Mina's Matchbox

A beautiful novel, I was engrossed in the story the entire time. The voice was clear, consistent, innocent, compelling, and the storyline drew me onwards, wrapped me like a blanket. It’s a story about Tomoko, who spends one year with her cousin Mina, who collects matchboxes and writes stories about them, and her family: the German Aunt who had lost her twin in the Holocaust but found a new sister in Yoneda (the cook); Pochiko the pygmy hippo; the aunt who drinks in secret; the uncle who is handsome and disappears and mends the broken things that pile on his desk. A charming family with beautiful parts and shameful parts. An obsession with Olympic volleyball, with shooting stars, secretive crushes on young men. It also captured the nostalgia of looking back on beautiful childhood moments, no matter how long ago it was, through the lens of adulthood and the years that have flown by.

In the last chapter, this paragraph got to me: “It’s not that we’ve grown apart or lost track of each other, but simply that time has slipped away much more quickly than we could have imagined when we were young.” In that one sentence, I know how I feel, how I will feel, how I have felt, having experienced the blossoming of beautiful memories and then the reduction of them into one sentence, as if you are on one end of a telescope looking into the vast expanse of space.

Minor Note: While there were a few times I did question if the dialogue was fitting for a middle schooler (no matter how precocious she were), it was not that big of a deal for me.