Mina's Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa

This is a quiet, lovely story that is beautifully told. The year is 1972. Tomoko lost her father when she was six years old. Now that she’s twelve, she will spend a year living with her mother’s wealthy sister in Ashiya while her mother goes back to school to study dressmaking. In Ashiya, Tomoko encounters family she has never met and it is through her eyes that we learn the family dynamics. First is her impossibly handsome, half-German, Mercedes-driving uncle who has is fables to make people happy. Then there is her aunt as well as her uncle’s mother, Grandmother Rosa. Grandmother Rosa is a perfectly poised and coiffed 83-year-old German immigrant. The titular Mina, Tomoko’s cousin, is just a year younger. She is a frail elementary school student who will become Tomoko’s best friend for the year she spends in Ashiya. There are others but none so surprising as Pochiko, the family pet pygmy hippopotamus. It is through Mina that Tomoko grows up--Mina is obsessed with books but she is too frail to get them herself, so she sends Tomoko. There is symbolism in the novel and it is reflective of the books that Mina is reading. There is a fairy tale quality to it all that seems on the verge of collapse throughout, a kind of house of cards. I read a review that made the case that while this is on the surface a coming of age story about Tonoko, that it is also reflective of Japan on the cusp of change as well. The oil embargo of 1973 brought about real changes in the promise of prosperity that characterized Japan after the Americans withdrew in 1952. In any case, this is a well told story, written in 2006 but recently translated and published in English.