The Phone Box at the Edge of the World

by Laura Imai Messina

  The thing that had been astonishing though, and that was coming back to her now, was the reaction of everybody else, including Hana. A silence had trickled over the carriage like honey, and everybody held their breath. And then, from the back of the train, from the mouth of a person of whom she could see only a small section of white hair, a song emerged.

  Zō-san zō-san … Little elephant, little elephant, with a long, long nose.

  And, as the song progressed, the voice cracked slightly in laughter. The most astonishing thing was that after the second verse, another voice joined in, then another. Yui was moved, and the elephant emerged, vivid in her mind, with its trunk, its heavy feet and the rest of its clay-like body.

  Now the entire carriage seemed to be singing. It was as though she and her daughter had been parachuted into the middle of a wonderful party.

  The man who had tried to mute her daughter had himself fallen silent. In his attempt to turn off one switch, he had inadvertently flipped another.

  And now, switching off her bedside lamp, Yui smiled and thought that her daughter had a truly phenomenal power. Actually, she thought all children – without exception – were miracle workers.

  chapter

  thirty-eight

  The Title of the Picture Book Takeshi Read to Hana that Evening

  Yōko Imoto, Kaze no denwa, Tōkyō: Kinnohoshi, 2014.

  chapter

  thirty-nine

  ‘BY YOURSELF?’

  As she nodded, her chin brushed the collar of her coat. Yes, she was sure.

  ‘But by yourself? Are you really sure?’

  The question played on a loop, continuously broadcast by both her father’s voice and his expressive eyebrows. They furrowed one moment then stretched out again, unsure of how to respond.

  ‘Come on. I’ll walk you to the door and perhaps pick the phone up for you.’

  Hana was inflexible. She crouched down, releasing herself from her father’s grip.

  He also squatted, bending his knees, and felt a twinge in his back. What if I get old? he asked himself. I can’t get old. Not for another twenty years at least.

  He raised his eyes and at the edge of the garden he saw Yui giving Suzuki-san the usual yellow package of banana cakes. She was talking to the man, bowing her head and smiling at him, yet Takeshi was certain that her attention was on him.

  In that moment he wanted nothing more than for Yui to come home with them, for her to help him bring the shopping bags into the kitchen, to tidy up the little girl’s wardrobe, for them to put up the New Year decorations together. It would be nice if they went to the temple together and prayed to the gods for a year of health and serenity. He wanted to keep her close, even when they became old and started to lose their hearing.

  Oh dear, were they at that point? Could his feelings have grown that much already?

  He wondered, bemused, whether Hana had noticed it too; children were so observant.

  And would he ever be able to distinguish between the personal love he felt for a woman, and the plural love that encompassed his daughter?

  Yui turned, pulled by the insistence of Takeshi’s gaze, which, embarrassed, he immediately averted. He slowly stroked Hana’s tangled hair.

  ‘OK then, let’s do it this way,’ he said to his daughter. She would go in alone and he would wait outside.

  The little girl detached herself from her father and approached the phone box with small steps, the bell in the archway jingling. Takeshi held his breath. What would happen? His racing pulse made him feel like a teenager.

  Takeshi joined Yui just as Suzuki-san was going back into the house and Hana had picked up the telephone. They watched as the receiver moved down from the cradle to the little girl’s ear.

  ‘She’s so small.’

  ‘Not for her age,’ Yui replied sweetly. ‘She looks perfectly average to me.’

  ‘I meant inside there.’

  They stood unmoving on the doorstep.

  He broke the silence. ‘She wanted to go in alone.’

  ‘Yes, I saw.’

  ‘You don’t need a voice to speak here, do you?’ Takeshi asked.

  ‘No, I suppose you don’t.’

  Takeshi shifted his position and inside the cabin he saw his daughter moving her mouth, her lips opening and closing over and over again.

  He was stunned, unable to grasp a clearer emotion. Were her lips just beating the air or were they saying something? Was she speaking? Was Hana speaking?

  ‘She’s speaking!’ he exclaimed. And then: ‘Is she speaking?’

  ‘It looks like she’s speaking, yes,’ Yui whispered.

  ‘It’s hard to say though.’

  ‘No, we can’t say with any certainty.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘It’s difficult to tell from here. We’re too far away.’

  ‘But is she speaking?’ Takeshi repeated.

  ‘It does look like it.’

  The wind blew vigorously, a pile of leaves swirling; a window slammed somewhere nearby, a dog barked. The sounds were like a mist rising to veil the girl’s privacy.

  Yui, though she hid it, was just as excited as Takeshi was. She would have liked to hug him, but she didn’t.

  She stared at Hana’s outline, which occupied little more than half of the glass squares her father’s did. Another ten years or so and she’d catch him up.

  chapter

  forty

  Phrases Floating on the Wind of Bell Gardia in the Month of June

  ‘I didn’t love you then as much as I love you now.’

  ‘It’s always raining, I’m starting to get tired of it.’

  ‘Auntie, where are you?’

  ‘Hello, Grandpa? How do you pass the time where you are?’

  ‘Seventy-two people died in a skyscraper in London.’

  ‘If you come back, I swear, I swear …’

  ‘Is it you who’s hiding my things by any chance? I can’t seem to find anything recently.’

  ‘I found your diary; will you let me read it?’

  ‘Mummy, it’s Hana. Do you still remember me?’

  ‘Dad?’

  chapter

  forty-one

  WHEN NOBODY IS THERE TO see the miracle, the miracle happens.

  Yui had met Hana for the first time that morning. After more than two years of listening to Takeshi talk about her, she was now looking into her eyes, holding her hand. Hana was docile and calm, the perfect example of a five-year-old girl. She would start elementary school the following year.

  When Yui, rather than beeping the horn, had pulled over and got out of the car to meet them, Hana smiled at her with a small bow. She seemed to know exactly who she was and why the three of them were all there together.

  Yui had driven with extra care, casting frequent glances in the rear-view mirror to check that Hana, sitting in the child seat they had rented especially for the journey, was comfortable.

  They had put the seat behind the driver, and Takeshi rode next to her.

  They made their usual stop at the Lawson in Chiba. Hana chose a gianduja pudding and a little bottle of cocoa milk. She was crazy about chocolate and when the ocean came into view, Yui reached behind to offer her a square from her bar. Although she no longer felt so much as a spasm, she continued to buy it every time, she had got so used to the ritual.

  ‘I see the sea and start salivating, but only because I’ve become greedy,’ she said, amused. ‘It’s a disaster.’

  She wanted chocolate regardless. She adored it.

  ‘If I lived near the sea, I’d weigh a hundred kilos.’

  Hana was comfortable around Yui straight away, as if she’d always been there. It was clear she liked her.

  And when the little girl came out of the phone box and ran towards her father’s knees, hugging them tight, when tears came to both of their eyes and Yui made to leave them alone, it was Hana who grabbed the hem of her jacket, then her sleeve and finally grasped her hand, pulling her towards them.


  It was the right moment. It always is when something beautiful happens.

  Takeshi had to be ready for it, even before his daughter. He finally was. And Hana seemed to know.

  And so, when Takeshi bent down to hug his little girl and she pushed her head into his neck, she began to speak again, and she said only normal things. Childish things, things that were just right for a girl her age.

  She was hungry, and a bit thirsty too. No, the wind didn’t bother her, even though it was very strong. It was really pretty there.

  And although Hana would never be a chatterbox, she talked on the way home about how much she liked chocolate, and the two of them, she and Yui, bought a ton of sweets at a konbini they stopped at. Takeshi watched them, amused, as they unwrapped, sucked, chewed, cracked, crunched and licked every single product that had the word choco on the packet.

  Yui told her that when she was little, her mother would sometimes buy her two doughnuts. One for now and one for later. As if she really didn’t want to teach her that happiness always came to an end.

  ‘“You’ve finished one, but there’s another one, you see,” she would say. And the space in my stomach for the second one would quickly close up and that poor doughnut would be left to get old in the cupboard, nobody touching it.’

  They could afford that luxury.

  ‘Either way, there would always be another one.’

  Hana’s mouth opened wide in admiration.

  ‘Your mummy also used to buy lots of sweets,’ Takeshi cut in. ‘More than she ever managed to eat.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s where your passion for chocolate comes from,’ Yui said.

  As if the two memories were connected in some way, Yui recalled a day in April, when her daughter’s mouth was full, her cheeks bulging, and she said her first full sentence: I want lots of cake. It was Yui’s birthday and the little girl had come to help blow out the candles. She remembered the feeling of her warm and boisterous body on her lap. Her greedy finger dipped into the cream, destroying its perfect outline, and she brought it to her mouth.

  ‘What’s left in there?’ Yui asked, nodding towards the konbini bag. She decided to keep the memory of her daughter to herself.

  ‘Again? How much do you two eat?’ Takeshi would repeat over and over that evening, pretending to be full, but only so that he could watch Yui and Hana put something into their mouths and hear them say: ‘Mmmm! So good! Don’t you think this one’s the best one? So crunchy, isn’t it? It’d be delicious heated up a little in the microwave. With cream on top! Yes, fresh cream on top! And cinnamon powder! And cocoa? Yes, you’re right, cocoa powder too!’

  Takeshi found Yui’s ability to keep coming up with new ways to describe the food entertaining, like those TV presenters who invented other-worldly analogies for something like a cream puff. He was moved by his daughter’s crystalline voice: it rested on things, on normal words, and made them vibrate with an exceptional timbre. Like fingertips on the keys of a piano.

  chapter

  forty-two

  List of Chocolate Snacks Yui and Hana Bought at the Konbini on the Way Back from Bell Gardia

  Gianduja and pistachio-cream doughnut

  Chocolate-and-banana folded crêpe

  Chocolate-filled mochi

  Mini chocolate eggs with a whole almond inside

  Chocolate sticks studded with crushed almonds and hazelnuts

  Chocolate-and-matcha cream-sponge sandwich

  Soft sandwich filled with squares of chocolate

  Small bag of 75% cocoa chocolates

  Box of salted-caramel chocolate cubes

  Chewy chocolate cookie

  Packet of two crunchy biscuits with chocolate chips

  Can of cocoa milk x2

  chapter

  forty-three

  THEY WOULD CONTINUE GOING TO Bell Gardia together. Not every month, because seven hours each way was really too much to ask of a child Hana’s age, but the three of them would meet on a Saturday or Sunday, or Saturday and Sunday, in Tōkyō, to see a film at the cinema, eat pancakes shaped like flowers, or throw themselves repeatedly – sometimes up to fifty times in a row – down the slide of a park in the suburbs.

  Of all the things they did together, one memory echoed for longer in their minds. It was O-bon, a festival that fell in August, during Hana and Yui’s summer holidays. It was to celebrate the return of people’s ancestors, to welcome the dead back into their homes.

  ‘Let’s do things properly this year,’ Takeshi announced.

  They hung chōchin lanterns outside the front door, as custom dictated, so that the spirits could find their way home quickly without getting lost. Hana worked tirelessly making horses and oxen out of aubergines, cucumbers and toothpicks (‘the horses are for a quick arrival, and the cows are for a slow return to the world of the dead’); Yui dug out her mother’s recipe book and kneaded mochi and red bean paste to make o-hagi, and Takeshi went out and bought the flowers and offerings for the family altars, both theirs and Yui’s.

  Hana imagined her mother and paternal grandfather, whom she’d never met, riding on the saddle of the green bumpy horse, and alongside them, with the same lively gait, Yui’s mother and daughter. The procession was so vivid in her mind that she drew it and gave her drawing to Yui, who took it home and taped it to the kitchen door. It cheered her up each time she walked into the kitchen.

  On the evening of 16th August, Hana and Yui each put on a brightly coloured yukata and headed to the coast. Takeshi met them at the end of his shift at the hospital, he too wearing a yukata he had borrowed from a colleague, the geta sandals in his rucksack. He got changed quickly in the station toilets and the three of them set off, hand in hand, towards the strip of land that connected the little island of Enoshima to the mainland of Kanagawa.

  Hana learned that, in the past, people believed that the afterlife was on the other side of seas and rivers, and so, in many places in Japan, people put offerings or candles on little paper boats, like lanterns, that they entrusted to the currents.

  The two adults and the little girl bent down over their own paper boat, on which they had written the names of Takeshi’s wife and Yui’s mother and daughter. Spellbound, they watched the light of the candle flickering behind the inky kanji. Then, in unison, they opened up their hands and sent it off on the water, towards the open sea.

  ‘This was a wonderful idea of yours,’ Takeshi whispered, giving Yui’s fingers a squeeze.

  They continued walking towards the island and went up to pray at the shrine at the top of the mountain. Yui asked the goddess Benten for the ability to prepare delicious bentō for Hana’s lunches, as she had never been a very good cook; Takeshi asked for more days like this one, and Hana just stared, enraptured, at the quivering reflections of the lanterns below. From up here they looked like fireflies flitting above the water’s surface.

  That night, Yui stayed at their house for the first time. She lay down beside Hana.

  ‘Stay until I’m asleep,’ the little girl pleaded.

  ‘Is there something on your mind?’

  ‘No, no, nothing,’ she replied. She just wanted her there, in the same way a person might want a second coffee in the morning or an extra blanket in winter.

  Yui nodded off too and Takeshi let her sleep. She would wake up with a terribly stiff neck and two deep furrows on her left cheek, but it would be worth it: the memory of their breakfast together would come back to her, like a gentle caress, for months to come.

  When, some days later, Yui found a picture book that depicted, in pastel colours, all of the world’s many heavens and celestial kingdoms, she bought it. She gave it to Hana when they were eating sukiyaki together at the end of a long day.

  The origin of the world, according to Nigerian folklore, was a bull. According to the Altay Tatars, there were three fish that caused periodic floods to punish humans for their evil actions. In Sumatra, Indonesia, a serpent-dragon ruled the earth and the seven layers of heaven stacked above it, at the t
op of which there was a tree whose leaves bore everybody’s destiny. They believed that earthquakes were caused by the movements of the serpent-dragon.

  ‘Like in Japan!’ Hana cried.

  ‘Yes, just like in Japan,’ Yui echoed, thinking of the Ukiyo-e prints that depicted the Japanese archipelago at the mercy of a catfish, the namazu, which caused disasters by whipping its tail and twitching its long whiskers.

  They laughed as they read the book together; humans really are inventive.

  Takeshi, who joined them after an exhausting shift at the hospital, particularly liked the world of the Yekuana people in Venezuela. On the sofa, with a glass of beer in front of him and a little bowl of salted edamame in his lap, he asked Hana and Yui whether they thought it could be possible that the Yekuana people were right, that the cosmos was modelled on a traditional house. After all, if a house was structured a certain way, why wouldn’t the universe be the same?

  But the idea they found most interesting was that of the Ojibwa tribe in Manitoba, Canada. For them, dreams were at the centre of everything. Dreams were what taught people about relationships between humans and non-humans and were how they explored unknown places, without the burden of the body.

  ‘If you dream well, you’ll have a long and beautiful life,’ a grandfather in the book said to his grandson, and it reminded Yui of one of the first conversations she and Takeshi had ever had.

  ‘Me reconceiving my daughter every night and you dishing out advice to Hana, do you remember?’

  ‘Of course. We must have sounded like a right pair of nutcases.’

  ‘But you were in fact her guardian spirit, without even knowing it,’ Yui laughed later, when they were saying goodbye on the doorstep.

  They would look through that book again every so often, and each time they came back to the story of the Ojibwa people. Hana preferred it over all the others, not just because of the dreams, but because they believed that dead people ended up in a spirit world where they didn’t need to hunt for food and where, most importantly, there was no winter. Her mother used to get cold easily and Hana distinctly remembered her constantly complaining about how freezing the house was, how horrible it was to feel cold, that she even preferred the uncomfortably humid Tōkyō summers, despising the cold with every inch of her being (although she would then make the exact same protest against the heat in the summer). Hana liked the idea of a place where her mother wouldn’t have to go around in woollen knee-high socks with a heat pack stuck to her stomach.