‘Mina’s Matchbox’ Perfectly Captures the Frustrations of Modern Japan

Yoko Ogawa’s haunting novel Mina’s Matchbox is a story of thwarted ambitions. The clever Ogawa, whose previous work The Memory Police drew wide acclaim in the literary world, has woven together a number of strands in her bold new effort. One can read the book as a family drama, a coming-of-age story, a dark comedy, a psychological study, and a parable about modern Japan, whose wartime legacy has long hampered its efforts to stride the world like Godzilla.

In places, Mina’s Matchbox attains something like the eloquent sadness of Philip Larkin’s 1947 novel A Girl in Winter, another story of dashed dreams. But a more useful analog may be a short poem by the twelfth-century Japanese courtier Fujiwara No Kiyosuke, which Kenneth Rexroth translated into English and included in his One Hundred Poems From the Japanese: “I may live on until / I long for the time / In which I am so unhappy, / And remember it fondly.”

This verse captures the arc of Ogawa’s tale. We start out in the early months of 1972. Tomoko is a twelve-year-old girl living in Okayama with her parents and burning with curiosity about members of the other side of her family who live in Ashiya (where Ogawa today resides). Her great-uncle married a lady he met while studying in Berlin. Hence Tomoko’s uncle Eric-Ken is half-German and her cousins one-quarter German. Eric-Ken is a successful businessman who makes a popular soft drink called Fressy, which does wonders for people’s digestion.

This entrepreneur intrigues Tomoko, but in the narrator’s eyes, the real curiosity is her cousin Mina, a girl with precarious health and literary tastes far more sophisticated than most people her age. The relatives also have a good-natured hippo named Pachinko on which the frail Mina rides to and from school.

When Tomoko goes off to live with her aunt, uncle, great-aunt, and cousins in a house in the hills above Ashiya one day early in 1972, she begins to experience a sequence of jarring events. They might bring on depression if the novelty of her sojourn among these people were not so bracing. It grows clear that the narrator’s relations with her relatives, and the social context, form an unhappy period which she is able to relate years later with something like fondness.

Some of the bad developments are personal and local. Others are beyond the ability of any characters in the book to avoid. Not long after her arrival in Ashiya, the news comes that Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, has died at age 73. To this day, speculation runs high about whether Kawabata died of natural causes or suicide. On behalf of the bookish Mina, who has an interest in Kawabata, Tomoko heads off to the local library in pursuit of a stack of Kawabata’s novels. There she begins a long flirtation with the cute boy in a turtleneck behind the counter, who voices his admiration for Tomoko’s refined tastes—wow, you’re into Kawabata?—not knowing that she is checking out the works for her cousin.

Kawabata’s death is a blow for Japanese literature, and one might say for the nation, but not nearly as shocking and traumatic as what will unfold just a few months later. In September 1972, the Olympic Games commence and Tomoko and her relatives, along with pretty much the rest of the country, tune in with eagerness to see how the Japanese athletes in various events will fare.

Of course, these are not just any Olympics. They will go down in history as one of the most tragic events of all time after the Palestinian terrorist group Black September breaks into a building in the middle of the night and proceeds to abduct and murder eleven Israelis. The attack steals the show, exactly as its planners intended. Though the Japanese taking part in the games do not perform badly, in the aftermath of the massacre it is hard to care. The world is too mired in shock and revulsion at the mass murder to take any note. Here is an atrocity far more unsettling than Kawabata’s alleged suicide.

Not all the anticlimaxes to befall Tomoko and her relatives are quite so dramatic. One of her relatives buys a winning lottery ticket, for which the prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to Hokkaido. But then someone breaks into the house during the night and steals the ticket.

Yet another anticlimax occupies a good part of the book’s latter third. The news that a meteor shower will pass over the hills around Ashiya sends the community into a frenzy of excitement. Tomoko, Mina, and the rest of the clan make plans to go to the top of one of the hills where they will enjoy an ideal vantage point for this once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. But some kind of odd celestial phenomenon diverts and hides the shower, leaving almost nothing for the viewers of Ashiya to take in. The reader marvels at the cruelty of a universe that would dangle the prospect of such an exhilarating escape from the mundane, only to snatch it away.

Not everything is wrong in Tomoko’s world. She and Mina hit it off and they both delight in spending time with the hippo, Pachinko. Then a sequence late in the novel offers a contrast with all the frustration and disappointment that came before. Tomoko visits the factory where her uncle’s underlings make Fressy. The machinery functions with smooth, ineluctable, not to say awesome punctuality. Bottles roll off assembly lines in their thousands and make their way into cartons and trucks for distribution to a nation thirsty for a cool soft drink.

Tomoko cares about Mina and hopes she will find a bit of peace and fulfillment amid life’s chaos and horror. Conscious of Mina’s interest in the handsome delivery guy who brings Fressy to the house, Tomoko resorts to a ruse after he stops showing up. A sneaky visit to the soda plant leads to the discovery that the kid got assigned to a new route. His former manager happens to possess a matchbox with an image of a girl trying to catch shooting stars in a bottle. Here is the perfect metaphor for Mina. Tomoko talks the manager into giving her the matchbox and then presents it to Mina, saying that the delivery boy had a thing for her and asked Tomoko to pass on this symbol of his interest. The lie is as sweet as it is futile.

By now the grand design of Mina’s Matchbox should be clear. For all its tender depiction of the friendship among two girls and their beloved hippo, the novel presents in microcosm a society that aspires to stand out but suffers repeated visitations of rotten luck or encroachments on the part of foreign bad actors. Those happy outcomes that do come its way from time to time are negotiated, shared, partial, subject to the goodwill of others.

Needless to say, Imperial Japan committed many unspeakable atrocities and richly deserved defeat in the Second World War. But in an essay in the New Left Review’s July/August 2006 issue, “East Asia’s Dollars,” scholar and journalist R. Taggart Murphy, who teaches in Tokyo, provided an overview of how postwar arrangements came to constrict the island kingdom on both a political and economic level.

Among the U.S. conditions for ending its occupation, Murphy recounts, was the merger of the nation’s two leading conservative parties into the Liberal Democratic Party, which has held sway in Japan for so many decades now. According to Murphy, the idea was to form an electoral block large enough to hold off the country’s militant Left, which, in the absence of a powerful conservative force, might have chosen a far different course for Japan. Murphy relates how Japanese firms kept a bulk of the massive returns from their products and tech innovations squarely within the Western banking system and the international order with the world’s undisputed superpower, the United States, at its helm.

One does not need to be a deconstructionist to see how Yoka Ogawa has channeled the frustration, pain, anger, and humiliation of a country shackled for so long into her novel. Her social commentary is as astute as her writing is elegant and vivid.