Mina’s Matchbox

I will never forget the house in Ashiya, where I lived from 1972 to 1973. The shape of the shadow under the arched entry porch, the cream-colored walls against the green of the mountains, the pattern of grapes on the railings of the veranda, the two towers with their ornamental windows. Every inch of it is etched in my memory, from the grand sight of the exterior to the particular odor in each of the seventeen rooms, from the quality of the light in the garden to the cool touch of the doorknobs.

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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.

It was my uncle’s father who built this residence in the hills some two hundred meters above sea level to the northwest of Ashiya Station on the Hankyu Railway, along the Kōza tributary of the Ashiya River. The second in the family to serve as president of the beverage company, he had gone off in his midtwenties to study at the University of Berlin, specializing in pharmacology. It was there that he met and married Grandmother Rosa. After returning home, he had expanded the company by developing Fressy, a radium-fortified soft drink that was said to be beneficial to the digestion. And it was he who acquired fifteen hundred tsubo of land at the foot of Ashiya Mountain, where a residential area was being developed after the Hankyu Line came through, and there he built a mansion in the Spanish Colonial style. That was in 1927, the second year of the Showa period.

With its arched porte cochere and terrasse, semicircular sunroom on the southeast corner, and orange-tiled roof, the house gave an impression of cheerful graciousness rather than opulence. Great care had been taken with even the smallest details, and the balance of the whole had a special elegance. Though the exterior was in the Spanish style, the furnishings, dishes, and linens were all German made, to ensure that Grandmother Rosa would not be homesick. The garden to the south sloped gently toward the sea, in order to take advantage of the sunlight. Few cars passed along the road to the north, and trees grew all around. The bustle of the city was far away. Protected from the seasonal winds by the Rokko Mountains, the winters were mild and the summers made bearable by the breezes from the sea. Perhaps it was due to this favorable environment that my grandparents were blessed with a child in the twelfth year of their marriage, almost as soon as they moved to this house. That child was my uncle.

My uncle’s life unfolded along nearly the same lines as his father’s. After studying in Germany, he had returned to work on improvements to Fressy, the company’s key product. He also updated the packaging and ultimately achieved a substantial improvement in sales. The only difference was the fact that he did not find a wife in Germany. My uncle married my aunt, who was working in the company laboratory, washing beakers and testing new products.

This couple, who lived the early years of their married life in the healthy environment of the house in Ashiya, did not have to wait twelve years to conceive a child. On the contrary, just seven months after their wedding, they had a son, Ryūichi. As if to counterbalance this precipitous first birth, it was seven more years until the next one. Mina, who gave me so much and asked nothing in return, was born in the winter of 1960. Mina, the darling of the whole family, whose body was too weak to travel but whose soul never stopped voyaging to the ends of the earth.

They were all assembled in the hall to greet me when I followed my uncle through the door, and they all seemed more nervous than I felt. Grandmother Rosa, leaning on her cane, gave an awkward smile, and my aunt was apparently too disconcerted by this first meeting with her niece to find the right words to say. Mina’s look was serious, as though she was determined to discover the true nature of this newcomer.

In addition to the family, there were two old people I could not identify. It wasn’t long before I discovered that the man, who appeared to be the younger of the two, was the gardener, Kobayashi-san, who lived elsewhere, and the woman was Yoneda-san, the maid who lived in the house. Since the characters for Kobayashi, who took care of the trees, meant “little forest,” and those for Yoneda, who prepared our meals, meant “rice paddy,” I soon memorized their names.

“Please take your bags upstairs.” It was Yoneda-san who spoke up first. “Your room is the second one in the wing just at the top of the stairs. The boxes that arrived from Okayama are already there. You can take your time arranging things to your liking. Mina, please give her a tour of the house. The location of the bathrooms, how to get hot water, everything

she needs to know. Tea is at three o’clock, so come down to the parlor then. I’ve made a fruitcake for this afternoon.”

As she spoke, the smile with which my uncle had greeted me at the station never left his face. Then we all left the hall in obedience to Yoneda-san’s instructions.

My first impression of this family was that the group had a great deal of variety. The color of their hair, for example, ranged from white (Grandmother Rosa and Yoneda-san) to gray (Kobayashi-san) to light brown (my uncle) to dark brown (Mina) to black (my aunt). Nor was that the only way they differed. Their names freely mixed Chinese characters with foreign ones (my uncle’s full name was Eric-Ken, Mina’s was Minako), and they all spoke somewhat different languages. Yoneda-san, Kobayashi-san, and Mina spoke a very natural version of Kansai dialect, while my aunt and uncle spoke the standard dialect but with a large inflection from Kansai. Grandmother Rosa spoke a peculiar sort of Japanese that was, at times, difficult to understand.

But there was nothing negative about all these differences. On the contrary, compared to my small family, just my mother and me, it provided room for a lost girl to wander in and find her place.

Mina followed Yoneda-san’s instructions and gave me a thorough tour of the house. There were many doors to open, and each room they revealed was more attractive than the last.

A reception hall with a dazzling chandelier and a fireplace of black marble. A silent study illuminated by a ray of light through a stained-glass window. A guest room with a canopy bed of the sort I’d seen only in picture books. The excitement I had felt as I’d stepped from the car continued to grow.

But Mina, apparently unaware of what I was feeling, and apparently without a hint of vanity, continued the tour.

“This is where Mama hides to have a drink without Grandmother seeing. That’s why the carpet is covered with cigarette burns.” “I wish someone could explain to me why they chose such hideous curtains.” “This is Yoneda-san’s workroom. The spot on the wall is where she threw the iron one day when she was hysterical.”

She went on and on like this. But I was barely listening; I was so taken in by this palatial house and thoughts of Yoneda-san’s three o’clock fruitcake.

The room they had prepared for me had been Ryūichi’s before he went to study in Switzerland. It was next to Mina’s, sunny, south-facing, with a balcony and a fine view of the garden. Since it had been a boy’s room, it was a bit lacking in romance—nor was there a canopy on the bed—but still, how could I complain?

Mina and I went out on the balcony. Even the handle on the door, which had to be turned at a right angle to open, seemed strange to my eyes. It was then that I finally looked about the garden. It was so large that it seemed to stretch down to the sea, and at the far end was thick vegetation and a pond. Something was moving in the tall grass. A black, unidentifiable mass.

“Did something move down there?” I asked, pointing at the spot.

“Oh, that’s Pochiko,” said Mina, her tone softening. “Our hippopotamus.”

And that’s how I learned of the final, and equally important, inhabitant of the house.

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From Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Yoko Ogawa.