If you are in search of a quiet corner to cozy the winter and tumult away, if you want to spend a Saturday morning not speaking even one word, or, if the voices in your head and the notch in your chest and the ringing in your ears are ballooning in tandem at a rate so alarming that you think you may just erupt all over your brand new second-hand rug, look to Yoko Ogawa, melt into her short story “The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain,” or collapse into her newest novel Mina’s Matchbox.  

This most-recent Ogawa novel follows 12-year-old Tomoko as she is sent to live with her extended family in 1972 coastal Japan. Following the death of Tomoko’s father, her mother must enroll in a demanding Tokyo trade school while Tomoko moves in with her mother’s sister and family in the wealthy Ashiya suburb. 

The family’s sprawling compound houses a just-as-sprawling extended family including Mina, Tomoko’s cousin, a year younger than her. Most other characters are referred to by their familial titles: Aunt, Uncle, Grandmother. Uncle’s soda empire Fressy, “a radium-fortified soft drink that was said to be beneficial to the digestion,” furnishes the family’s lavish lifestyle, outlandishly featuring a pygmy hippo, Pochiko. As Mina is chronically asthmatic, she, even more outlandishly, rides said hippo to school. Despite eccentric flourishes, the book remains disarmingly internal to the home, reflecting a steady intimacy between its inhabitants. 

Like many bildungsromans, there is a crush or two, inscrutable adults, changing bodies and a bra that keeps riding up. Then there is the history unfolding in the background only vaguely legible to Tomoko and Mina, two young girls just learning the full expanse of their world. This awareness blossoms the way it did in my early teen years, and I assume in yours as well: incrementally, in waves, with domestic minuscule victories, like a compliment from a crush or a bra that suddenly stops riding up. 

In the style that Ogawa is known for, this story, while stepping upon the well-trod path of coming-of-age tales, is notably interior to the lives of Tomoko and her family members. Long passages spill across the page describing each dish at family meals in great detail. The family thinks there is a nearing forest fire, but there isn’t. Even Mina slips in and out of the hospital without much fanfare.

But Mina’s Matchbox is markedly divorced from Ogawa’s previously translated texts in that it is notably of our world, a departure from a writer who has been described as crafting modern fairy tales in their emblematic abstract style. Even Ogawa’s The Memory Police stands apart from its dystopian compatriots for how spare the description, the text, the world building is. In this newest addition to her oeuvre, Ogawa settles into the category of truly eclectic, but her prose maintains a dreamy quality, a clarity, a pleasing quiescence.

This is why I go to Ogawa. Our world today is loud: loud with images and 24-hour news cycles and the making and unmaking of democratic institutions and technology that just won’t quit and 10-second video after 10-second video after 10-second video. Each new advancement (cassette tapes to CDs to iPods with tiny memories to Spotify with its horizonless catalog) has helped sustain our fervor for more, more, more. Then the constant, constant advertisements to make YOU YOUR BEST YOU, to place you and your bank account and your face at the center of the universe.  

And we are all so helpless. Or, at least, I feel helpless: wracked by the sickening tide of dopamine triggers and encouragements to define my personal aesthetic, brand, website. As if my humanness is only valid if ascertainable by the algorithm. As if I am only a valid fleshy human sack if the popular girls from high school, grad school, work like my post on Instagram, Linkedin, BlueSky. Then the ads: this dress will get you that validation. Even though you had a dress like that in college and your roommate said you bore a striking resemblance to a rectangle. Then the news: lava is gurgling our way. You’re not doing enough to stop it. You. You as the basic unit of being. You have failed in some way. 

This, when all of this gets too loud—if I can manage to get my head out of my ass long enough to take just one god-forsaken breath—this is when I go to Ogawa. 

I have read Ogawa’s “The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain” at least a dozen times. Her worlds are quiet. There is a lot of fog, and birds flying into and out of fog. The text does not even identifiably center itself in a country, aside from it being one where its citizens appreciate a genuine German stove. The narrator is a woman: she is young; she is betrothed to an older man; she is readying their home. One rainy day, a man, of no discernible religion or true occupation, knocks at the woman’s door with a little boy, his son, asking if the narrator is “experiencing some anguish.” 

No one is named aside from the narrator’s dog, Juju. 

Later in the story, after ornate descriptions of food preparation and house maintenance and more fog, the narrator and Juju go on an evening walk where they run into the man and the boy next to a cafeteria. The boy lays on Juju like a couch. The man tells the woman a story of a pool in the rain. 

That is the whole story. And yet, I have spoiled nothing. Ogawa is un-spoil-able. Her stories were the first I read where I thought, “this, this is what it feels like to pass one’s days.” My days are spent thinking deeply about my next meal. My family huddles around the television in the evening. My teen years were spent asking what came before me and what will come after and what is that cryptic thing that mom just said about the war and is that why Grandpa gets so quiet when I ask him about his childhood? My experience of living consists of quotidian slips into connection with the people I share my days with. 

And yet, loneliness is up; depression is up; suicide is up. Alcohol usage is down but internet addiction is up; teen pregnancy is up but teens hanging out with friends is down. And, also, I miss my mom. 

There I was, five years ago, all alone in my room at 3 a.m., my eyes bleary. I am watching 10-second video after 10-second video of domesticated otters wrestling stuffed-animal snakes while I lay sideways in my bed when the app quits. For the first time in an hour, the room is silent, and, for the first time since I was maybe 12, I notice that I miss my mom. I didn’t realize this in an intellectualized, linguistic way—not something as terrestrial as letters flitting across my mind. But the cold that had been beside me, maybe since I was 12, took shape as the absence of my mother. I would have called her, but it was morning back home, and she was going to work, and, besides, we didn’t talk that much then. 

Shape of mother is both metaphor and lived reality. It is a metaphor for the animal body seeking connection as a need, like water or bread. 

It was January 2020, five years ago. I was in China’s Chongqing province working at SouthWest University when rumors of a pneumonia-like virus began to emerge from the neighboring province. Over the course of Spring Festival, as most people were returning to their family homes, the largest annual human migration in the world, provinces began to close borders. I was in Sichuan province with a friend when we heard the news. Her uncle was driving back to Chongqing tomorrow; we should go before we get stuck. (What would have happened if I had said no?) When I got back to my apartment, I told my dad I wanted to stay, wait it out, stockpile a week’s worth of food. (Comical. How naive.) To calm his anxiety, I called a friend at the Chengdu consulate. (A giving friend.) I assured her that I knew the government wasn’t telling us everything: 

I know you can’t tell me the truth, but can you tell me when I need to leave?

Leave, she said. 

That night, in my bed, unable to sleep, unable to buy the damn ticket, I realized, like a fever overtaking me, that I did not want to die on the other side of the world from my family. I wanted to spend the end of the world fighting with them. I bought the damn ticket and started packing. 

Over the last five years, the sound, the shrill scream of a train whose brakes can’t compete with its headlong speed, has been deafening, finding us in our homes, our bedrooms, every cranny of our lives. 

Unlike much of her work, in Mina’s Matchbox, geopolitics enters the home. While the family devotedly follows the rise of the 1972 Japanese volleyball team, violence erupts at the Munich Olympics. Mina’s grandmother, a German woman who left her home country before the Second World War, weeps at the scene as we learn her twin sister was murdered in Auschwitz. Tomoko checks out a book of war photos, searching for a recognizable face. There is no more discussion on the matter. 

Eventually, time passes. Small dramas unfold. Japan is in its booming post-U.S. occupation, post-war, pre-economic bubble burst years. Just as the moment between childhood and adulthood passes in an instant, so does the reader recognize a country grasping at temporary security. 

On the last New Year’s Eve before COVID, my friends and I went to KTV, private karaoke. We sang Chinese songs and English songs and songs that both countries revere, like “My Heart Will Go On” and “Country Roads” and that one magnificent Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston song from The Prince of Egypt. I look back at pictures from that night and try to remember what it was like in the “before.” For those of us, most of us alive today, who have only known the world order of Pax Americana (an egregious misnomer), we might look around and wonder what we are in the “before” of, what temporary security is slipping from our fingers.  

While Mina’s Matchbox was originally published in Japan in 2006, it seems oddly prescient. Ogawa’s characters are no longer removed from the world. They are asking how they protect their peace in the face of wars and disease and raging fires. How to be of the world and not of the world. Some of the noise we must listen to, for ourselves, our families, our neighbors; for our ability to survive, to form plans of resistance. Some of the noise is just noise, designed to stoke dread and distract and discombobble. What the book shares with all Ogawa’s work is a tender collectivism, a belief that relationships are the most significant structure of meaning making. 

On the 30th of January 2020, I left Chongqing International Airport. I slept on a bench at Shanghai International Airport. At LAX, a National Guard member met us at the gate to ask if we had been to Wuhan. We said no, and he let us pass. When I made it to Denver, jetlagged and saturated with fearful posts from China’s social media site WeChat, I told my parents it was gonna be a shit show. 

And it was, in small and large ways. You remember. We sanitized groceries and the mail and walked on the opposite side of the street from our masked neighbors. 

My brother was home too, and, for the first time in a decade, all four of us lived together. We chased the dog and fell asleep in front of movies and screamed about how to quarantine. The loud swept through our house like chinook winds, sometimes emanating from within us. My mom and I fought and fought and talked and talked until I realized that I would not be okay with myself until I was okay with her. 

By the time summer began to turn and it was safe enough to move out, we had defined boundaries that allowed us to be both separate and together. This is not to say the plague of COVID convinced me to talk it out with every family member. There are family members I have cut off for their cruelty, both interpersonal and political, because I could not be right with them and still be right with myself. This is instead to say that we are not individual dinghies in a great wide sea; we are a web; we are a net; we belong both to ourselves and to one another. Now, three states away, closer but still away, I still miss my mom some days, but now I call her. 

In its original Japanese, the book’s title does not translate to Mina’s Matchbox, but to Mina’s March. The matchbox refers to a private stash of collectable trinkets Mina keeps under her bed. For each acquired matchbox, she writes a corresponding short story reflecting the image on the box. Another trait of an Ogawa story: a story within a story. The way we spend our days: telling one another about our days. But in the book’s original, the focus is not only the stories we tell, but the steps taken. In this case, Mina opts to walk to school alone instead of being accompanied by an adult and Pochiko. Aunt, Uncle, and Grandmother watched “her slender figure until she descended the hill and disappeared around the corner.”

In a time of manic individualism and frantic noise, Ogawa’s unnamed characters invite us to reckon with our undeniable permeability; they invite; they do not demand; they are certain in their truth that each character is a reflection of their compatriots. 

During the last five years, I have craved silence just as often as I crave fresh-baked cookies (read: daily). Quiet seems scarce, but I can find it in my big green chair, far too large and therefore perfect, with a book propped against my knees as I slide deeper into velvet emerald folds. This is not disassociating but reassociating, reacquainting myself with the smallest units of pleasure. And it is frightening. To know that this is really it, here we are; to accept the true smallness of one life in the face of a culture declaring the self as deity. Breathe slow, I tell myself, take another sip of tea, read another chapter, and maybe the fear of oblivion will be somewhat soothed. 

In the silence, I feel my permeability reveal itself. I feel my parents three states away waking up, whispering good morning, walking the dog. I feel my brother wiping sleep from his eyes. I feel my grandparents, who would be in their 90s: my grandmother slicing oranges in the French way that we still call “Grandma Slices”; I feel my grandfather, young and still tall and almost still a boy, returning from Italy, the war, certain that everything had changed. There he is, steady, knowing time marches on, and, despite its scourge, we may better notice every moment we are offered, better know the gift of being one of many, in the silence.