters are dead in the sense that they have lost their words in a world made up of them.
“When I depict the characters, the role of the narrator is important. If I can’t decide who the narrator is or the viewpoint that person has, the voices of the dead won’t come through to the reader. The narrator of The Memory Police is one of those who has had her memories taken. In Little Boxes, the custodian of the boxes hasn’t lost a child, and this creates distance. I thought having her somewhat removed would allow me to make her a more objective observer.”
A Regular Concern
Many of Ogawa’s characters exist in quiet corners of society. Her interest in these kinds of people dates backs to her childhood. Her father’s family home in Okayama Prefecture was a church for Konkōkyō, a Shintō sect, and she was born and raised there. “The church was a gathering place for all sorts of people without social standing, in a range of different circumstances. People were considered equal there. In my novels, there are lots of characters who find it hard to live in society due to something they lack. Maybe I was influenced by encountering so many people like that when I was a child. They’ve been swept into a corner, where they seem to live on the verge of being swallowed up by the darkness.”
Little Boxes is about parents who have lost their children, while an earlier novel, Kotori (Little Birds), tells the story of two brothers who can only communicate with birds. In her bestseller Hakase no aishita sūshiki (trans. The Housekeeper and the Professor), the professor is only able to remember the past 80 minutes. Memory is a regular concern for Ogawa in her writing.
“Little Boxes has characters obsessed by memories, but it’s an unavoidable topic when depicting people. You could say that humans are made up of memories. The professor’s limited-term memory brought into relief his humanity and his interactions with the people around him: the housekeeper and her son.” Mathematics, another key element in the story, came into being when Ogawa made a connection between memory disorder and math, she says.
“Next I’d like to write a novel set in a theater.” As well as her enjoyment of plays, Ogawa notes that in the industry a theater is known as a hako, or “box,” and is isolated from the outside world with no movement between the stage and audience. “In the end, I always imagine the same kind of place,” she laughs. “I can write with a sense of reassurance about a space with a clear outline. I can’t write an adventure where characters break out beyond that.”
(Originally published in Japanese on March 10, 2020, based on an interview by Itakura Kimie of Nippon.com. Photos by Hashino Yukinori of Nippon.com.)
Ogawa, Yoko THE MEMORY POLICE Pantheon (Adult Fiction) $25.95 8, 13 ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: "Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It's a shame that the people who live here haven't been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that's just the way it is on this island." But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared--often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing "anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable," they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses--or is simply unable--to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion--as modest as a birthday party--do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters' kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist's emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator's developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
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"Ogawa, Yoko: THE MEMORY POLICE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A587054465/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=08dd081a. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
The Memory Police
Yoko Ogawa, trans, from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. Pantheon, $25.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-101-87060-0
Ogawa (Revenge) returns with a dark and ambitious novel exploring memory and power--both individual and institutional--through a dystopian tale about state surveillance. The unnamed female narrator is an orphaned novelist living on an unnamed island that is in the process of disappearing, item by item. The disappearances, of objects such as ribbons, perfume, birds, and calendars, are manifested in a physical purge of the object as well as a psychological absence in the island's residents' memories. The mysterious and brutal Memory Police are in charge of enforcing these disappearances, randomly searching homes and arresting anyone with the ability to retain memory of the disappeared, including the narrator's mother. When the narrator discovers her editor, R, is someone who does not have the ability to forget, she builds a secret room in her house to hide him, with the help of her former nurse's husband, an old man who once lived on the ferry, which has also disappeared. Though R may not leave the room for fear of discovery, he, the narrator, and the old man are able to create a sense of home and family. However, the disappearances and the Memory Police both grow more aggressive, with more crucial things disappearing at a faster rate, and it becomes clear that it will be impossible for them--their family unit, and the island as a whole--to continue. The classic Ogawa hallmarks are here, a dark eroticism and idiosyncratic characters, but it's also clear she's expanded her range into something even deeper. This is a searing, vividly imagined novel by a wildly talented writer. (Aug.)
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"The Memory Police." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 25, 24 June 2019, p. 144. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A592040017/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=66aa1aca. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
OVERTHROW By Caleb Crain
THE MEMORY POLICEBy Yoko OgawaTranslated by Stephen Snyder
A defining feature of 21st-century life is that everyone can see what you're looking at. Perception is increasingly defined as a social activity, from public likes to streaming platforms that broadcast what you're listening to and how many hours you've gamed. Horny swipes on dating apps have become a potential advantage in geopolitical strategy; in May, United States authorities forced Grindr's Chinese owners to sell the gay dating app, citing reasons of national security. Even as ordinary people lose control over how they are seen, institutional gatekeepers expand their sway over public opinion. Electronic books and digital records vanish with shifts in political power or copyright regimes. Yet few novelists have probed the inner consequences of life in a world so intimately mediated by surveillance.
Set during Occupy Wall Street in 2011, Caleb Crain's ''Overthrow'' explores the fallout that occurs when friendship's intimate ambiguities become ammunition in an information war. Like ''Necessary Errors,'' his debut novel about expatriates in Prague, Crain's second work of fiction features a circle of young people experimenting with mature identities. Marginally affiliated with Occupy, they refer to themselves (with varying degrees of earnestness) as the ''Working Group for the Refinement of the Perception of Feelings.'' The group spends most of its time cultivating a form of mind reading that is, depending on whom you ask, either a supernatural aptitude or ''a supersensitive variety of tact.''
Nobody ''reads'' better than Leif, a 24-year-old poet-barista with an ''elfin beauty,'' a ''moonglow complexion'' and a lunatic energy that his peers find impossible to resist. In the first chapter, he picks up a graduate student named Matthew and whisks him off to a meeting of the group. The coy divination of cruising gives way to collective experiments in psychic transparency: ''Matthew had wanted to go to bed with the boy, and he was being led to a plane even more tenuous than utopia.''
Crain skillfully evokes a recent past when the unprecedented access fostered by the internet still felt like a promise of liberation. Nebulously aspiring to save the world through openness, the group's half-dozen members blog, exchange intuitions, make promotional T-shirts and intermittently volunteer with the activists encamped at Zuccotti Park. ''Not knowing exactly what it was was part of the charm,'' Crain writes. ''To do something that no one had managed to define yet and to do it without permission.''
Leif's friends aren't the only ones interested in radical transparency, and after police arrest several other members at Occupy, the group runs afoul of a government intelligence contractor who's placed them under scrutiny. A misguided attempt to retaliate by ''doxxing'' the company results in felony charges for cybercrime. The case goes viral, attracting the exploitative attention of ambitious lawyers, opportunistic roommates and online trolls. Journalists label them the ''Telepathy Four.''
What follows is, essentially, a 19th-century social novel for the 21st-century surveillance state. Frequently alluding to Henry James's ''The Princess Casamassima,'' another story of young radicals, Crain subjects his characters to quandaries that test their precariously entwined identities. The novel almost dares readers to object to its inwardness -- ''It's like there's a new sumptuary law against introspection,'' one of the four complains -- but its tender, psychologically precise prose feels like a bulwark against the exposure it takes for a subject.
As the friends prepare separate defenses, trust frays and class divisions metastasize. One working-class member, feeling abandoned by peers with expensive legal representation, turns state's evidence, while the wealthiest person in their group reveals that she's planning to write a tell-all. Leif loses confidence in his psychic abilities; a once-swaggering ''hacktivist'' wets himself in his lawyer's office; and everybody anxiously anticipates the actions of everybody else. What all inevitably discover is that -- in law and surveillance as in love and friendship -- there's no way to know another's mind without self-exposure. We all have on ''read receipts.''
It's not always easy to disentangle the empath's intuition from its dark, data-driven analogue. Near the end of ''Overthrow,'' an executive at ''Planchette'' -- Crain's riff on the shadowy analytics firm Palantir -- envisions a future where ''no gesture goes unnoticed,'' and ''tactful'' surveillance fits like a glove. ''No one will feel watched,'' he goes on. ''But everyone will feel ... appreciated.'' We all know how this story ends, and it certainly isn't with the universal refinement of feelings. But Crain's novel reminds us that real sympathetic awareness -- engendered by trust, courage and human proximity -- remains our best defense against its weaponized digital double. ''It's a war of the senses,'' Leif explains. ''Over what we're allowed to perceive, still.''
It's a war that's been lost on the bereft island of Yoko Ogawa's latest novel, ''The Memory Police,'' where hats, perfume, green beans, birdsong and countless other entities have been stricken from perceptible reality. Translated by Stephen Snyder, the acclaimed Japanese writer's fifth English release is an elegantly spare dystopian fable narrated by a novelist who hides her editor under the floorboards of her home office. He's wanted for his immunity to the periodic ''disappearances,'' an incremental collective dementia that is reducing the island to ''nothing but absences and holes.'' Objects don't vanish, exactly; people wake up knowing they are ''gone,'' and destroy them. Those who can't forget receive a visit from the Memory Police, who enforce the disappearances by carting off families and eliminating contraband while betraying no signs of their intent.
[ ''I always thought, no matter how my life changes, I want to have a life of writing. Whether I could make any money off it, I did not know'': Read our profile of Yoko Ogawa. ]
Reading ''The Memory Police'' is like sinking into a snowdrift: lulling yet suspenseful, it tingles with dread and incipient numbness. The story accrues in unhurried layers of coolly reported routine, as Ogawa's narrator (the central characters are nameless) describes a life that is ordinary yet pockmarked with absence. She lives alone in her childhood home near the river, writing novels in her father's old office or brooding in the basement studio where her mother, a sculptor, once entrusted her with forbidden keepsakes. ''Ribbon, bell, emerald, stamp,'' she writes. ''The objects in my palm seemed to cower there, absolutely still, like little animals in hibernation, sending me no signal at all.''
That her memories disappear ''right on schedule'' provides no defense against the island's authorities. The Memory Police regularly ransack her home, but only once they target her editor does she begin to resist. She conceals him in a secret room below her office, assisted by an elderly friend who lives on the rust-eaten ferry he once captained. The three form a makeshift family, conspiring in small domestic rebellions -- holding a birthday party, for instance, after calendars vanish -- as the island's dissolution accelerates.
Often drawing inspiration from ''The Diary of Anne Frank,'' Ogawa's fiction is celebrated for its exploration of loneliness, claustrophobia and caretaking's proximity to cruelty. Her collection ''The Diving Pool'' features a novella about a teenager who seals a panicking toddler inside an urn, while her novel ''The Housekeeper and the Professor'' traces the relationship between a domestic servant and a mathematician with an 80-minute memory. It's a conceit that ''The Memory Police'' chillingly inverts, by making two amnesiacs the protectors of a man whose mind is unimpaired.
Rarely has the relationship between author and editor felt more fraught with consequence. Writing with her first reader literally underfoot, Ogawa's narrator struggles to complete her manuscript -- a novel-within-the-novel about a captive typist -- even as her inner resources deteriorate. The editor fights to revive her memories, a psychic drama that unfolds in exchanges even more rending than the novel's scenes of totalitarian violence. Lemon candies, perfume, a harmonica -- each disappeared object is a potential spark with which to reignite her consciousness.
''The Memory Police'' expounds no politics. Its eponymous jackboots don't spout propaganda, or even bear clear responsibility for the island's epidemic. There are book burnings and a special class of scapegoats, but the novel shares less with dystopian classics like ''Fahrenheit 451'' or ''The Handmaid's Tale'' than it does with the novels of Samuel Beckett; or, in Japanese literature, Kobo Abe, whose landmark 1962 novel, ''The Woman in the Dunes,'' is also a story of surreally escalating diminishment. The effect isn't solipsistic. Rather, Ogawa's ruminant style captures the alienation of being alive as the world's ecosystems, ice sheets, languages, animal species and possible futures vanish more quickly than any one mind can apprehend.
Who hasn't awakened to the free-floating fear that our world has imperceptibly shrunk? One frosty morning, already unsettled, Ogawa's narrator steps outside to find the river carpeted in petals. Roses have disappeared, and the island's residents -- seduced by this spectacular carnage -- begin uprooting their gardens. Fatalism's deadly pleasure is to accelerate what it cannot stop; though we never learn what motivates the Memory Police, the narrator seems to ventriloquize them (and the authoritarian nihilists of our own imperiled time) when she describes the aftermath of a disappearance. ''The new cavities in my heart search for things to burn,'' she says. ''They drive me to burn things and I can stop only when everything is in ashes.''
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OVERTHROWBy Caleb Crain404 pp. Viking. $27. THE MEMORY POLICEBy Yoko OgawaTranslated by Stephen Snyder274 pp. Pantheon. $25.95.
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DRAWING (DRAWING BY GEORGE WYLESOL)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The New York Times Company
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Lucas, Julian. "We're Being Watched." The New York Times Book Review, 8 Sept. 2019, p. 12(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A598668023/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=af3a7576. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Yoko Ogawa
The Memory Police
Trans. Stephen Snyder. New York. Pantheon. 2019. 274 pages.
We are on an island. No inhabitant knows its size, its shape, or where it is. About fifteen years earlier, things started vanishing: the narrator begins, "I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first--among all the things that have vanished from the island."
Things that are disappeared may be all objects of a type--emeralds, say--or entire categories--birds, say. Disappeared objects don't literally vanish; rather, they lose all meaning in the mind. A disappearance is not limited to cognition: when perfume was disappeared, "the ability to smell the perfume ... faded, along with all memory of what it meant."
Any residue of a disappearance must be destroyed. "If it's a physical object that has been disappeared, we gather the remnants up to burn or bury or toss in the river.... Soon things are back to normal, as though nothing has happened, and no one can even recall what it was that disappeared."
Meanwhile, man-made structures are deteriorating, victims of neglect and entropic decay. At one point snow begins to fall and does not stop. Gradually, distinctions between objects, the stuff of meaning, are obliterated by the white and the quiet. Thus does landscape externalize processes underway in the narrator's psyche. But no matter what is disappeared, the islanders adapt quietly and without complaint, for they fear the Memory Police.
Distinguishable only by indecipherable geometric badges, the Memory Police wear "dark green uniforms, with heavy belts and black boots ... leather gloves [with] guns half-hidden in holsters at their hips." They can enter any dwelling, arrest anyone, search anywhere without warning or justification. Terrifyingly efficient, they work "in silence, their eyes fixed, making no unnecessary movements." Their primary duty is to enforce disappearances by obliterating anything and anyone connected to what has been disappeared.
Although the Memory Police could become the stuff of cheap Orwellian horror, Ogawa avoids this trap by consistently presenting them with a calm, chilling understatement that repeatedly catches us off guard. Here as throughout the novel, Ogawas imagery is empowered by the beauty and simplicity of her prose, which, in this elegant translation by Stephen Snyder, evokes a mood of elegiac sadness that blankets the twists and turns of the story and lingers long after the novel ends in inevitable dissolution.
Ogawa has written over twenty books and won several major awards: notably the Akutagawa Prize (1990) and the Shirley Jackson Award (2000). Only four have been previously published in English, all sensitively translated by Snyder. They are nothing if not diverse. The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003; 2008) is a charming domestic story about number theory. Hotel Iris (1996; 2010) tells of a sadomasochistic affair between a teenage girl and a grieving widower. The Diving Pool (1990; 2008) is a triptych of novellas about painfully isolated women driven by their inability to connect with others to casual cruelty and even sadism, while Revenge (1990; 2013) is a mosaic novel: eleven obliquely linked stories that share a common setting and some recurring characters and motifs. What unites these works are a fascination with violence and the grotesque; a willingness to plunge readers into a surreal hyperreality, and Ogawas style: always restrained, even calm, no matter how grotesque the material.
Ogawa offers no explanations for the inexplicable "laws of the island." None are needed. For she is using the machineries of The Memory Police to vivify a philosophical inquiry into the nature of self, the role of memory in its construction, and its inevitable dissolution as age erodes, denatures, and eventually destroys memories. The richness of characterization, the subtly poetic imagery, and the strangely compelling nature of the leisurely plot make The Memory Police singularly unforgettable.
Michael A. Morrison
University of Oklahoma
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
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Morrison, Michael A. "Yoko Ogawa: The Memory Police." World Literature Today, vol. 93, no. 3, summer 2019, pp. 84+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A592138493/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1d9acdb2. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Mina's Matchbox
Yoko Ogawa, trans, from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. Pantheon, $28 (288p) ISBN 978-0-593-31608-5
In Ogawa's captivating latest (after The Memory Police), a Japanese woman looks back 30 years to 1972, the year she stayed with her aunt's family in the coastal town of Ashiya, and reflects on the secrets she uncovered there. Tomoko is 12 when she leaves her home in Tokyo while her widowed mother attends a course for dressmaking. In Ashiya, she's dazzled by her handsome half-German, half-Japanese uncle, the owner of a soft drink company, who drives her from the train station to his magnificent house, where she's charmed by her asthmatic cousin Mina, who collects matchboxes and writes stories based on their cover designs. Even more impressive than the family's mansion is the pygmy hippopotamus they keep as a pet. Tomoko and Mina bond over the books Tomoko borrows at the library and they share a devotion to the hippo, on whose back Mina rides to school. But Tomoko's joy and wonder are tempered by Mina's chronic health problems and by the discoveries she makes about her aunt's secret drinking habit and where her uncle disappears to for days at a time. The revelations are described with cool and subtle precision, and Ogawa pulls off the rare feat of making childhood memories both credible and provocative. Readers will be hypnotized. (Aug.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"Mina's Matchbox." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 22, 3 June 2024, p. 88. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A800536237/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cf960fd2. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Ogawa, Yoko. Mina's Matchbox. Pantheon. Aug. 2024. 288p. tr. from Japanese by Stephen 8. Snyder. ISBN 9780593316085. $28. F
In 1972, the widowed mother of twelve-year-old Tomoko sends her to live with wealthy relatives in Ashiya for a year while she furthers her education in Tokyo. The family welcomes Tomoko, who bonds with her fragile cousin Mina, 11, whose needs drive the household's daily activities. Tomoko is an observant innocent--curious and charmed by Mina's collection of matchboxes and the stories tucked inside; by her uncle's frequent absences; by Mina's pygmy hippo whom she rides to school; by Great Grandmother Rosa, a Holocaust survivor; by Rosa's best friend, Yoneda-san, who has run the household for more than 50 years; by her removed aunt, an obsessive proofreader; and by the emotional distance between Mina's absent brother and his father. In language as clean and delicate as a whisper, the cousins' year of shared adventures frays as tragedies chip away at the public facade of the family's private realities. VERDICT Ogawa (The Memory Police), 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.--Beth E. Andersen
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Andersen, Beth E. "Ogawa, Yoko. Mina's Matchbox." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 7, July 2024, p. 88. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A800536128/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e428b949. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Ogawa, Yoko MINA'S MATCHBOX Pantheon (Fiction None) $28.00 8, 13 ISBN: 9780593316085
A young Japanese girl spends the pastoral summer of 1972 with her asthmatic cousin.
Focusing on characters of an age when the world seems full of wonder and possibility, this engaging bildungsroman explores the friendship and mutual curiosity between two extraordinary young people. Our narrator is 12-year-old Tomoko, who has been sent to live with her aunt's family in the wake of her father's death as her mother studies dressmaking in Tokyo. In comparison to their young charge, the family is outsized--sophisticated and wealthy inheritors of a soft-drink empire, complete with a country estate--and includes Tomoko's enigmatic aunt; her half-German uncle, who is more absent than not; and their charismatic 18-year-old son, Ry?ichi, off studying at university. The center of Tomoko's orbit is her younger cousin, Mina, an ailing bookworm who persuades Tomoko to raid the local library for her fix and eventually shares the secret of her hidden collection of matchboxes, given to her by a crush. This curious duo is lightly grounded by the inclusion of groundskeeper Kobayashi and cook Yoneda, who has curiously bonded late in life to Mina's German grandmother, Rosa. If this weren't enough to fill a Wes Anderson film's worth of oddballs, there's always Mina's pet pygmy hippopotamus, Pochiko, the last survivor of a family zoo closed since World War II. While much of what we see on the surface is idyllic, Ogawa laces her narrative with real-life tragedies, among them the mysterious suicide of Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich. Facing complicated themes with deceptively simple language, she pulls off a neat trick here, painting everything in miniature and often in hindsight without losing the immediacy of Tomoko's experiences.
A charming yet guileless exploration of childhood's ephemeral pleasures and reflexive poignancy.
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"Ogawa, Yoko: MINA'S MATCHBOX." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332729/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=88904d89. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
Mina's Matchbox.
By Yoko Ogawa. Tr. by Stephen B. Snyder.
Aug. 2024. 288p. Pantheon, $28 (9780593316085); e-book
(9780593316092).
On March 16, 1972, 12-year-old Tomoko went to live with her maternal aunt while her widowed mother spent a year in Tokyo studying in hopes of improving their future. Tomoko's uncleby-marriage, whose mother is German, had inherited his father's beverage company and the 17-room family mansion with grounds that formerly housed a zoo; only 35-year-old pygmy hippopotamus Pochiko remains as the family pet. Among the human inhabitants is Tomoko's one-year-younger cousin, Mina; Mina's older brother is away at a Swiss boarding school. Tomoko quickly settles into her extended family, growing especially close to Mina, who counters her debilitating asthma with reading stories, imagining stories, and making stories inspired by the art of unique matchboxes. Tomoko proves to be a prodigiously astute observer, discovering truths behind closed doors. Thirty years later, Tomoko's memories "have grown more vivid and dense" and ready to reveal. Ogawa's latest was serialized in her native Japan in 2005. The timing of Sydney's impressively seamless translation is remarkable. Ogawa already brilliantly, deftly broadens her not-quite-quotidian family saga with pivotal world events, but what disturbingly, ironically stands out in 2024 are references to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, Auschwitz, and Israel's founding. How Ogawa might (re)write the novel--and would she?--almost two decades later is a question to ponder.--Terry Hong
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
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Hong, Terry. "Mina's Matchbox." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 21, July 2024, p. 26. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804615789/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=69d7d252. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
What books are on your night stand?
Anne Frank's ''The Diary of a Young Girl'' and Yasunari Kawabata's ''Palm-of-the-Hand Stories.''
Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?
In middle school, a teacher scolded me for reading while I was supposed to be weeding in the schoolyard during after-school cleanup time.
How have your reading tastes changed over time?
Since childhood, reading has been more than just a hobby for me. You might say that I can't find meaning in life without books. Since becoming a writer, I've had more occasion to read for work than for my own enjoyment, but I can't say that has caused me any distress at all. Even if a book isn't suited to my personal taste, there is always something to be gained by reading it, always some light that it will shed on my life from an unexpected angle.
Describe your ideal reading experience.
Finishing early with whatever I had planned, I wander through town and come across a bookstore. I go in, with no intention of buying anything. Suddenly, my gaze meets the spine of a certain book. We exchange glances. I buy the book, go home and become completely absorbed. I'm filled with joy at the thought that this book has chosen me.
What's the last great book you read?
''Primeval and Other Times,'' by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones); ''A Whole Life,'' by Robert Seethaler (translated by Charlotte Collins); and ''The Cremator,'' by Ladislav Fuks (translated by Eva M. Kandler).
Who are the Japanese writers overdue for translation into English?
If I could name only one, it would probably be Kenji Miyazawa. There may already be translations, but I feel that his dynamic appeal in works that move freely between historical periods and languages, between human beings and animals, between the Earth and the universe, should be more widely known.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
So many: ''The Sound and the Fury,'' ''The Brothers Karamazov,'' ''The Tale of Genji'' ...
Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?
''Kagero Nikki'' (''The Kagero Diary''), by the Mother of Michitsuna, spans 20 years in the life of a woman of the Heian period (794-1185) whose real name is unknown. Reading it gave me a fresh appreciation for the rich history of diary literature in Japan.
What is it like having your books circulate in translation so many years after you wrote and published them?
It doesn't affect me one way or the other. Human time and the time of fiction are quite distinct in my mind. My goal is to write novels that have a life beyond that of the author.
How is your life different now from when ''Mina's Matchbox'' was published in 2006?
My life hasn't changed at all. I have simply continued to write my novels.
What is your involvement in the film adaptation of ''The Memory Police'' ?
So far, I haven't been involved in any significant way. Since I know very little about the film world, it's difficult for me to know how things will develop. But the novel is written. There's nothing more I can do for the moment.
You've described yourself as indebted to the work of Paul Auster. Did you ever get to communicate that to him?
Unfortunately, I never had the chance to speak with him directly. But it was an enormous pleasure to read the blurb that he wrote for the English version of one of my novels. It made me truly glad that I had continued my work as a writer.
What's the last book you read that made you cry?
When I feel like crying, I reread the scene in Erich Kästner's ''The Flying Classroom'' where the young protagonist tries to keep up his spirits by telling himself, ''Crying is strictly prohibited!''
The last book you read that made you furious?
Svetlana Alexievich's ''Chernobyl's Prayer,'' translated by Arch Tait and Anna Gunin, which will be released in 2025.
What's the best book you've ever received as a gift?
Shortly after I published my first novel, my editor gave me a copy of Richard Brautigan's ''In Watermelon Sugar."
What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
Female anglerfish can reach 60 centimeters or more, while some males can be less than four centimeters. The male becomes a parasite, attaching itself to the larger female and dissolving into her body, effectively becoming nothing more than a tool for producing sperm.
You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Anne Frank, J.D. Salinger and Emily Dickinson. All three were either confined by circumstances or chose to confine themselves during their lives. I would hope that they could enjoy themselves freely at an imaginary party.
An expanded version of this interview is available at nytimes.com/books.
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"Yoko Ogawa." The New York Times Book Review, 18 Aug. 2024, p. 6. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A805153647/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a1112fe0. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.