Mina’s Matchbox

Hello Gentle Reader,

By the end of October, the north wind has rampaged through. The leaves routed from their trees. They've ruptured and burst forth into the roaring wind, scattering on the street. Winter looms over the horizon. A starved dog whose howls close in every night as the sun pulls away. Never content to remain ominous or threatening in the distance, a smattering of snow anointed the ground, and while it has since melted, snow marks the conclusion of autumn. Once dandy trees peacocking with their burning foliage are reduced to gnarled shadows. Etherized, they contort and frame the early dusks. Their scaffolding branches claw at the sky, creep along the streets, and lurk outside windows. Autumn recedes further away as October closes. Soon November will sail in on slate grey clouds imbued with cemetery light. Frost will thread and sew its way through the grass; while the filigree of hoarfrost engraves the windows. As October concludes on a brittle note, one can’t help but suspiciously eye the romantic attitudes and airs projected on the month. Of course, October reaps the splendors of its harvest regalia, it is also a month of closures and hollowing out. A time of preparation and harvest; taking stock and giving thanks. In turn, October is a month of transitions and shifting borders. Here at the end of October everyone slips into the forlorn mists, swept up and away, retreating just a little further into themselves. Night falls suddenly, leaving all to cozy up with their memories. Under the circumstances its best to quote the venerated October Poet, Louise Glück:

            “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”

Childhood is a nebulous subject, shifting and shaping. Ranging from the coyly saccharine sugared imaginings of bewildering entertainment, to more serious literary explorations of individual development and the lodestone of the human condition. All individuals look back on this development period with their own imbued perspectives. Some recount homes that were more hovel than house, where ignorance and violence were the preeminent languages. A world acquainted with the predatorial philosophy and Darwin law of “survival of the fittest.” Others described autocratic and tyrannical fathers or claustrophobic communities, where power was unimpeachable, taking the form of violence and brutality, enforcing conformity and complacency. The vocabulary of these homes and of these families were each the same: overcrowded, meager, unwanted, unsustainable. Thumps in the night always foreshadowed further impoverishment. The term ‘unwanted pregnancy,’ was synonymous with further suffering. For a wife and already overwhelmed mother, another link in the chain to the iron ball dragging her to unknowable depths. For an unwed daughter or sister, it was the beginning of the fall. An expedited journey to ruin and the end. They were described as being filthy and dirty; branded as whores who bitched and catted around. The shame was palpable, coloured in contusions. All of them were excited to caste out anything that could be described as of an ill-reputed nature or cheapened or spoiled. One of the rarest of moments in which they can elevate themselves beyond their squalor and piss on another. Despite this, they were all in the same pit, vying and clawing for the edges. While others describe their childhood in pastoral shades. The closet version of Arcadia that earth could facilitate. Then there are others whose lives were full of the same, the otherwise grey mundane; not without but no splendor to spare. Childhood is where one is forged and oriented to the workings of life.

Memory is a perennial preoccupation in the works of Ogawa Yōko. In the dystopian parable “The Memory Police,” Ogawa observed an island in a continual state of loss and redaction. Throughout the novel the inhabitants of the island lose their memories and their gradual connection to the world, all the while their entire reality reduces in size and scope. When calendars are deemed obsolete, the island nation finds itself transfixed in permanent winter. The entire world is lost in a whiteout, redacted further into the reductionist of nothing. In the still untranslated novel, “The Ring Finger,” a woman works at a laboratory, where clients bring in specimens (a bird bone, a melody, a scar, mushrooms) to be preserved by the memorial taxidermist, who preserves not only the specimens but also the associated and corresponding memory. Another untranslated novel “The Museum of Silence,” a woman collects and curates a macabre collection of mundane miscellaneous objects pilfered from people’s homes just after they have died. While in “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” the 88-minute-long memory of the professor, becomes more an eccentric plot point of the novel, rather than abstract theme, but allocates the novel the ability to float temporally in weightlessness while engaging in the abstract beauty of mathematics. In “Mina’s Matchbox,” Ogawa Yōko returns to the theme of memory, as the narrator looks back on a year of her childhood where she begins to transition from the dreaming and imaginative world of childhood and enter the more actualized reality of young adulthood.

As a novel “Mina’s Matchbox,” is more akin to “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” then “The Memory Police,” or “Revenge.” Where “The Memory Police,” a parabolic in its dystopian vision, contemplating the responsibility of remembrance and the corrosion of obsoletion and forced amnesia having the reductionist power to redact the world, but also discombobulate and alienate individuals’ relation to reality, and slowly releasing them into nothing. Whereas “Revenge,” showcased Ogawa as a master of the macabre. A consummate curator, Ogawa assembled, organized, and crafted scenes and landscapes transfixed and static in their clinical ordinariness, and then began to autopsy these otherwise starched and ironed scenes, revealing the absurd, deranged, and visceral undercurrent coursing beneath the otherwise unexceptionally ordinary. What is best described as the macabre or the madness of the mundane. Instead “Mina’s Matchbox,” bubbles and floats on the gentle effervescence of Ogawa’s observational and unadorned prose, explicitly in alignment with that of “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” while providing Ogawa the space to indulge in detours, details, and the shadows shifting in the periphery. Of course, as in “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” the quotidian is relayed on the slant. Whereas the titular professor’s 88-minute memory injects a sense of eccentricity into the narrative; in “Mina’s Matchbox,” the unconventionality comes not only in the niche habits and quirks of its characters, but also in the form of a pygmy hippopotamus, the sole survivor of a private family zoo, now a pet and mode of transportation. Ogawa’s straight forward prose hits the necessary punches in order to evade sentimentality and kitsch. Regardless, from 1972 to 1973 prove to be a formative year for Tomoko, who looks back on her stay with her distant and affluent relatives in Ashiya, who provide her a new world of discovery and knowledge. Counterbalancing the whimsy and the unconventionality of the relatives, Ogawa Yōko laces time specific details within the text, not only grounding it but enlivening the narrative into a greater context, enriching the narrative with a necessary palpability. Specifically, the 1972 Summer Olympics are by and large a defining feature of the year, with both Tomoko and Mina transfixed by the Japanese Olympic Volleyball Team’s journey to Munich and the aspirations the team would win gold. The two girls’ devotion to the team became borderline fanatical; but their rationale regarding their admiration towards individual team members delineated how the girls viewed the team. Mina logically evaluated the statistics and abilities; while Tomoko frivolously admired the beauty and appearance of another.

Tomoko’s reminisces of her time in Ashiya prove to be crystalline, but also express a gap in memory or a child’s lacking maturity to fully realize the depth of the situation. Through all their eccentricities, their indulgences in intellectual pursuits, and their lavish surprises, the family is dogged by secrets and familiar tensions. Mina is asthmatic, but her conditions severity gyrates between crisis and projected exaggeration by those around her. Despite this, Mina’s medical remand has nurtured an imaginative and creative mind, as the novel is spiced with a few of her matchbox stories. Tomoko’s uncle is charming dazzling, but beyond his smooth and shiny veneer lurks an ungraspable tension. His absences fill the house and while his returns are celebratory, Tomoko perceives a tension between her uncle and her maternal aunt. While her aunt in turn spends her days drinking and smoking, reading texts and books scanning for typographical errors. When Mina’s beautiful brother Ryuchi returns from Switzerland, Tomoko once again reflects on a concealed strain between father and son. From Grandmother Rosa, Tomoko comes to learn about the Holocaust, and the survivor’s guilt that plaques her grandmother, all the while the horrible massacre and terrorist act of the Munich Olympics, becomes a shattering reminder of the human capability for terror, marking one of the unadulterated moments when the idyll of childhood is infiltrated with the violence of the external world. The novel in turn traces first loves and there fated disappointments. All the milestones in the march to growing up. Ogawa’s prose is casual and laconic as it languishes over the details, which is also the novels weakness. Details effervescently emerge and while their intentions are ominous or foreshadow conflict, they instead burst or drift off course, never quite actualizing. Just who is the uncle’s mistress? While Tomoko circles the issue and approaches it, the subject is never explored further. Ogawa’s tasteful desire to refuse to linger on overtly dramatic events, be it a home invasion or a fire, allow her to bob and weave the entrapments  and indulgences of melodramatic histrionics, but the lack of completion or conclusion or at the very least hard lined definition can be considered underwhelming. Yet, in Ogawa’s defense, children are minuscules in comparison to the machinations of the adults around them and as such as scaled to their environment. The hypersensitivity and overprotectiveness of Mina is in turn leveraged against Tomoko, and while she exercises some agency in her movements, she is otherwise tethered to the house. In addition, as a child Tomoko may be reluctant to explore or investigate an issue of an extra marital affair further. The revelation of the holocaust was enlightening to the human capacity for horror and cruelty.

“Mina’s Matchbox,” was originally written in a serialized format, which explains the short chapters and the episodic feel of the narrative skipping along, in addition to the abrupt endings. The novel is a marvelous exploration of the domestic, and while many readers have praised Ogawa’s foray into the realism and domestic novel, it still retains a slanted perspective betraying the signature flirtation with the macabre. The overgrown Fressy Zoological Garden remains a haunted landscape. Mina’s matchbox stories integrated themselves into the narrative naturally. I found this time the transition between novel and independent fable more symphonic; whereas with “The Memory Police,” chapters from the narrators’ novels did not blend within the narrative as organically. Ogawa Yōko’s continued exploration of the finer nuances of memory are on perfect display with her novel “Mina’s Matchbox.” While it eschews Ogawa’s usual underpinnings of the grotesque and ghoulish, it succeeds in being a charming domestic novel. Ogawa’s prose shone in the crisp gracefulness, a lightness of touch continually feathering out and insinuating each detail. While others are quick to categorize “Mina’s Matchbox,” as a coming-of-age story, Ogawa Yōko has skillfully skirted the mechanical form of such novels and stories. This ‘year in the life,’ novel layers events and details naturally form, never fixating or magnifying on any particular event as having a significant contribution to the development of either girl. All the while through the course of the novel they inevitably do change and grow. Time marches forward, yet as Tomoko reminisces, it was a transformative year. Ogawa succeeds at encapsulating those moments of youth. The awkwardness of self-awareness. The frustrations of infatuations. Those insignificant moments which haunt us throughout our lifetimes; much like the little girl catching falling stars in a bottle, on one matchbox cover. This is Ogawa’s strength, the ability to effortlessly examine the subtle shifts and changes in her characters psychology and relation to the world.

“Mina’s Matchbox,” is a welcome – like all future Ogawa Yoko publications – and overdue entry into the English language. “Mina’s Matchbox,” showcases Ogawa’s range as writer, her ability to move beyond the visceral or mundane violence of her other works, and instead explore a quieter and intimate family narrative. Ogawa’s prose remains natural and unadorned, never burned by ostentatious formatting and achieving at their crests a wistful lyricism, much like the radium-fortified drink Fressy which appears throughout the novel. “Mina’s March,” provides a holistic portrait of one’s memory and one’s relationship to it, but also the complicated relationships and how they’ve adapted and changed through the ages, and how they too are remembered. In a manner similar to Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun,” Ogawa Yoko moves through time deftly and with ease covering a period of thirty years through highlights and applying a short epistolary format. As in “Klara and the Sun,” which fixated on only a short pinnacle period of a character’s life, Ogawa ended "Mina's Matchbox," without cheapening the prose, but coming to a rounded conclusion. 

 

Thank you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
 
M. Mary