The Phone Box at the Edge of the World

by Laura Imai Messina

  The woman, curled up in the cabin, urged him to come away from the side of the boat, because there were some things that, once seen, could never be forgotten. But he’d retorted that people were dying out there, drowning like ants, and if there were any survivors, even just one, he needed to save them.

  He had made a futile effort with a fishing rod and a net to grab a floating boy with an enormous wound on his head; the boy was wearing the uniform of his son’s high school. He had pressed his hands into his eyes, wailing, when he’d seen a newborn baby and her mother in one of those half-floating boxes that were once cars, dozens, hundreds of them, traps in which scores of people drowned; like the little goldfish you could win at a fair, limp in their plastic bags before you had time to get them home.

  As the hours passed, before Shio’s father’s eyes, humans were transformed into sea creatures: thin-limbed elderly folk became crabs, men dragged away by the current were carp, their hungry mouths agape. In an instant, houses and shops became rocks, life rafts to cling on to to avoid drowning.

  But the worst thing of all was that he didn’t save anyone, not even the man who was hurled against the side of his boat and who didn’t give up climbing until his very last breath.

  Shio’s father felt a pang of familiarity when he saw him. He must have been fifty, and was soaked from top to bottom except the crown of his head, where a little dry patch signified his resistance.

  ‘Come on!’ he had shouted repeatedly. But the man never said a word. He didn’t say anything, not when their fingers clasped for a moment, nor when Shio’s father, terrified by the prospect of falling in himself, loosened his grip. And as the man was sucked up by the sea, disappearing behind the carcass of a house that was crumbling into the water, Shio’s father remembered. The man was the owner of the bakery he used to go after work on a Saturday afternoon. The one who cheerily claimed that his melon pan was the best melon pan in all of Japan.

  One rumour said that Shio’s father had mistaken someone else’s body for his wife’s. Another that he really had seen her and was crushed by remorse.

  The truth was that his powerlessness had destroyed him. The woman had been right: some things can never be unseen.

  On that day he fell into a trance. He became kelp, just like the stuff he used to spend hours untangling and separating, hanging one end this side of the wooden plank and one the other, to be dried by the breeze. His body was intact but his mind was somewhere else.

  So now Shio used the Wind Phone to talk to his father who was alive and living under the same roof, and not with his mother who had been recorded missing. He refused to call her, he said, because she still had to be out there somewhere. He secretly hoped that one sunny day she would come home to stick the two parts of his father back together again.

  Sometimes he wondered if this was her revenge for her husband’s betrayal. She had taken a piece of him away, the best piece.

  ‘What an awful story,’ Yui had murmured. ‘There’s no way to …’

  She was about to say ‘fix him’, but she stopped herself.

  Since moving to Tōkyō she had seen people wandering around like broken toys: they always stayed at the edges of the crowd, on the margins of the lives of millions of others who set their alarms at the same time, stood judiciously in line on the platform, got on and off the trains in unison, uttered ohayōgozaimasu and otsukaresama-deshita dozens of times a day, swallowed their own saliva, inhaled the exhalations of others, flopped down, stood up at the last stop on the last train, and then started off once more.

  She thought again of the man in the school gym with his picture frame. Her heart suddenly softened, even though she knew these were two very different stories.

  Takeshi waited before replying to Suzuki-san.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be good for him, for precisely that reason, to get away for a bit?’

  Takeshi had always believed in the power of distance.

  ‘Sometimes you need a change of scenery,’ he added, ‘even if it’s just to take stock of things.’

  ‘They’ve tried, but Shio has refused every time. He says yes to begin with but, when it comes down to it, he doesn’t go through with it. He’s convinced that his father will wake up one day.’

  ‘But is that possible?’ Yui asked, looking at Takeshi.

  ‘With the right treatment it’s not impossible, but it would take a long, long time …’

  That day in the car on the way back to Tōkyō, Yui and Takeshi hardly spoke.

  Since they had started visiting Bell Gardia, they had begun to see humanity differently. The lives of many people had collided with theirs, within the walls of Suzuki-san’s living room or outside, on the streets of Ōtsuchi and Kujira-yama. And sometimes these lives, like Shio’s, became grafted onto their own.

  Why hadn’t the boy told them about his father? Why had he said he was dead?

  It was probably because to him, in a way, his father was more dead than his mother was. And because, however insignificant it may sound, Shio was ashamed, not just of his father, but of himself for the way he had reacted to what had happened. He thought a clean-cut tragedy would be easier to explain, would help him keep up a good impression.

  As they arrived in Tōkyō, Takeshi broke the silence. ‘He’ll tell us about it himself when he feels ready.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure he will,’ Yui replied immediately.

  There was less and less need, between them, to specify the subject of their conversation.

  chapter

  thirty

  Shio’s Favourite Passage from the Holy Bible

  After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

  Genesis 8:6–12

  chapter

  thirty-one

  WHEN HER DAUGHTER WAS BORN, Yui had been amazed. Even the tiniest of lives needed everything: plates, cutlery, crying, a full refrigerator, lullabies and vaccinations. She got used to it quickly, though she didn’t feel she was much good at the more practical side of things.

  She diligently filled out the boshi techō, the little mother and child handbook that she’d been given at the city hall before her daughter was born. Every week during the pregnancy she had noted down her weight and blood pressure. After the birth she copied out the baby’s measurements precisely: 2,739 grams, 47 centimetres long. Between the measurements she added: ten fingers and ten toes, a mountain of dark hair, cries like a lunatic.

  Anyone who has experienced great grief wonders at some point which is more difficult, learning or unlearning. There was a time when Yui wouldn’t have been able to say, but now she was sure it was the second.

  After her daughter died, Yui took a ruler and marker pen and drew a diagonal line from the bottom left to the top right of every empty page. When her daughter was still alive, Yui had developed a sequence of physical actions so that even when her mind failed her, her body could help out. Sometimes, though, she still found herself counting the months until the next vaccination on her fingers, or writing down something she needed to buy for her, and that’s when she understood that once the mind has learned something, it doesn’t give it up easily.

  Yui had her doubts about the umbilical cord. According to folklore, it could protect a child from any threat and could snatch life back from death, even in the depths of critical illness. It was supposed to be crushed into a fine powd
er and swallowed by the sick child.

  The small box was given to her the day after the birth, still open so that the little piece of flesh wouldn’t go mouldy as it dried.

  Even though she was rather untidy by nature, Yui had looked after it with great care. Following the tradition, she would have given it to her daughter on her wedding day.

  She dropped the little blackened piece, unable to crumble it up, into the urn that reunited her mother and daughter. She had taken the ashes and bones of both of them and gently tipped one into the other, keeping them together just as they had been found. Holding each other.

  ‘Holding each other?’ Takeshi asked one evening in the car as they were driving back to Tōkyō from Bell Gardia. He imagined a beautiful scene but was cautious not to ask too much.

  Yui nodded. She had her hands on the wheel.

  It had been a beautiful day. There had been a barbecue with lots of people from the local area. Around thirty people from Ōtsuchi had come, including seven children. The old woman with the dog had called in with some azuki-bean paste pancakes and told them that her German daughter-in-law was pregnant. Suzuki-san’s wife had made some delicious chirashi-zushi. Keita, amid the general euphoria, announced that he had passed his university entrance exams: he would be going to the University of Tōkyō, Tōdai, following in his mother’s footsteps.

  Perhaps it was because of the joy she had felt that day, or because of their Bell Gardia anniversary, which coincidentally fell on the same day (‘Do you know it’s been two years since you both came here for the first time?’ Suzuki-san had said, showing them the little book in which he recorded everyone who visited), that Yui felt strong enough to speak about it.

  ‘Yes, they were holding each other.’

  She told him that when the people at the information centre had explained that they thought her mother and her daughter had been found and, depending on the state of the bodies, they would need either an identification or a DNA test, she had become terrified by the idea of seeing them. What if, from then on, she could only remember them like that?

  However, it turned out that having seen them was her only consolation, the confirmation of her hope, that they didn’t die alone, but together.

  ‘They told me they had a photo to show me, as long as I was willing to see it. It was up to me. So I asked them to describe it to me first. They said they had found them in an embrace, that they looked alive and that, as tragic as it was, it was a remarkably tender image. They were all moved when they saw it.’

  They had found them locked together, like a closed clamshell.

  ‘It was incredible, I can’t describe it, it looked as though my mother’s hands were tied around my daughter’s body. It seemed like they were sleeping.’

  The volunteers who recovered them had placed a finger over their lifeless jugulars and beneath their smoke-filled nostrils following protocol, but they also had the foresight to imagine a third person (a son? a daughter?) that connected these two people. If that person was still alive, they thought, they would want to see this.

  So they took a photo. And only after that did they untangle them.

  ‘They were good people,’ Takeshi murmured, looking out of the window. After a long stretch of mountains the ocean appeared again on the left. Tōkyō was close now. When Yui saw it, immense and black before her, she slowed the car down.

  Again? she just had time to wonder, quickly reaching towards the chocolate. But this time the nausea was overwhelming.

  ‘Pull over,’ Takeshi said. He pointed towards a lay-by just up ahead. It was as though he had it in the palm of his hand, offering it to her.

  Yui got out quickly, leaving the keys dangling in the ignition.

  She stood with the sea head-on, looking it in the face.

  Here it was, again. She was looking at the ocean and, in it, seeing everything.

  The water advancing, the debris piled up at the sides of the roads like snow.

  Her two by three metres canvas in the gymnasium. The man with the bulging eyes who observed her from the other side of his picture frame and clearly pronounced the caption he had created for her: ‘The lady who doesn’t eat. The lady who watches the sea instead of the TV.’

  The bodies she had seen at the morgue, pieces of flesh to which they tried in vain to attach a name. The teeth they extracted to recover an identity.

  And the sea, that immense sea that Yui went out to look at every day. Hugging the tree and at the same time holding on to the strongest thing in the world: the life that was still within her, in spite of herself.

  The images were coming back up, one after another and then rolling again from the beginning. They pushed up in her chest, desperate to come out.

  For the first time since her nausea had started, Yui did nothing to stop the surge, and out it came.

  Retch after retch she felt as though she was being liberated of litres of salty water and debris from the disaster, of the foul sludge she had kept down for years out of fear that her memories would flow out with it. The joy, for instance, that she had felt the day her daughter was born, or the satisfaction of having managed to bring her up with more yeses than nos. Or the intense happiness of covering her in little kisses to wake her up every morning. Or, of her mother, the hand she always placed on Yui’s back as she said Itterasshai when Yui left the house, or the phrase she had said so many times Yui was sick of it: ‘Yui-chan, what a wonderful daughter you are.’

  Takeshi rested a hand on her back, not saying anything. In the fist of his other hand he held Yui’s ever-longer and blacker hair, the yellow strip still visible around the tips.

  When there was nothing but air left inside her, Yui crouched down. She felt the need to hug herself tight.

  She didn’t cry, but neither did she take her eyes off the sea for a single moment. She understood now that there would be no more nausea ever again, even though she had come to accept it as something that would be with her for life.

  She had been wrong. It isn’t just the best things that come to an end, but also the worst.

  Takeshi remained behind her, careful not to obstruct her view. He rubbed her back, first from the bottom to the top as she threw up, and then in the other direction, to help her breathe in the wind that was still blowing against them.

  ‘I was lucky,’ Yui whispered once she had recovered, knowing deep down that it was the truth. ‘At least I got to see them one last time.’

  There were people who had searched for bodies for years, who’d had to give up on the idea of ever finding them. And if you didn’t see them one last time, the grief had no end.

  Perhaps it was the intense darkness of that stretch of road, but before getting back in the car and continuing the journey to Tōkyō, Yui rested her gaze on the puddle of vomit that now trickled over the side of the mountain.

  It was black, gleaming, like the devil in fairy tales.

  ‘Black as tar.’

  ‘I don’t know what colour it was, Yui, but—’

  ‘It was like a horror film, wasn’t it? Go on, say it!’

  ‘Seriously, I’ve never seen any patient vomit like that.’

  They would laugh until they reached Tōkyō, they would laugh so much at the stupid description and her cartoonish retches that they would have to pull over again. To laugh even more, until they cried, clutching their stomachs.

  They laughed so much they couldn’t breathe.

  chapter

  thirty-two

  The Tradition of heso no o as the Obstetrician Who Helped her Give Birth Explained it to Yui

  ‘This custom of giving the new mother the umbilical cord has been followed in Japan for centuries. The cord has been carrying nutrients from mother to baby for months. So, if you think about it, along with the placenta, it’s the most precious thing there is.

  ‘It is believed to be a sort of talisman that can protect the unborn child throughout its life. Mothers used to give it their sons when they left for war and to their daughters when they
got married.

  ‘It is also said that, in the case of a fatal illness, we should grind it to a powder, add water and imbibe it, and it will save us. Wonderful, isn’t it?

  ‘Leave it there, open. Now it’s white and shiny, but by tomorrow it will be all dry and brown, no bigger than a peanut.’

  chapter

  thirty-three

  ‘YOU NEED PRACTICAL THINGS TO set you straight.’

  This was the beginning of a long speech. Takeshi could tell from the way his mother’s hands were suspended in mid-air.

  ‘The telephone, you see, is a practical thing.’

  Takeshi scraped the leftovers from dinner into one bowl, then stacked the empty crockery, sliding one small dish into another and gathering up the chopsticks.

  ‘I saw a photograph of the Wind Phone. It’s like the ones we used back in my day – in your day too actually, right? The middle part looks like a necklace, or a Buddhist rosary,’ said the woman, miming a circle around her wrist. ‘One of those bracelets monks wear, you know?’

  How many similes does one word need, Takeshi thought.

  He sighed. Dinner was finished. He got up from the table as his mother peeled a tangerine, its perfume dispersing along with its peel, and he rested the stack of dishes next to the sink.

  His mother had never been a woman who kept men out of the kitchen. On the contrary, she had brought him up with the conviction that there was no difference between a son and a daughter.

  As his mother continued to talk about the phone box, Takeshi muttered countless sō desune, hontō da ne – ‘it’s true, yes, yes, I agree, you’re right’ – and other sounds that didn’t even make it as far as words. That usually calmed her down.

  ‘You’ll see; it’ll help and she’ll start to feel like going out and having fun again. A child has to play at her age, she absolutely has to play.’ The weight of her phrase pressed down on the has to. ‘If she doesn’t play now, when will she?’