Hello LIT CLUB! What an enchanting little world we are in with this book. I will be sending along a playlist for some paired listening and discussion! We are a quarter of the way through (around chapter 11). Avoid spoilers if you’ve read ahead! See you in the chat!
"Now, after thirty years have passed, there is no trace of the house. The sturdy palm trees that grew at either side of the door, as though keeping guard over the family, have withered and been uprooted, and the pond at the southern end of the garden has been filled in with earth. The land long ago passed into other hands and was divided up, and is now home to strangers, the residents of a nondescript apartment block and a dormitory for the employees of a chemical company. But perhaps because they are now so completely removed from reality, nothing in the world can dim my memories. My uncle’s house still stands in my mind, and the members of his family, those who have grown old as well as those who have died, live on there as they once did. Whenever I return there in my memory, their voices are as lively as ever, their smiling faces full of warmth. Grandmother Rosa, seated before the makeup mirror she brought from Germany as part of her trousseau, carefully rubbing her face with beauty cream. My aunt in the smoking room, tirelessly hunting for typographical errors. My uncle, impeccably dressed, even at home, endlessly tossing off his quips and jokes. The staff, Yoneda-san and Kobayashi-san, working hard in their respective domains; the family pet, Pochiko, relaxing in the garden. And my cousin Mina reading a book. We always knew when she was about from the rustling of the box of matches she kept in her pocket. The matchboxes were her precious possessions, her talismans. I wander quietly among them, careful to avoid being a nuisance. But someone invariably notices me, and, as if thirty years have vanished in a moment, calls out a greeting. 'Tomoko, is that you?' 'Yes, it’s me,' I answer to the family in my memories."
Ogawa, Yoko. Mina's Matchbox: A Novel (pp. 13-14).
I will admit it, I was rooting for the David Mitchell book. I've read three of his novels and they really are one fantastically designed, realm-sprawling big novel, so knocking another off reveals a bit more of the universe. But I am so very glad to instead be reading Mina's Matchbox.
The feeling I keep getting throughout, an elegiac quality Japan understands so well, like an understated Ireland with all the beauty and none of the bluster, is presented almost like a thesis statement early in the second chapter (the quote above). And weirdly, I had that exact feeling the narrator is describing last summer, in my small hometown in Iowa. I found myself, sort of by happenstance, across the street from the house where I grew up, with sudden tears in my eyes. We'd just come looking for a playground, for my great nieces and nephew (daughters and son of my nieces). For my brother who never left Iowa it was just casually normal to be across the street from that house, which I left forty years ago. St. Martins, the elementary school across the street, where we stood, had been razed -- the the old limestone three story building replaced by a squat industrial thing, the magical realm of the playing field, where so much significant history of me occurred, graveled under for a fancy new playground. Our family house still stood, but all the trees (seven of them, each planted for a newborn child) and the hedge and every ounce of mystery was gone, as was Joe Moose's cornfield, the weird quarter-block remnant of what a century ago had been all cornfield and which the old man (who lived with cats in his 51 Chevy because he was afraid of his renter, Zelda, who we all knew was a wicked witch) kept as a remnant of former empire, coming to watch the corn grow every day throughout the summer. The cornfield, where as a child I thought Bigfoot lived, was now a nondescript house on a lot that seemed far too small to have formerly been a wilderness of stalks.
I digress, of course, but my point is this: we all have our lost intimate empires. We had our own way of doing everything, like all families. We are all gone now, some never to be seen again, yet somewhere somehow it feels like it's still going on -- in "the immutability of memory," as Yoko Agawa describes it as one point. So the circumstance of this book have particular magic -- the house tucked beneath the wooded hill with the pygmy hippopotamus roaming the yard, the handsome and elegantly mysterious uncle, Mina's perfect face -- but there is particular magic most everywhere we came from. A novel achieves greatness when it evokes not only its own time and place but somehow your own. Agawa has performed an act of restorative alchemy in Mina's Matchbox.
Thanks for the prompt to read and think about this, Margaret.
I'm still waiting for my copy to be delivered from World of Books. I can't wait to jump into this world!