Mina s matchbox

From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt's family. Tomoko's aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home--and handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company--are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family's pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion--Tomoko's dignified and devoted aunt, her German great-aunt, and her dashing, charming uncle, who confidently sits as the family's patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko's cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.In this elegant jewel box of a book, Yoko Ogawa invites us to witness a powerful and formative interlude in Tomoko''s life. Behind the family''s sophistication are complications that Tomoko struggles to understand--her uncle''s mysterious absences, her great-aunt''s experience of the Second World War, her aunt''s misery. Rich with the magic and mystery of youthful experience,