From Japan, a novel about a girl who makes new friends and rides a hippo to school

Yoko Ogawa’s novel “Mina’s Matchbox,” in a magnificent translation by Stephen B. Snyder, demonstrates the abiding comfort of fiction that envisions childhood as a time of discovery — without the elevated stakes of being a grown-up.

Originally published serially in Japan in 2005, the story sees 12-year-old Tomoko spend a year with her aunt’s family in the hills outside Osaka. She’s never met these relatives, but knows they live in a 17-room mansion and have connections to faraway European lands. Her excitement increases upon arrival, in March 1972, when she meets Pochiko, her cousin Mina’s pet pygmy hippopotamus.

The house has plenty of other exotic touches, such as a “light-bath room” and a refrigerator stocked with Fressy, the “radium-fortified soft drink” Tomoko is only permitted on her birthday at home. Her aunt’s family believes these novelties are beneficial for Mina’s chronic asthma, which constricts her activities, even necessitating that she ride Pochiko to school to avoid exhaust fumes.

The girls bond over shared interests and passing obsessions with world events, like the Japanese men’s volleyball team’s gold medal run at the Munich Olympics. Though she’s a year younger, Mina is more precocious, possessing a vibrant imagination “far beyond that of most sixth-grade girls.”

This creativity, perhaps spurred by her physical frailty, manifests most strikingly in fables she writes about the artwork on matchboxes, one of which is always in her pocket. Inspired by these images of, say, an elephant on a seesaw or a frog playing the ukulele, the stories are “Mina’s only true chance to escape.”

Other household members intrigue Tomoko, too. Her aunt hides, smoking and drinking while seeking typos in various written materials. Her dashing uncle, the third of his line to helm the Fressy corporation, disappears for weeks at a time. Her 83-year-old German grandma is best friends with the 83-year-old housekeeper, who lives “like a member of a family to which she was in no way related.” Even Mina’s 18-year-old brother becomes a mystery to be solved while visiting from school in Switzerland.

Snyder, who — like too many translators — goes unacknowledged on the book’s cover, has translated several of Ogawa’s works into English, including 2019′s “The Memory Police,” which was a finalist for both the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award. A prime example of why his work is deservedly lauded can be seen in his enlightening treatment of Tomoko’s discussion with Grandma Rosa about the characters that spell her name.

Snyder retains those three characters in the text, allowing English readers to see, as Rosa observes, that the name Tomoko begins with “two identical characters lined up next to one another,” which would have been self-evident to Japanese readers. Tomoko further explains to us that the characters mean “friend” or “companion.” The seemingly esoteric linguistics prompt Rosa to share that she left a twin sister in Germany, a key to the novel’s message about connection.

A lovely epistolary epilogue allows readers to close the book contented that “Mina’s Matchbox” is almost a fairy tale. Its moral? Childish curiosity is as fleeting as the flame of a beautifully struck match — capture it before it’s gone and you can kindle a lifetime love of learning.

Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.

Mina’s Matchbox

By: Yoko Ogawa.

Publisher: Pantheon, 288 pages, $28.