When All You Have Left Are Memories, Plus a Hippopotamus

MINA’S MATCHBOX, by Yoko Ogawa. Translated by Stephen Snyder.

“Mina’s Matchbox,” the latest novel by the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa, is a story of first enchantments and last gasps. In 1972, a 12-year-old girl, Tomoko, leaves her widowed mother in Tokyo to spend a year with her maternal aunt’s family, heirs to a soft drink fortune. Everything about them feels foreign to Tomoko, from her dashing half-German uncle, who picks her up at the train station in his shiny Mercedes, to the family’s wunderkammer-like estate at the foot of a mountain in Ashiya, an affluent coastal town.

There, Tomoko meets her taciturn aunt and bright, curious cousin, Mina. A year younger than Tomoko, tiny Mina is chronically ill and leaves the house only to attend school, though her book-fueled imagination is capacious enough to accommodate them both.

Rounding out the household are Mina’s warm, Berlin-born paternal grandmother, Rosa, who moved to Japan 40 years earlier but struggles with the Japanese language, and the family pet, a pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko. A member of an endangered species, Pochiko is the sole remnant of a zoo that once existed on the estate before World War II. Each morning, Mina, deemed too frail to walk to class, rides on Pochiko’s back, escorted by a groundskeeper who leads the animal with a ribboned leash.

The entire household, with its arcane rituals and tenebrous objects, feels like something on the verge of extinction. The material signifiers of its vanishing loom large: the gold-trimmed German baby carriage with silk buntings; the regular deliveries of Fressy, the sweet soft drink the family believes to be a kind of elixir; and Mina’s secret collection of matchboxes with whimsically designed covers — an elephant on a seesaw, an angel mending her wings, a girl catching shooting stars. The matchboxes — and the tales they inspire Mina to write — are shared in confidence with Tomoko alone.

As the girls grow closer, Tomoko understands that the family has other, darker secrets, which bubble to the surface in lieu of a single synthetic plot. Among them are the fate of the people in Rosa’s old family photos, the aunt’s drinking and the uncle’s prolonged absences, during which household items accumulate on his desk in need of rewiring or mending. Mixers and jewelry clasps can be fixed, but as in all families, some things prove irreparable.

“Mina’s Matchbox” is largely a book about storytelling, the conveyance it provides for unresolved emotions, and the way our futures are mapped in large part by our capacity to imagine them. The novel is filled with pocket histories and references to the literary classics that become a kind of liturgy for the girls, such as Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” and Yasunari Kawabata’s “Snow Country”— though another Japanese novel about a wealthy Ashiya family whose way of life is slipping away comes to mind: Junichiro Tanizaki’s World War II-era masterpiece, “The Makioka Sisters.” A family home isn’t just architecture, but a shared set of stories — ideas, values and narratives to dwell in.