The Phone Box at the Edge of the World

by Laura Imai Messina

  ‘Here!’ Shio exclaimed. ‘Listen to this.’

  And he read: ‘A word was secretly brought to me, my ears caught a whisper of it.’

  ‘Hmm, nice,’ his friend said. ‘Perhaps a bit too poetic for me though.’

  And as she walked, in her pale pink scrubs, back towards the entrance of the canteen to look at the menu, Shio realised for the first time that wind was an important word in that book. It was the primordial chaos, it was what had brought the locusts to Egypt, but also what, when pushed back onto the Red Sea, had parted its waters. He recalled Elijah’s meeting with the Lord in the book of 1 Kings, his journey to Mount Horeb, and the wind that—

  ‘What are you going to have?’ the nurse interrupted his thoughts. She looked at Shio’s rapt face. ‘Best to go with curry when you can’t decide,’ she said warily. ‘You always know it’ll be good.’

  She grabbed a tray, two pairs of chopsticks and two plates of salad and set off briskly towards the curry counter.

  Standing still in the middle of the hospital canteen, Shio had his revelation: there was no doubt about it, it was the phone box, the Wind Phone, that had called his father back to him, that had returned him to the world. All the breath Shio had expelled trying to speak to his dad, all those years he had spent imagining him returning to the man he was, God had channelled it all and set it aside for him.

  He was suddenly sure that the same thing must happen for everyone who clambered up the Mountain of the Whale, who passed through Ōtsuchi’s dark valley; for anyone who made the climb up to the blustery garden of Bell Gardia.

  It was an act of pure faith to pick up the receiver, dial a number, to be answered by a wall of silence and speak anyway. Faith was the key to it all.

  ‘Shio, come on! My curry will get cold!’ the nurse said, putting the tray into his hands. ‘Choose quickly! My lunch break will be over soon.’

  ‘OK, sorry, I’ll take the curry too,’ he replied, pulling out his prepaid canteen card.

  The wind was God’s breath, he thought, as he placed the steaming plate down in front of him.

  ‘Here’s a spoon. You always forget your spoon!’

  ‘You’re right.’

  Itadakimasu!

  Itadakimasu!

  And as they pressed their hands together in prayer and bowed their heads, Shio thought that, actually, maybe, the wind wasn’t God’s breath.

  The wind was actually God.

  chapter

  sixty-eight

  The Passage from 1 Kings that Shio Would Have Cited Had his Friend Not Interrupted Him

  Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

  Then a voice said to him, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’

  1 Kings 19:11–13

  chapter

  sixty-nine

  THEY RETURNED TO TŌKYŌ WITH their lives in two parallel lines.

  Takeshi, overwhelmed by a need for definition, tried to merge the two lines into one: they would get married; they would live under the same roof. He, Yui and Hana.

  He didn’t ask Yui officially, not for lack of courtesy or resolve, but because, after all they had been through, it seemed like the most natural conclusion. Everything had been leading to that point.

  Yui was startled when, one Sunday afternoon, Takeshi mentioned that he thought May would be a nice month for the wedding. She tried not to let the surprise show on her face, and likewise hid her bemusement when he asked her how many guests she thought she would invite, and whether she would prefer a Japanese-style ceremony or a Western one.

  Yui kept her responses vague; she mentioned that she thought registering at the city hall and having a small get-together would be enough for her. She didn’t like being the centre of attention.

  Wondering why that conversation had started not at the beginning, but halfway through, Yui blamed her memory. She convinced herself that she had been asked the question at some point, and that she must have just been distracted at the time. She was sure her answer was yes, anyway.

  It was a yes, she was certain about that, but suddenly everything was moving so fast and she was struggling to keep up.

  From Hana’s reaction when she walked into the living room midway through the discussion, catching onto fragments of sentences, Yui realised that this was really big news. The little girl squeezed her tight and it was this that frightened her, far more than Takeshi flicking through the calendar in the kitchen and circling in red pen the first week of May.

  In that moment, her joy was overwhelmed by distress. By a fear that she couldn’t define.

  Takeshi phoned her first thing in the morning because he urgently needed to talk to her about their plans for the evening. If we go to the cinema then it will be an anime, and if we have dinner, it will be okonomi-yaki: batter all over their hands, spatulas in the air and those sprinkles of puffed rice that Hana loved so much.

  But deciding what they were going to watch or eat was of course trivial. Yui had been evasive for days now, and the way she had started to subtly wriggle out of his arms, and orient every conversation (whatever the subject matter) towards an undefined future, was starting to worry him.

  Two days earlier, on their way to Ginza to order the wedding rings, he had touched her shoulder on the escalator down to the metro and clearly felt Yui recoil. Later that evening she had slipped away before Hana’s bedtime story, saying she had a headache. She did the same thing the following night.

  He could tell something was wrong, but whatever it was, it was clear Yui didn’t want to talk about it.

  Takeshi reassured himself that it was normal that she might be having cold feet; that positive changes took time too. There was no addition or subtraction in life that did not require some time for adjustment. The wedding day was edging closer, as was the move; the packing and unpacking of her old life.

  Grief, Yui had once told him, is something you ingest every day, like a sandwich cut into small pieces, gently chewed and then calmly swallowed. Digestion was slow.

  And so, Takeshi thought, joy must work the same way.

  Yui was in the radio studio when the phone call arrived. The evening before, during the broadcast, there had been an irritating whistling sound in her earphones, but it was late and they had all decided to call it a night. But now they needed to sort it out, pulling out jacks and putting them in again, calibrating volumes, searching for the source of the problem.

  The technician, bending over the sound deck that was covered in levers, controls, screens and buttons, seemed to be getting closer to the solution. ‘This cable is worn out; it needs to be changed. Let’s try again now.’

  Yui nodded and moved back into the recording studio. It was the seventh time they had tested the earphones and she was starting to get tired.

  ‘Now? Try speaking.’

  ‘Testing, testing …’

  ‘How is it?’

  ‘I can’t hear anything now!’ she replied, relieved. ‘Finally … it seems like it’s sorted.’

  As she emerged from the studio, her phone started to vibrate.

  ‘Go ahead if you need to answer it,’ said the technician, seeing her screen flashing on the counter. ‘I’m going down to talk to accounts.’ Yui was about to respond, but he had already disappeared with a folder in his hand.

  A wedding, discreet as Yui had requested, had been arranged. Their names would be officially transcribed on the document at the city hall, while they sat on those folding chairs where they would imagine themselves together forever. The ceremony would be followed by a buffet in an Italian restaurant that you could hire for those kinds of occasions.

  Perhaps Takeshi needed to know whether she
had asked her colleagues if they had any dietary requirements, whether Hana’s dress was ready yet, whether the necessary documents had arrived from the city hall in the district where she was born. Whether she was sad about something, and why.

  But to Yui all these queries were disguising the same repetitive and stubborn question: ‘Are you ready Yui? Are you really ready?’

  The phone buzzed once more, then stopped. A notification arrived, then silence again.

  She read it: ‘We’ll be waiting for you at 7. Hana says she still wants to eat okonomi-yaki. What do you say? See you later!’

  She reread it: ‘Yui, are you ready? Are you really ready for us?’

  For the next few days, at the most inopportune times, an image appeared in Yui’s mind of the grown-up girl that, presumably, Hana would one day become.

  She had thicker and longer hair tied into a severe ponytail. In her vision, Yui would see Hana coming through the front door of the house, saying nothing, dropping her schoolbag on the floor in the hallway, and the house would suddenly be filled with echoes. She would see her wearing a high-school uniform, her legs even thinner than now, which was hard to imagine. They were certainly toned though, because she probably played tennis or lacrosse.

  ‘How was your day?’ she asked in the daydream.

  Hana would reply brusquely: ‘I’m tired. I don’t want any dinner.’

  And bam, her bedroom door was shut and the day was over.

  Then the scene would change.

  Next there was Yui who, despite not seeing herself in the frame, knew she was older. They were both in the kitchen, Yui talking about what they were having for dinner (or perhaps their weekend plans?), and Hana, with a grimace, making scornful comments, particularly towards Yui, who wasn’t real family. Had she said something wrong? Had she criticised her? Perhaps she had denied her something? Something she really wanted.

  She probably didn’t deserve all that anger, but it was a matter of roles. It almost always was.

  And then the backdrop would change again, the curtains sweeping back.

  They were in a third place that wasn’t the hallway or the kitchen. And she could hear a lecture coming out of her own mouth about homework, studying hard, taking it slow with boys, because once you’ve done it, it’s for life – trust me, you’ll never forget it – and that skirt, Hana, is pulled up too high around your waist (all teenage girls seemed to do that, so Hana would surely do it too). And that lipstick is too red, it’s tacky, not right for a girl your age.

  And the final scene was at Hana’s bedroom door, Yui following her as she tried to escape: ‘Hana, are you going out? Who with?’

  ‘What the hell does it matter to you, Yui?’

  ‘I’m your mother and—’

  ‘You’re not my mother. I owe you nothing!’

  The truth was that: (1) even if it was Akiko there instead, it would have been no different; and (2) she would never dare to call herself Hana’s mother. The idea of using that word terrified her. Almost as much as the thought of it being robbed from her again.

  That was it. For days on end, all she could think about was Hana as a teenager, in battle against them, against Takeshi but especially against her. Scene after scene depicted Hana in the theoretical war that was becoming an adult. It was tough for everyone, parents as well as children; Yui could only imagine how hard it would be for her.

  She remembered that even when she was pregnant, she was already asking herself how she would confront her baby’s adolescence. She was terrified of that phase of development, and remembered mentioning it to the gynaecologist while, in the twelfth week of pregnancy, she examined her stomach. The doctor, looking first at the minuscule human on the screen and then at Yui’s bewildered face, burst out laughing.

  As she was mid-thought, the technician came back into the studio, ‘Are you OK, Yui? Your face has gone pale.’

  But perhaps she should have been scared of something completely different. The opposite, even: Hana would be so meek that adolescence would never materialise, that it would become no more than an unfulfilled promise. Or worse: a wasted opportunity. What if teenage Hana censored herself because Yui wasn’t her mother? What if she held back from the total rebellion and accusation that was, in fact, essential at that age?

  That would also be a disaster, and all Yui’s fault, because she wasn’t a real part of the family.

  ‘Right, shall we do one last test?’ she said, turning abruptly towards the technician. ‘The whistling during yesterday’s show really set my nerves on edge.’

  In the week that followed, those scenes kept popping up in her mind. At the till when she had to pay for a head of lettuce and a bunch of grapes, in line for the toilets in the station, as she swiped her pass at the entrance to the radio building. She was more or less constantly assailed by the feeling that she would never be able to love Hana properly, particularly in the stormy periods.

  That was what this was all about, she realised one morning as she inspected her face in the mirror. This was not about getting married, or about leaving her house. This was about becoming Hana’s mother.

  She remembered it had taken her around three months to fall in love with her own daughter. And she had actually given birth to her; she’d had nine months to get used to the idea. She couldn’t imagine how she would feel towards a child who wasn’t hers on the inevitable occasions when that child charged at her like a battering ram.

  Completely wrapped up in the question of whether Hana loved her, Yui realised she had neglected the real issue.

  Was she capable of loving Hana sufficiently? Would she be able to reach that level of familiarity? To scold her? To tell her, ‘Now that’s enough’?

  chapter

  seventy

  The Two Worst Things Yui Thought and Felt in Those Twenty-Three Days

  I loved her, but it didn’t do anything. Love definitely can’t save people. Love can’t straighten up a garden or tidy a house. So it’s not really good for anything.

  Rummaging through the best memories of her daughter, her instinct was to regret having been happy. Or not having been happy enough.

  chapter

  seventy-one

  THERE WERE LESS THAN TWO months until the wedding.

  Another 11th March came and went. The anniversary became more benign as each year passed and Yui picked off the scab again to check whether the wound had healed yet.

  Walking towards the entrance to Tōkyō Station, Yui saw Takeshi’s number flash up on her phone screen.

  They want to talk to me, she thought, but I have nothing to say.

  You can always find at least one thing to say, she told herself; but she didn’t feel like speaking.

  Over the past few weeks she had been elusive; she’d told them she was making a new radio programme that she would be hosting and producing herself. As soon as it was finished and the first two or three episodes had aired, she said, things would be back to normal.

  Yui bumped into a woman inside the station. Excuse me, she murmured begrudgingly; she couldn’t even muster the strength to apologise sincerely. She kept her eyes down and quickened her step. When the sliding doors for the Chūō line train opened, she waited on the right-hand side. The carriage was already overflowing with people, but a few more crammed themselves in. Yui got on.

  ‘We will soon be arriving at Kanda Station. Kanda. The doors will open on the right-hand side,’ the recorded voice recited. Orderly tone, orderly words. First in Japanese, then in English.

  Yui wove her way to the other side of the carriage so that she wouldn’t be in the path of the surge of people getting off.

  As the train swayed from side to side before coming to a halt in line with the platform, Yui thought, once more, about the fact that she was going to become Takeshi’s wife and that Hana would have her, and only her, as a mother.

  Nobody else will have a right to that title. Are you sure you’re up to it?

  Yui could be a gloomy person. She had a tendency to
wards sadness; it was as if she had been born on the side of a hill and she couldn’t help sliding down it.

  Was she the right fit for a creature as sensitive as Hana? Wasn’t she putting the little girl at risk of contracting her concealed melancholy?

  A message preview on her phone showed a little teddy bear with a mouth shaped like a sideways D. It was holding a tray in its arms, with the words: Are you coming to our house for dinner?

  She knew Hana adored the stickers in the Line messaging app and had a particular weakness for that series of bears. It must have been her who wrote the message. When she was older, she had said on a number of occasions, she wanted to create her own virtual stickers. Was that a job?

  ‘We will soon be arriving at Ochanomizu Station. Ochanomizu. The doors will open on the right-hand side.’

  They didn’t deserve her hiding from them. By the time Yui got off the train she had resolved to set things straight.

  Yui took two weeks for herself. Takeshi, without realising, granted it to her.

  Hana asked why. She had no idea that Yui was going through a profound crisis, or that the crisis had her at its centre. Or at least a version of her that did not yet, and might never, exist.

  Yui said she had to go and request a new copy of her birth certificate from the city where she was born. In fact, the document had arrived by post days ago and was lying in a folder in her kitchen amid a mountain of other paperwork.

  Usually when Yui didn’t know what to do, she did nothing. Now, though, aware that time was running out and that, like in a chemical reaction, if she got the quantities wrong, she could damage everything beyond repair, she acted quickly.

  Denying herself the chance to change her mind, she picked up the phone and called Suzuki-san.

  ‘Can I come and see you?’ she asked after a few minutes of small talk.

  ‘Yui-san, you are always welcome here,’ the custodian responded. He guessed from her tone that something was wrong.