The Phone Box at the Edge of the World

by Laura Imai Messina

  chapter

  two

  Playlist for that Night During Yui’s Radio Programme

  Fakear, ‘Jonnhae Pt. 2’.

  Hans Zimmer, ‘Time’.

  Plaid, ‘Melifer’.

  Agnes Obel, ‘Stone’.

  Sakamoto Kyū, ‘Ue wo muite arukōō’ [I look up as I walk].

  The Cinematic Orchestra, ‘Arrival of the Birds & Transformation’.

  Max Richter, ‘Mrs Dalloway: In the Garden’.

  Vance Joy, ‘Call If You Need Me’.

  chapter

  three

  AS SHE PLAYED AROUND WITH the satnav, Yui tried desperately not to be sick.

  The view of the sea had that effect on her for the first few minutes every time she saw it. As though, just by looking at it, the water would rush into her mouth, choking her. So she would quickly stuff something else in her mouth, a square of chocolate or a sweet, and within moments she would be used to the sight and the spasms would ease.

  In the month following the tsunami, she had lived on a two by three metre sheet of canvas in an elementary-school gymnasium, with 120 other people. And yet she would never again feel as lonely as she had in that place.

  Despite the heavy snowfall, almost unheard of in March, she would go outside as often as she could. She would squeeze through a crack in the wall of the school playground and cling to a tree that seemed firmly rooted to the earth. From there she would contemplate the ocean, now back in its correct position, and the crater of rubble it had left in its wake.

  She scrutinised the water intensely; she hadn’t looked at anything else for weeks. She was convinced that in there she would find the answer.

  Every morning and every evening she would go to the information centre with the same query. Two names and two descriptions: the pigtails, the mid-length grey hair, the colour of a skirt, the mole on a stomach.

  On her way back she would make hasty use of the school bathrooms, which were designed for children aged six to eleven. She would walk up and down the corridors wallpapered in drawings and homework assignments. Then she would return to her small square of life, silenced by all the absurdity.

  Some people, among the canvas sheets laid out on the linoleum floor, wouldn’t stop talking. They needed to say it out loud to be sure it had really happened. Others, however, said nothing, as if they were terrified to read the next page, where they knew the tragedy would take place. They convinced themselves that if that page wasn’t turned, the inevitable wouldn’t happen. Others still, the ones who already knew everything, had nothing left to say. The majority were waiting, and Yui was one of them.

  Depending on what you were told at the information centre, you belonged to one of two groups: those who knew and those who were waiting. Sometimes people would go on to another shelter, where they’d find the people they had been waiting for waiting for them.

  There were hundreds of astonishing stories to tell. Everything, when you looked back on it, seemed like part of a plan (‘If I hadn’t been in bed sick …’, ‘If I’d turned right instead of left …’, ‘If I hadn’t got out of the car …’, ‘If we hadn’t gone home for lunch …’).

  Everybody had heard the voice of the young woman working at the city hall, one hundred metres from the sea, who hadn’t taken a moment’s break from broadcasting the tsunami warning through the loudspeaker, the repeated command to run up hills, climb to the highest floors of reinforced concrete buildings. Everybody knew that even she hadn’t been saved.

  The images on mobile phones, which people were now queuing for hours to recharge, played back the absurd spectacle of men, women and children clinging to rooftops, capsized cars, houses that – after putting up a good fight – followed their inhabitants into the water’s deadly flow, whirling like the rinse cycle of a washing machine.

  And then there was the fire, which nobody ever imagined could overcome the water. We were taught as children that scissors beats paper, paper beats rock, and water always beats fire, extinguishing it and saving our lives. Nobody could recall, from those childhood lessons, that time is everything, and smoke fills the lungs faster than anything else. That you can also die from flames in a tsunami, without the water ever touching you.

  From the high ground that skirted the town, where she had run to that day after the first quake, Yui watched the ocean advance. It was slow, silent and bold, as if its destination was inevitable. What did the sea do, if not wash in and out again?

  She was far from home, and her mother’s message saying that she and Yui’s daughter were nearly at their local shelter had been so reassuring that Yui had simply followed the people around her. She helped an old woman who was struggling to walk, she made herself as useful as possible, convinced as she was, deep down, that she was a survivor. For a moment she had even felt guilty for her good fortune.

  Arriving at the open space on the mountainside they all looked out, as though on a balcony at the theatre. They held their phones in their hands, enlivened by an excessive faith in technology. They had looked like children again, back at the age when there was no difference between fear and excitement. But when the sea struck the land, and didn’t stop until it reached the base of the mountain, there was only silence.

  The scene was so surreal that, for a long time, Yui couldn’t be certain of what she had witnessed.

  The tsunami rose much higher than predicted, so much so that, in some cases, the term ‘shelter’ became a broken formula, a misspelled word; an imprecise definition that creates an equivalence between two things that are, in reality, nothing alike. That’s what happened to her daughter and her mother, who, when they got to the shelter, found only death awaiting them.

  Yui would wait on that sheet of two metres by three metres for a month, forgetting, at a certain point, what she was waiting for. The few objects she’d had with her at the time of the earthquake lay around her like a garland. Added to them were bottles of water, towels, cups of freeze-dried ramen, onigiri, cereal bars, sanitary towels and energy drinks. Surrounded by these things that were getting older and older, she waited for it all to be over.

  Eventually, the bodies were found and Yui stopped looking at the sea.

  chapter

  four

  The Tōhoku Disaster According to the

  Figures Released by the Website

  Hinansyameibo.katata.info,

  Updated on 10th January 2019

  Confirmed deaths: 15,897.

  Missing: 2,534.

  Displaced: 53,709.

  Disaster-related deaths: 3,701.

  chapter

  five

  YUI DROVE THROUGH THE GREY streets of Ōtsuchi, the land cleared of people. It was one of the areas worst hit by the March 2011 disaster, one-tenth of the population either engulfed by the sea or burned by the fires that blazed for days.

  Stripped bare by the tsunami, it now looked like an enormous dirt field, only broken up by a few rudimentary buildings, bulldozers and a handful of cars, the purpose of which was hard to imagine.

  It reminded her of one of those sprawling, half-empty Buddhist cemeteries that appear all of a sudden high in the mountains.

  The vertical flags that announced work in progress and the names of the construction companies busy in the area were tugged back and forth by the incessant wind.

  As she drove up the coast, following the road as it expanded and narrowed tracing the natural curve of the bay, she was assailed by a doubt. What if the man on the radio had been wrong? Not so much about the existence of the place, which she had successfully found on the map, along with telephone and fax numbers, but about whether what had worked for him could work for her too?

  A telephone box in a garden, a disconnected phone on which you could talk to your lost loved ones. Could something like that really console people? And what would she say to her mother anyway? What could she possibly say to her little girl? The thought alone made her dizzy.

  The satnav kept giving her contradictory commands; she was
now so close that it refused to give her any more solid clues. She pulled over and turned off the engine.

  What if Bell Gardia was so full of people that she had to wait in line? Who didn’t have dead people they would like to talk to, after all? Who didn’t have unresolved issues with the other side?

  Yui imagined one of those huge Chinese swimming pools, where all you can see is flesh, coloured swim caps and inflatable rubber rings. Everybody wants to get in, but nobody is able to swim; the water underneath, a figment of the imagination.

  Yui was sure that she would never be able to speak on the phone if there were people waiting outside.

  It would be like in the toilets at school. Are you nearly finished? How long do you need in there?

  She rummaged in the plastic bag that was overflowing onto the passenger seat. She unwrapped one of the onigiri that she’d bought with a chocolate bar and can of coffee before leaving Tōkyō. Chewing, she examined the landscape.

  It was an anonymous corner of countryside: run-down buildings, two-storey houses with the typical blue roof tiles and large gardens with storehouses, neat rows of vegetables, the odd chicken coop. To her right was the sea, shielded by the smooth curve of a hillside. Behind her, immovable, the mountain.

  Immersed in that landscape, she relaxed. There was no traffic and no shops. Her fear that there would be a crowd thronging the phone box was unfounded.

  Suddenly, after hours of clouds and rain, light spilled over the earth. Yui noticed rows of persimmons hanging to dry under the eaves of a house. In the rear-view mirror, she caught sight of a man leaving the house and climbing up a ladder propped against a tree with many branches. He had a pair of shears in his hand, preparing to trim it.

  She thought about asking him for directions to the house of Suzuki-san, to the Wind Phone; yes, Bell Gardia, do you know it? But she faltered as she realised that the request would reveal her grief to the stranger. She hated the way people changed, the pity that made them smile uneasily or shrink back into cool politeness.

  But then the figure of a man with a youthful face and grey hair passed through the reflection in the wing mirror, and Yui knew that he was like her. A survivor.

  She couldn’t explain it, but she had glimpsed a corner of darkness in his features, a darkness she recognised. It was a place where those who had been left behind relinquished all emotions, even joy, in order to avoid suffering the pain of the others.

  This man was holding a map in his hands, his cap lowered on his head, the crinkled paper flapping against his chest. He was looking around, searching for something.

  In the years that followed, Yui would get to know the man well; she would carefully examine his back as it curved over the Wind Phone, the receiver pressed to his ear, the view of his body divided up into the small square panes of the telephone box.

  He would bring a little bag each time he came, carried carefully by hand so that it wouldn’t get squashed, containing two of the banana-and-fresh-cream special eclairs his wife had loved. In a ritual of their own creation, the two of them, Yui and Fujita-san, would eat them together, sitting on the bench at Bell Gardia.

  With the clearest of hearts they would look out to sea because, though Yui had moved to Tōkyō and kept her distance from the ocean ever since, after a year and a half of separation, she had begun to long for it again. Everyone said that: at first you hate it and then you slowly start to love it again, with the same excruciating emotion you might feel towards a son who has killed someone; in spite of everything, you’ll never be able to disown him.

  ‘Time may pass, but the memory of the people we’ve loved doesn’t grow old. It is only we who age,’ this man, who was now unfolding the map again as the wind played with his hair, would often say.

  When Yui got out of her car, the air smelled overwhelmingly of salt. The sea was nearby of course, but the density with which it filled her nostrils unsettled her. She quickly locked the door, not giving herself a chance to turn back.

  She approached the man, who had by now crossed the road and was about to start walking up a gentle slope. She left the sea behind her and looked upwards.

  Yui felt the wind on her back, as though it were pushing her. It felt almost like a real hand resting there, gently pressing her up the path that climbed gradually towards Kujira-yama, the Mountain of the Whale.

  ‘Excuse me!’ she called out, trying to catch up with the man. Her voice was swallowed by the wind. She said it again, sumimasen, and this time the words held on and were carried to him.

  The man turned, the map crumpling against his chest.

  He smiled. In one glance he knew that she was like him, that they were there for the same reason.

  chapter

  six

  Other Phrases Fujita-san Would Often Say

  ‘Sleep cures all.’

  ‘It is difficult to know yourself if you do not know others.’ (Quoting Miyamoto Musashi)

  ‘You can never find the keys when you need to go out.’

  ‘A cappuccino is infinitely better with a sprinkling of cinnamon on top.’

  ‘The superficial knowledge of a subject is often more harmful than absolute ignorance.’ (Again, quoting Miyamoto Musashi)

  Note: The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, along with Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, was Fujita-san’s favourite book.

  chapter

  seven

  FOR AROUND A YEAR YUI had a recurring dream. Night after night she dreamed that she conceived her daughter again.

  Something inside her was suggesting that if the baby had emerged from her womb once, she could do it all again, repeat each step of the process and bring her back.

  For that first year of grief, rationality kept itself to itself, curled up in a corner of her dreaming mind, silently watching, as if it felt itself in no position to interfere. And yet as soon as Yui woke up, it would crawl out of the nook, stand up and whisper that it was all a fantasy, that now she needed to be strong and carry on.

  Even if she became pregnant again, and even if, for the sake of argument, it was with the same man, it wouldn’t bring back the girl with the little scar in the middle of her forehead and freckles dusting her nose and cheeks. Even if she sacrificed the straight and pointy nose, or the painfully sharp cry that demanded Yui’s undivided attention, there was no way; she wasn’t coming back.

  Fujita-san – who was now standing in front of her and, with an embarrassed smile, admitting that, no, he didn’t have the faintest idea where the place was but it had to be around here somewhere – had also been having visions every night for months.

  In his dream he was giving advice to his three-year-old daughter, who was still alive but mute. Mute since she had lost her mother. His dreaming self would give her every instruction that came into his head. He would take her little hands and, smoothing them incessantly between his palms, he would teach her the right way to do things: don’t stick your chopsticks in your food, lay them down like this; put your hand over your mouth when you yawn, and say itadakimasu before you eat, yes, bow your head a little, just like that; always wash your hands when you get home, and, most importantly, smile with your heart, not just your mouth.

  Manners, manners are important, his wife would always say when she was alive, and he agreed. He believed it even more now she was gone.

  He harboured an immense faith in those words, those commands that flooded his head and would be repeated for a lifetime, sharp phrases that carried the sound of his daughter’s mother’s voice, her father’s voice, and that would gradually break away, becoming her own.

  ‘They were the things my wife said to our daughter. I heard them every day but I never said them myself. I left that to her, maybe because deep down I thought my role would always be marginal. But now I watch mothers in the street, in parks, at the supermarket, and I try to steal their secrets. I want to know how you make a child talk, how you make them feel happy to be alive.’

  ‘Oh, but nobody knows that!’ Yui would reply
instinctively later that evening, turning to look at him.

  They spent the afternoon wandering around Kujira-yama, had a light dinner in the only restaurant in the area. Before Yui dropped him off at the station, they sat in the car for a good half an hour as the sunset ignited, then extinguished, its light over each thing. They drove in silence through the pitch-black of Ōtsuchi bay.

  In the wake of uttering, but nobody knows that! Yui had found herself laughing at the anguish on Fujita-san’s face. The surprise struck her immediately afterwards.

  It wasn’t surprise at the man’s naivety. Yui knew nothing about fathers, neither as a daughter nor as a wife. She just had a feeling that certain complex things like happiness had to be taught by example rather than words. We need to possess joy in abundance before we can bestow it upon somebody else.

  No, it was at the sound coming from her own throat that first threw, then dumbfounded, her: laughter. She was laughing.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she had burst into laughter, the last time she had felt light enough to allow herself that level of distraction.

  If somebody who loved her had heard, they would probably have found it moving.

  ‘Oh no?’ And Fujita-san had laughed too.

  chapter

  eight

  How to Make Children Feel Happy to Be Alive

  According to Mrs Kuroda, mum of Sakura (two years old) who Fujita-san met at the Kēio supermarket in Kichijōji: ‘Praise them the same number of times (plus one) as you tell them off, make pancakes together on a Saturday morning, look when they say “Look”.’

  According to Mrs Anzai, mum of Tao-kun (three years and five months old), during a conversation with another mum at the Inokashira Park: ‘Take them to the park to run around every day, hug them hard when they have a tantrum, don’t take them to toy shops so you don’t have to say no.’