Mina's Matchbox: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from Publishers Weekly

• A masterpiece…A rare work of patient and courageous vision.

  — The Guardian on The Memory Police

• Ogawa’s fable echoes the themes of George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it has a voice and power all its own.

  — Time on The Memory Police

• An intimate, suspenseful drama of courage and endurance.

  — The Wall Street Journal on The Memory Police

• Gorgeous, cinematic…This novel has all the charm and restraint of any by Ishiguro or Kenzaburō Ōe, and the whimsy of Murakami.

  — Los Angeles Times on The Housekeeper and the Professor

• Deceptively elegant…This is one of those books written in such lucid, unpretentious language that reading it is like looking into a deep pool of clear water. Dive into Yoko Ogawa’s world…and you find yourself tugged by forces more felt than seen.

  — The New York Times Book Review on The Housekeeper and the Professor

• Ogawa’s fiction reflects like a fun-house mirror…[Like] Haruki Murakami, Ogawa writes stories that float free of any specific culture, anchoring themselves instead in the landscape of the mind.

  — Washington Post on The Diving Pool

• The stories seem to penetrate right to the heart of the world…[Ogawa’s] spare technique is very skilled. Every word is put to work.

  — Hilary Mantel on The Diving Pool

• Ogawa has long been recognized as one of Japan’s best writers of the postwar generation.

  — BookForum on The Diving Pool

• A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from Publishers Weekly

• Yoko Ogawa is a quiet wizard, casting her words like a spell, conjuring a world of curiosity and enchantment, secrets and loss. I read Mina’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.

  — Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness

• A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from The Atlantic and Publishers Weekly

• The reader is immersed in [Tomoko’s] ardent love for her fragile cousin, and comes to appreciate how history seeps into every life, even the most sheltered ones.

  — The Atlantic

• A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from The Atlantic, TIME, and Publishers Weekly

• The reader is immersed in [Tomoko’s] ardent love for her fragile cousin, and comes to appreciate how history seeps into every life, even the most sheltered ones.

  — The Atlantic

• A transfixing coming of age tale.

  — TIME

• The reader is immersed in [Tomoko’s] ardent love for her fragile cousin, and comes to appreciate how history seeps into every life, even the most sheltered ones.

  — The Atlantic

• A transfixing coming of age tale.

  — TIME

• 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… 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.

  — Kirkus, starred review

• A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from The Atlantic, TIME, Boston Globe, and Publishers Weekly

• The reader is immersed in [Tomoko’s] ardent love for her fragile cousin, and comes to appreciate how history seeps into every life, even the most sheltered ones.

  — The Atlantic

• A transfixing coming of age tale.

  — TIME

• Capturing a Japanese girl’s adolescence in the early 1970s, this hypnotic book shimmers with eccentric enigmas.

  — Boston Globe

• A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from The Atlantic, TIME, Boston Globe, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly

• A transfixing coming of age tale.

  — TIME

• Yoko Ogawa is a quiet wizard, casting her words like a spell, conjuring a world of curiosity and enchantment, secrets and loss. I read Mina’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.

  — Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness

• It’s the kind of transformative trip that makes for a powerful read at any time of year, but feels especially appropriate when you’re craving a (literary) summer sojourn.

  — Bustle

• Captivating…Ogawa pulls off the rare feat of making childhood memories both credible and provocative. Readers will be hypnotized.

  — Publishers Weekly, starred review

• Captivating…Ogawa pulls off the rare feat of making childhood memories both credible and provocative. Readers will be hypnotized.

  — Publishers Weekly, starred review

• “[12-year-old] Tomoko proves to be a prodigiously astute observer, discovering truths behind closed doors…Remarkable is the timing of Snyder’s impressively seamless translation. Ogawa already brilliantly, deftly broadens her not-quite-quotidian family saga with pivotal world events.

  — Booklist, starred review

• “In language as clean and delicate as a whisper, the cousins’ year of shared adventures frays as tragedies chip away at the public façade of the family’s private realities…Ogawa 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.

  — Library Journal, starred review

• A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from The Atlantic, TIME, Boston Globe, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly

• A story of first enchantments and last gasps…Effervescent…’We look at the world once, in childhood,’ Louise Glück wrote in her 1996 poem ‘Nostos.’ ‘The rest is memory.’ Ogawa captures the enduring spark of that imprinting and its oracular glow. We revisit those moments when the match was first struck, when the future still felt like ours to ignite.

  — New York Times Book Review

• "Ogawa evokes the secret crushes and crushing secrets of girlhood with charm and elegance.

  — People

• It’s the kind of transformative trip that makes for a powerful read at any time of year, but feels especially appropriate when you’re craving a (literary) summer sojourn.

  — Bustle

• "Powerful in its nuanced details, Mina’s Matchbox is an immersive and poignant coming-of-age story...Curious and filled with wonder...Ogawa’s masterful descriptions, too, add depth and suggest simmering secrets that wait to boil over...An elegant and stirring work that captures the dreams of youth, and the lingering sweetness that can remain even after those dreams have faded.

  — Bookpage, starred review

• A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from People, The Atlantic, TIME, Boston Globe, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly

• A Best New Book of the Week from Parade

• A bittersweet coming-of-age tale…Dreamy and whimsical, Mina’s Matchbox traffics in the themes at which Ogawa always excels: memory, identity, and nostalgia.

  — Esquire

• "A magnificent translation...A lovely epistolary epilogue allows readers to close the book contented that Mina’s Matchbox is almost a fairy tale. Its moral? Childish curiosity is as fleeting as the flame of a beautifully struck match—capture it before it’s gone and you can kindle a lifetime love of learning.

  — Minneapolis Star-Tribune

• "One of the literary events of the year.

  — Parade

• "Ogawa evokes the secret crushes and crushing secrets of girlhood with charm and elegance.

  — People

• An incredible novel that affirms Ogawa’s position as the great writer of fantastical literature today…Brighter in tone and detail…but somehow the tension and terror of living is always at the periphery. Ogawa has produced a world near and tender, but tough and bittersweet, like recognizing a lost loved one in the story told by someone new.

  — The Millions

• I just loved it. It’s an absolute delight of a book…A jewel-box of a novel. It’s wonderful.

  — Suzanna Hermans of Oblong Books on WAMC

• A delicate domestic novel...A quiet novel to savor!

  — Historical Novel Society

• Powerful in its nuanced details, Mina’s Matchbox is an immersive and poignant coming-of-age story...Curious and filled with wonder...Ogawa’s masterful descriptions, too, add depth and suggest simmering secrets that wait to boil over...An elegant and stirring work that captures the dreams of youth, and the lingering sweetness that can remain even after those dreams have faded.

  — Bookpage, starred review

• A Most Anticipated Book of the Summer from People, The Atlantic, TIME, Boston Globe, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly

• A Best Book of August from the Christian Science Monitor

• A Best New Book of the Week from Parade

• Capturing a Japanese girl’s adolescence in the early 1970s, this hypnotic book shimmers with eccentric enigmas.

  — Boston Globe

• "Gemlike...Ogawa’s storytelling is radiant.

  — Christian Science Monitor

• Hypnotic, introspective.

  — Daily Kos

• A delicate domestic novel...A quiet novel to savor!

  — Historical Novel Society

• This elegant, unusual novel full of eccentric personages is a Wes Anderson movie waiting to happen...A magical adventure.

  — Oprah Daily

• A conspicuously gifted writer…To read Ogawa is to enter a dreamlike state... She possesses an effortless, glassy, eerie brilliance.

  — The Guardian

• Elegant…A playground for Ogawa’s interest in particular details…Mina’s Matchbox feels more familiar in the tradition of Latin American magical realism, especially Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, with its enigmatic family lore and the rich, sophisticated practices of a fallen era…Intimate…[The novel] sparks the imagination toward faraway places.

  — The Japan Times

• A delicate domestic novel...A quiet novel to savor!

  — Historical Novel Society

• “Magnificently wrought…It is written in precious, tender prose yet maintains the reserved voice of an author who understands the need to keep certain things private…The beauty in Ogawa’s writing is her willingness not to answer our questions but rather keep them swirling about…Ogawa already knows the clandestine power magic moments can hold for us, if we are courageous enough to surrender to them.

  — World Literature Today

• “Unfurls like a dazzling and mysterious dream…In Stephen Snyder’s elegant translation, the tone is whimsical but never syrupy…Beautifully composed…Ogawa has turned a deceptively simple account of a year spent with exotic relatives into something closer to a universal fable about the precarious wonder of growing up.

  — Financial Times

• A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

• "Gemlike...Ogawa’s storytelling is radiant.

  — Christian Science Monitor

• “Moving…A gentle reminder of how to live and how and why we harken back to what has been. As Yoko Ogawa—helped immeasurably by Stephen Snyder’s tender translation—has Tomoko come to understand, ‘Even when you die, you don’t disappear.  Matter doesn’t vanish, it transforms.’

  — The Anniston Star “Haunting…The clever Ogawa, whose previous work The Memory Police drew wide acclaim in the literary world, has woven together a number of strands in her bold new effort…Mina’s Matchbox attains something like the eloquent sadness of Philip Larkin’s 1947 novel A Girl in Winter, another story of dashed dreams. But a more useful analog may be a short poem by the twelfth-century Japanese courtier Fujiwara No Kiyosuke, which Kenneth Rexroth translated into English and included in his One Hundred Poems From the Japanese: ‘I may live on until / I long for the time / In which I am so unhappy, / And remember it fondly.’…[Ogawa’s] social commentary is as astute as her writing is elegant and vivid.

• Beguiling…The book is suffused with the transplant’s growing awareness of the ephemerality of her own innocence.

  — The New Yorker

• “Moving…A gentle reminder of how to live and how and why we harken back to what has been. As Yoko Ogawa—helped immeasurably by Stephen Snyder’s tender translation—has Tomoko come to understand, ‘Even when you die, you don’t disappear.  Matter doesn’t vanish, it transforms.’

  — The Anniston Star “Equal parts whimsical and haunting…Much of the book unfolds as a series of small mysteries like this, rendering a coming-of-age tale utterly engrossing. Somehow Ogawa’s book, translated by Stephen Snyder, captures both the petty concerns of adolescence and also the allure, and horrors, of the wider world.

• “Haunting…The clever Ogawa, whose previous work The Memory Police drew wide acclaim in the literary world, has woven together a number of strands in her bold new effort…Mina’s Matchbox attains something like the eloquent sadness of Philip Larkin’s 1947 novel A Girl in Winter, another story of dashed dreams. But a more useful analog may be a short poem by the twelfth-century Japanese courtier Fujiwara No Kiyosuke, which Kenneth Rexroth translated into English and included in his One Hundred Poems From the Japanese: ‘I may live on until / I long for the time / In which I am so unhappy, / And remember it fondly.’…[Ogawa’s] social commentary is as astute as her writing is elegant and vivid.

  — Book and Film Globe

• A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A TIME Best Book of the Year  • A New Yorker Best Book of the Year • A BookPage Best Book of the Year

• Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME, NPR, The New Yorker, and BookPage

• A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

• "There’s such an elegance to the way Mina’s Matchbox unfolds...The world Yoko Ogawa builds is quiet, warm and it should feel comforting. But there are peculiarities about the whole thing that keep you on the tips of your toes.

  — NPR

• A transfixing coming of age tale.

  — TIME

• Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME, NPR, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and BookPage