Mina's Matchbox

Looking back thirty years, a woman recalls the luminous year of 1972, when as twelve-year-old Tomoko she was sent from home to live with her wealthy relatives in a seaside mansion near Kobe. There she falls under the spell of her cousin Mina — a delicate, asthmatic bookworm who rides a pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko to school and hoards a secret collection of matchboxes, each holding a tiny story. Beneath the household's grace run quieter currents: an uncle's unexplained absences, a German grandmother's wartime past, an aunt's sorrow. A tender, nostalgic coming-of-age novel from the author of The Memory Police.