In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy ...
Wistful recollections of a precious and magical childhood
Yoko Ogawa's books combine the mundane and the strange with a writing style that is profound and poetic but also very accessible. ミーナの行進 is a fabulous story - full of nostalgia, humour and whimsy. Tomoko is sent away to spend a year with her wealthy and somewhat eccentric extended family in the hills above Ashiya. She meets her cousin Mina who is simultaneously feisty, precocious, but also fragile, forced to travel the world in her imagination because of her poor health. She also meets the wonderful Pochiko, the pygmy hippopotamus who carries Mina to school on her back each day. This is a great book for language learners. The vocabulary is relatively straightforward - nothing too specialised, and the chapters are short. A few of us read this as part of the Ogawa book club on the Natively forum and really enjoyed it. Highly recommended.