When All You Have Left Are Memories, Plus a Hippopotamus

Elaborately illustrated matchboxes, one of which features a girl on the back of a small hippopotamus. Another girl stands next to the matchbox holding a red leash, which is attached to the hippo. 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 […]

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