The Phone Box at the Edge of the World
Page 15
‘I was thinking of staying a day or two.’
‘You can stay for as long as you like.’
Yui took the Shinkansen rather than the car this time. She wanted to have her hands free and, if necessary, to be able to close her eyes and sleep.
Before getting on the train, she went into the konbini to buy her usual onigiri and chocolate. While she was queuing up to pay she saw a woman at the photocopier. She remembered how excited her daughter used to get whenever they used the photocopy machines at Lawson or Family Mart. She loved them because while you were waiting for your copies, to help the time pass, there was a little concentration puzzle on the screen. There would be two almost identical pictures between which you had to find five differences.
For example, there would be two pictures of a rabbit carrying a basket of carrots, but one had sleeves with white stripes and one had sleeves with white and green stripes; one had a red bow on the right-hand side of its basket and the other a red bow on the left.
En route to Bell Gardia, with bossa nova playing in her earphones and an unopened magazine in her lap, Yui thought of five differences between her daughter and Hana.
After months of stopping herself whenever she was tempted to make a comparison, and perhaps thanks to the cracks that had been opening up inside her of late, she finally allowed herself to do it. She allowed herself to realise that the two little girls were both similar and different. That perhaps love made room for the possibility that she could appreciate different things about each of them.
And so, after identifying not five but ten differences between the two girls, rather than feeling disturbed, she felt relieved.
Yui hadn’t told anyone where she was really going and everyone was sensitive enough not to ask too many questions. She had told Hana she was going back to her hometown to collect some important documents and that she wouldn’t have phone signal there. The girl let herself be deceived: it wasn’t Yui’s words that convinced her but the anxious expression on her father’s face.
When Yui returned to Tōkyō, after three days in which she had been completely out of touch, she seemed happier.
She would never tell anyone where she had been, not even Takeshi; not even after they were married.
The truth was very simple: Suzuki-san had made up a little room for her on the second floor of his house, and she, like a grown-up child returning home to her parents, allowed herself to be spoilt. She slept without setting an alarm, feasted on delicious food and talked more about the future that awaited her than the past that had brought her there in the first place.
She took on some small tasks to pay her way: she held the ladder while the neighbour pruned her apple trees; she cleaned the gutter on the roof of the house and she revarnished the phone box’s wooden frame. She peeled carrots and potatoes, mixed dressings, rehemmed an apron and patched a hole in a pair of work trousers.
She said nothing to Suzuki-san and his wife about her fear of becoming Hana’s mother. But from the details they had heard, they understood implicitly. She said that the little girl had grown so much since starting school, she talked about Hana’s two best friends, from whom she was already inseparable, and about the numerous talents she possessed; about the challenge of striking the right balance when encouraging them.
On the day she was due to return to Tōkyō, she asked for an hour to herself. It was raining. She left her bags at the doorway, walked over to the phone box and went inside.
She lifted the receiver.
For the first time, she spoke.
chapter
seventy-two
Five Points From Yui’s Game of Spot the Difference Between Hana and her Own Daughter
DIFFERENCE No. 1: Their nails
Hana bit her nails; there was barely any white left after a day of school. Her own daughter, on the other hand, loved having her nails painted; young as she was, she knew exactly what she wanted: alternating blue and violet polish on each of her little fingertips.
DIFFERENCE No. 2: Hunger
Hana didn’t eat. She was slim like Yui, who had always been too thin. It was because of her age, Takeshi said, rather than her constitution. Hana’s mother had been robust and she loved the flesh on her bones; she even used to buy dresses in a larger size because she had no problem imagining herself getting bigger, adding an X to her L. Perhaps Hana would take after her; who knew? They would have to see how she developed once she was a teenager.
Yui’s daughter, on the other hand, ate with an exceptional appetite. She was skinny too but in her case it was definitely her metabolism. ‘I’m hungry,’ she complained constantly. ‘I’m soooooooo hungry.’ And once she could walk (twelve months? Perhaps thirteen?), and breakfast or dinner was over, she would toddle over to the fridge, open the door with her tiny hands, and pierce the silence of the white space, imperiously demanding: ‘Biscuit! Yoghurt! Carrot!’
DIFFERENCE No. 3: Singing
Hana never sang, yet music seemed to transport her into a state of grace. ‘If she does ever sing,’ Yui was certain, ‘she’ll sound like an angel.’
Her daughter was a tangle of melodies, each one completely divergent from the next. Despite having only a few words in her vocabulary, she would come up with lyrics, construct nonsensical phrases and be firmly convinced that she had composed the most wonderful score. ‘Listen, Mama,’ she would begin, and a rush of vowels and everyday words would pour out of her mouth. And Yui couldn’t help but laugh.
DIFFERENCE No. 4: Playing and Organising
Yui’s daughter arranged things by colour. Her notepads, her books and her dolls would find themselves grouped together purely because they were all white, purple or blue.
Hana valued objects for their utility. She left things where they were. It would appear that she didn’t organise anything. Perhaps she did, in secret.
DIFFERENCE No. 5: Style
Yui’s daughter was a true tomboy.
Hana was the girliest girl Yui had ever come across.
chapter
seventy-three
YUI AND TAKESHI OFTEN FOUND themselves wondering what happened next, how people’s stories were going to end. In the soft voices and minor tones that preceded putting out the bedside lamp and the descent of night, they would remind each other of the faces of the children and adults, the summer dresses, plaits and puffer jackets and all the other details of the people they had seen picking up the phone in the cabin at Bell Gardia.
Yui fondly remembered the hands of children desperately reaching up towards the handset, like saplings hungry for light.
The two of them would write lists in their minds of the men and women shaken by grief for lost spouses. Some of them, like Takeshi, had remarried, and others had been left behind with no one to love. Wrinkled elders searching for children whose lives had been wasted in all kinds of tragedies, or for siblings they had outlived.
There was no closing act in these lives, but Yui and Takeshi custom-built sparkling futures for each of them; inventing a guarantee that life would find a way to repay them. Wishing the best for all those people was the only thing they could do.
They would diligently continue to nurture some of the relationships they had formed at Bell Gardia forever. Keita, for example. Since the young man had moved to Tōkyō to attend university, he would often come to their house for dinner and, on the ever-rarer occasions that Yui and Takeshi went to Bell Gardia, he would join them for the journey, spending the day with his father and sister before going to the phone box to update his mother on his latest achievements.
Nobody, however, heard anything more from the man who had lost his son in the rubber dinghy in the typhoon. Takeshi was disappointed. He thought often about the man’s long diatribe in the tea room of Suzuki-san’s house, and he felt indebted to the candour of his words for the precious conversation he and Yui had that night on the way back to Tōkyō.
One day, two years later, as she was running, out of breath, to do an interview at a cafe in Ginza, Yui saw
a sign. On the shelf in the window of the independent bookshop that sold just one book each week, she read, in gold lettering: THE AGE OF IMMORTALITY.
Despite the fact that she was stressed and running late, the title pulled her in. She picked it up and, once it was clear that this book was indeed written by the man she and Takeshi had met years earlier at Bell Gardia, she bought it.
She and Takeshi flicked through the pages of the book later that evening, their minds flooding with memories of the man’s secret conversations and rebukes, and the symmetry between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
‘Look at this,’ she said to Takeshi, and reading the scant dedication (To Kengō, from Dad), they would both feel moved. No more recriminations, no more ‘cretin’, and they would wonder whether that disjointed midnight dialogue between father and son, living and dead, was still unfolding.
When they phoned Suzuki-san to tell him, the custodian was relieved. That man hadn’t been to Bell Gardia for years, but he had clearly found his own way to communicate with his son. Ultimately, that was what he wished for everyone who came there – that each person would find a place where they could tend to their pain and heal their wounds. That place would be different for each one of them.
chapter
seventy-four
The Address of the Tōkyō Bookshop Yui Passed that Day
Morioka Shoten & Co.
1-28-15 Ginza, Chūō-ku, Tōkyō
1st floor, Suzuki Building
Epilogue
YUI HAD TWO DAYTIME PROGRAMMES on the radio now. She had given up working evenings, because she loved their family dinnertimes so much. She, Takeshi and Hana would talk about their days and, after the wedding, Takeshi’s mother joined them more often too.
Yui found the rapid-fire questions her mother-in-law welcomed her home with irritating and, like Akiko, her loquacity somewhat excessive. But she didn’t let it bother her. In fact, Yui was grateful; she seemed to have lost her knack for conversation outside the radio studio. She loved to be quiet, floating at the edges of the house, watching the knot of warmth and beauty that pulsated in its centre: Hana and Takeshi, and she herself, in the wonderfully repetitive daily scenes that unravelled in the living room, kitchen or bedroom.
When those faces she had come to love showed signs of weariness and retreat, she would caress them with even more affection. Yui loved how people looked when they were drained of energy, but when she told people that, they didn’t believe her. They seemed to take it as a backhanded compliment: ‘You look tired, but you don’t look bad.’ It really irked some people. But Yui was being sincere; she found tired faces fascinating. Sometimes she wondered whether this had originated during those early-morning meetings at the Shibuya Crossing: Takeshi’s face was always still crumpled up from sleep, and that’s how she fell in love with him.
Her new child, the one that would soon be growing inside her, the baby that on that first visit to Bell Gardia Yui could never have imagined in her wildest dreams, would only discover his mother’s love of fragility once he had grown up. She had seen it, stripped bare, as plain as a dictionary definition, in the people around her.
It had started during the month she spent, her soul in shreds, in that school gymnasium that clung to the mountainside with a view of the sea. Not any sea, but an ocean that had washed far onto the earth and then retreated again.
Yui had come to know fragility mostly inside herself, in every crack that appeared over those interminable years, from March 2011 to the day she met Takeshi, then to the day she finally picked up the receiver of the Wind Phone and talked to her mother and daughter again.
Yui didn’t like to talk about her own frailty. But in the end she had accepted it, and that was the start of her path towards taking care of herself again. Acknowledging it helped her connect to the truest part of other people; it was what made it possible to feel close to them, part of their lives.
If someone were to ask her now, she would have explained it with great conviction: life decays, countless cracks form over time. But it was those very cracks, the fragility, that determined a person’s story; that made them want to keep going, to find out what happens next.
A day would come when Yui would cry and those tears would be both a baptism and a funeral. A beginning and an end.
They would be in Yokohama Station, taking Hana and her one-year-old brother to the Anpanman Museum, and the little boy would be wearing his Shinkansen rucksack, the pink and emerald-green train that served north-east Japan. The toddler would suddenly wriggle out of Takeshi’s arms, where he had been carried until that point, and toddle towards the descending escalators, which he loved almost as much as he feared the ones coming up.
And as the train going in the opposite direction pulled into the station, the little boy catapulted himself into the bench that everybody was hurrying to get up from and screamed, ‘Maaamaaa!’ The clarity of his voice would leave all three of them dumbstruck.
That day, without warning, Yui had been reinstated with the title. It was the first time their son had called her ‘Mum’.
Yui froze, her bottle of green tea in one hand and Hana’s small fingers in the other.
‘What? What did he just say?’ she would ask her husband as a throng of Chinese tourists wrapped around them like a scarf.
‘He said mama.’
And there it was. The latest in a series of astonishing banalities; the best one of them all.
In the midst of the commotion of the station, against the backdrop of the disciplined voice repeating directions, arrivals, departures and exits, they would stand in silence, honouring what had just happened.
Acrobatically scooping up his son in one arm, Takeshi would embrace Yui with the other. And soon the word would become contagious, just as his mother had predicted. Because Hana would have caught onto its power, and she too would start calling her Mum, Mummy, Mama, and would repeat it excitedly, like a magic spell.
After years of calling her ‘Yui’ or ‘Yui-chan’, ‘Mama’ finally arrived, and from then on the three words would be interchanged at random.
That was where joy was born. It resided in a reinstated word that would always remind her of the before, and solidify the after. Just like the wind that was being created there, right where they stood, between the two trains that glided into Yokohama Station and accelerated out again, pulling in two directions at once.
Everything always came back; it just needed to be called by the right name.
Was it possible that such vastly different feelings could reside within the boundaries of a single word? Could that word be used with one emotion, without the other trailing behind it like a tail?
No, it probably couldn’t, just like they couldn’t give Hana chocolate without her entire outfit ending up covered in it, or like their little boy couldn’t learn to walk without a baffling number of bruises appearing all over his body.
The word needed to be reinforced, to be made into a name that she could be called repeatedly, even thirty times in an hour.
Yui came to understand that there was always joy somewhere within unhappiness. That inside each of us we preserve the fingerprints of those who taught us how to love, how to be both happy and unhappy in equal measure; of those who explained how to differentiate between feelings and how to navigate the overlap, the areas that make us suffer, but that also make us different. Different and special.
That evening, and over the years that were yet to come, Takeshi would reveal that he understood this too:
‘The more I move forward, the more I find myself sure,’ he would say, ‘that we are all fixed at the moment of our first word.’
Yui’s first words into the Wind Phone
‘Hello?’
‘It’s Yui.’
‘Mum, it’s Yui.’
Yui’s second words into the Wind Phone
‘Hello?’
‘Sachiko?’
‘I’m here, it’s Mummy.’
Referenced Works
Itaru, Sasaki, [Six Years on from the Great East Japan Earthquake: what we can see through the Wind Phone], Tōkyō: Kazama Shobō, 2017.
Itaru, Sasaki and Yuriko Yanaga, [‘The Wind Phone’ and Grief Care: looking after the heart], Tōkyō: Kazama Shobō, 2018.
An Important Note
THE WIND PHONE IS NOT a tourist destination.
Don’t look for it on a map. Don’t try to find Kujira-yama unless you intend to pick up that heavy receiver and talk to somebody you have lost.
Don’t go there with a camera around your neck, don’t bring out your phone, instead hold your heart close. Caress it as you proceed along the path that leads to the phone box; reassure it that everything is OK. Allow it to open up.
There are places in the world that must continue to exist, beyond our experience of them. Like the Amazon rainforest, or Selinunte in Sicily, or the sculptures of Easter Island. Places that must remain, whether we visit them in our lifetimes or not. Bell Gardia is one of those places.
I personally experienced profound hesitation about going there. I justified not going for years by saying I had too much work on, it was too far from Tōkyō, that the area damaged by the 2011 disaster was too hard to access. I even blamed it on pregnancies, breastfeeding, and tiny children running around. The truth is that I was afraid of taking something, of stealing time and space from someone who needed it more than I did.
While writing this book, I understood how important it is to write about hope. The task of literature is to suggest new ways of being in the world, to connect the here to the there. For me, the Wind Phone is mainly this: a metaphor that suggests how precious it is to hold on tight to joy as well as pain. That even when we are confronted by the subtractions, the things that life takes from us, we have to open ourselves up to the many additions it can offer too.