A persistence of things past

Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox creates a world in which the past lingers with haunting clarity, like a delicate fragrance that refuses to fade. The novel opens with the narrator reminiscing about the first vehicle she ever rode in, a baby carriage given to her by her aunt. A little later, her uncle takes her out for tea and orders madeleines. These objects foreshadow the power of early memories, echoing Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and the boy’s sled in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.

Mina’s Matchbox, translated by Stephen Snyder, deals with the time 12-year-old Tomoko spends with her aunt’s family in the city of Ashiya on the western coast of Japan (where Ogawa herself currently lives). Tomoko’s father has died, and because her mother has decided to study dressmaking in Tokyo for a year, they agree that it would be best for her to live with relatives for the duration.

Tomoko is captivated by their Spanish Colonial-style home. Even thirty years later, she recalls every inch of it: the grandeur of the exterior, the distinct odours in each of the seventeen rooms, the quality of light in the garden, and even “the cool touch of the doorknobs”.

Melancholic reflection

The family comprises her half-German uncle, the president of a beverage company; his German mother; her aunt; and her frail cousin Mina, a year younger than her. Others in the household are Yoneda-san, the maid, and Kobayashi-san, the gardener. The final and equally important inhabitant, we’re informed, is Pochiko, a pygmy hippopotamus, the last animal standing from the zoo that once occupied the garden.

The occupants have their fair share of quirks. There’s a so-called ‘light-bath room’, for example, in which Tomoko spends many hours with the sickly Mina, lying under healing orange rays. While the grandmother is absorbed with facials and manicures, Yoneda-san writes postcard after postcard, entering every contest she can find. The aunt is obsessed with discovering typos, spending hours going through volumes and writing admonitory letters to publishers.

Ogawa keeps to a child’s perspective for the most part, with its sense of undimmed wonder and pleasure. The overall effect of these recollections is winsome and charming, even if tinged with melancholic reflection.

There are darker aspects, which Ogawa also captures with a child’s capacity for acceptance. The otherwise affectionate and competent uncle tends to mysteriously vanish from the house for days on end, and as if in response, the aunt takes to excessive smoking and drinking. The grandmother, too, has a troubled past relating to World War Two, and her bottled memories sometimes come to the surface.

The days and months are filled with school attendance, beach picnics, the visit of another cousin, and first crushes: Tomoko’s on a local librarian and Mina’s on a delivery man. Ogawa grounds these recollections in reality by mentioning actual events and their impact. These include the death of Junichirō Tanizaki, the underwhelming Giacobini Meteor Shower of 1972, the performance of the Japanese volleyball team and the killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

The novel’s title comes from Mina’s obsession with matchboxes: not only is she called upon to light candles and anything else that needs lighting at home, but she also collects them and writes short stories based on their cover illustrations. In a sense, the structure of the book mirrors this preoccupation: though thematically united, it is episodic, and every chapter largely deals with a new occurrence.

The persistence of the past is prominent in Ogawa’s earlier work, too. In her earlier The Memory Police, she writes: “No matter how wonderful the memory, it vanishes if you leave it alone. If no one pays attention to it. They leave no trace, no evidence that they ever existed.” With Mina’s Matchbox, she vividly demonstrates how, given enough attention, the essence of memories can last for years.