After the death of her father, 12-year-old Tomoko is sent to live with her aunt’s family in their colonial-style house in Ashiya, a Japanese town nestled between the mountains and the sea. She spends a year there, befriending Mina, her cousin, and the family pet, a pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko. The two girls spend their days collecting matchboxes, borrowing the novels of Yasunari Kawabata from the library, and watching the Japanese 1972 Olympics volleyball team on TV. In the background, her uncle frequently disappears from the house, her aunt retreats to a room to drink alone, and her grandmother reminisces about a long-lost twin. What follows is a whimsical tale of girlhood, coming-of-age and nostalgia. It’s peppered throughout with a subtle darkness that feels like an acknowledgement of the ever-present fear in all our childhoods: that this period of innocence must one day come to an end and the life to come will never be as carefree or as pure.

As in Yōko Ogawa’s previous works, there is a continuation of her preoccupation with memory and connection, while her prose flits between sweet nostalgia and dark foreboding. The effect is delicious; never did it feel like the story tipped into an overly saccharine tale of simple bildungsroman. Instead, Ogawa has produced a dynamic, Ghibli-esque tale that charms with its slightly naïve, slightly desperate, and slightly unreliable narrator, Tomoko. There’s a little bit of Lonely Castle in the Mirror here, and a little bit of The Book of Goose too, however Ogawa’s voice is entirely her own and entirely bewitching. I didn’t want it to end, and I will miss the time I spent with these characters.