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I had high hopes for this book because I am a big fan of Yoko Ogawa’s oeuvre in general. It was good but not stellar in my opinion.

Having said that, let me say this: I wish that her more of her books would be translated into English. Wikipedia says this about her:
�� “Since 1988, Ogawa has published more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Much of her work has yet to be translated into English.��
Yet there have only been 5 of her full-length works of fiction published in the English language, one of them being a collection of interlinked short stories (Revenge). And Mina’s Matchbox was originally published in 2005 in serial form interestingly enough -- 19 years ago!!!!! �� ��

Apparently she has worked with just one translator, Stephen Snyder. Yep, just him...read an interview that he gave after her popular book, The Memory Police, was published (and short-listed for the National Book Award for Translated Fiction in 2019): Dr. Snyder has a very important day job (dean of Middlebury Language Schools and vice president for Academic Affairs at Middlebury College, Middlebury Vermont. And in 2025 he will be interim President of the College)....so he appears to be doing this on the side.

So why did I not go bonkers over this book? In part because I read the inner flap of the dust jacket which gave a synopsis of what to expect regarding the books�� plot. It implied there was something sinister going on, something definitely wrong.... The last sentence of the synopsis was this: “Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen on time —and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.�� So given Ogawa’s previous works, I believed and anticipated this would be an underlying or even blatant tone in the book. (view spoiler)[ Nothing much happened. Time period is circa 1972, and location is a village in Japan. Mina, an 11-year-old girl who was wracked with serious asthma eventually got better. Her pet pygmy hippo died but the hippo was well over 30 years old and that wasn’t particularly surprising or sad. Nothing much happened to the central character and narrator in the book, 12-year-old Tomoko. She was living at her aunt and uncle’s house for a year (and their daughter was Mina). A grandmother also lived there as well as a female servant (cook/maid) of sorts and a gardener who took care of the hippo. Turns out the uncle was having an affair...but the way that was presented was not particularly earth-shattering. (hide spoiler)] The uncle owned a soft-drink factory...the soft drink was called Frezzy and it had radium in it (��...a radium-fortified soft drink that was said to be beneficial to the digestion��)!! I thought that was going to be a plot line....that a gazillion Japanese people were going to die of cancer because of his radium-laced soft drink! Nope...besides that one sentence saying that the drink contained radium the possible toxicity of the drink was never referred to in the book. (Ogawa can be weird like that!) Yeesh...I wonder why she ‘invented�� this soft drink....I think it was known at that time (1970s) that radium was not good to ingest...see what happened to this poor unfortunate soul:

Reviews:
�� this reviewer felt the same way as I did...
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