‘Thank you, Suzuki-san,’ he said abruptly, then rose from his seat. He took a crumpled plastic bag out of his holdall. ‘These are for you and your wife. They got a bit squashed, sorry.’
The custodian put the little bag of snacks on the counter, thanked Keita, told him not to catch a cold (‘winter’s on its way’) and urged him to work hard for his university entrance exams (‘but don’t wear yourself out!’). When the high-school student bowed to Suzuki-san and the newcomers, promising he’d come back soon, Yui’s mind was already far away.
She saw him go through the door, his shoulder bag deforming his outline, and imagined the immense future that lay ahead of him, and other kids his age. She realised there was no need to hold onto the boy’s voice in her memory: it was already there, in the garden of Bell Gardia, tied to the voices of so many others. It would probably always be there, brushing against his mother’s, telling her about his exams and then his first lectures at university, about a girl he loved who didn’t love him back, about another one who, unbeknown to him, he had turned down because she didn’t look enough like her; about his first job; his wedding – how hard it was to organise; his first child, the joy coupled with the constant feeling of inadequacy on hearing himself called Dad.
His voice would also flow out into the lapping waves of all the others. The sea would wash them to the edge of the city, to where the port is.
And then?
And then the fish would swallow them, like the princes’ rings in the stories Yui used to read her daughter at bedtime.
‘And then?’
And then one day, in a kitchen of a kingdom not too far away, someone would cut open the stomach of a mackerel, or a yellowtail, and those words would spill out.
Yui remembered her daughter’s repetitive ‘And then? Mama, and then what?’ and the movement of the little girl in her pyjamas, tucked under the blankets of the futon, as she would bring her tiny hands to her belly. Yui would read the passage out loud and, right on time, she would cry out, ‘Poor thing!’
Then she would resume a serious expression, her concern for the animal sincere.
Concern for the fish’s sliced-open belly, from which the fortune of a queen or a king was fated to emerge.
When they were left alone, Yui went out into the garden again. She said a brief goodbye to the custodian and there, in the late autumn wind, waited for Fujita-san. They would then go to the restaurant, where they would eat the bright orange flesh of sea urchins, miso soup and rice with delicious homemade furikake and tell each other about their lives.
The clouds on the horizon seemed to melt, mopped up by a sweeping wind.
It had been a tranquil afternoon, and the evening was serene. Yui told Fujita-san she would like to meet his daughter, to look her in the eyes and tell her to be proud, that not many little girls could be certain they were so loved. But if she did meet her she would never have said it. Yui knew that the strongest kind of love is the kind that is taken for granted.
She also discovered that Fujita-san’s given name was Takeshi, and she liked that combination of sounds immensely. From then on, as far as she could remember, she would always call him Takeshi.
They said goodbye that night with an affection that neither one deemed excessive. Both of them felt they had, somehow, been found, like two objects stuck together by chance at the bottom of a handbag.
That evening Yui drove back to Tōkyō on the empty highway. It was late by the time she slipped into the neighbourhood of Kichijōji, passing the glowing rectangular box of the konbini store at the side of the road, the dense cherry-blossom trees lining the wide avenue of Musashino-shi, the old people’s community centre, the gym. Everything was sleeping, as if under a spell.
For the first time in two years, looking in the rear-view mirror where she could still see her daughter sitting in the child seat, Yui felt she could sing her a lullaby; that she could then turn to her left, where her mother was sitting, and tell her about the strange magic of that day that was drawing to its close.
For the first time since the day of the tsunami, she allowed herself to question the steadfastness she had imposed upon herself, her decision to cut the world in two, into the world of the living and the world of the dead.
Perhaps it doesn’t do any harm, she thought, to continue talking to those who are no longer with us.
She just had to accept that her hands wouldn’t feel anything, that the effort to remember was what would fill in the gaps, that the joy of love would be concentrated in giving rather than receiving.
That night, wrapped in a blanket, she opened a book of fairy tales.
She read aloud the story of the intrepid little tin soldier, the big fish that swallowed him, the long journey that brought him back to his ballerina standing on one leg, and the blazing fire they had ended up in, a little tin heart and a tiny star as black as coal.
chapter
fourteen
Keita’s Phone Call to his Mother
‘Hi, Mum? Are you there? It’s Keita.
‘Sorry I haven’t been here much recently.
‘I’m going to juku every night, and at the weekends I have special classes for the Tōdai entrance tests. It’s never-ending.
‘Dad told me even you thought multiple-choice questions were stupid. It’s unnatural in life to have four options and only one of them be right.
‘Anyway, how are you? Are you secretly eating sweets over there too? (Laughing.)
‘I think you passed that food thing on to Naoko.
‘When I do the laundry I find sweets and chocolate wrappers in her pockets. Once I found some pretzels and churros. It’s not normal, in my opinion.
‘Oh yeah, and Naoko’s in love. Don’t ask me who with, I don’t know.
‘You can see it all over her face though. Plus, she’s less crabby than usual.
‘OK, I’m going now. There’s a woman walking around the garden, maybe she’s waiting to come in.
‘See you, I’ll come back soon, I promise. (Turning around.)
‘Oh, and feel free to eat whatever you like.’
chapter
fifteen
AFTER THAT FIRST DAY, YUI and Takeshi would return to Bell Gardia once a month.
They would arrange to meet at the Shibuya Crossing, in front of the Moyai statue. It was convenient for both of them, and Yui loved being at Shibuya before dawn, when the place was still deserted before the whole world converged there later in the day. With the big screens switched off and the traffic lights flashing amber, Scramble Crossing was an unassuming place, a festival float resting on a street corner with its lights out.
They became used to the car ride to Iwate, the departure at four in the morning, the break at a Lawson in Chiba where they would buy breakfast and a chocolate bar from which Yui would stuff a couple of squares into her mouth the moment she saw the ocean.
That’s how Takeshi found out about her nausea, about the sea.
And Yui discovered that Takeshi, that one day of the month, refused to bring his mobile phone with him. He said that the journey helped him physically; he needed to feel the distance with his body. With the phone, he said, there was the risk of turning back time, of constantly laying the past out in front of him.
That was why Takeshi gave Yui’s phone number to his mother, who looked after her granddaughter while he was gone. And so another person came to know of the existence of the Wind Phone and of that young woman who, once a month, made the long journey to Kujira-yama.
Yui and Takeshi only saw each other when they went to Bell Gardia. The place they met seemed destined to determine their trajectory in some way, and yet the distance between them kept getting smaller and smaller.
They began writing daily messages to each other.
On the evening when Yui, looking for a pair of gloves, found a wrapped present that had been for her daughter, it was Takeshi she texted. The house move had been so sudden, she had thrown everything into cardboard boxes at random as if the objects
were burning her fingers. Even after two years, the new house concealed a frightening number of things she had once bought for her daughter, things she remembered her particularly liking or that were on sale and she wanted to buy, even if it was too early to give them to her: little dresses she had put to one side for her to grow into, odd figurines, comic books, skirts that, being so untidy, she had simply forgotten about. Yui felt a stabbing pain when she discovered these things, the excruciating recognition of having deprived her daughter of a small joy.
Takeshi responded to her message with kindness, as always.
He promised her that one day, when she felt ready, they would tackle the house together; the wardrobes, the cupboards, the big cardboard boxes that were still sealed from the move, faced with which Yui felt a genuine sense of dread.
In the same way, it was Yui Takeshi wrote to when, at work in the hospital, he thought he’d caught a glimpse of his wife in a patient standing with her back to the window, or when he saw her in the tense outline of a woman who cut in front of him as he was walking to work.
It was to Yui that he recounted the kindergarten teachers’ concerns because his daughter wouldn’t open her mouth there either – she would draw, yes, she would join in, but verbally she was absent. Nobody knew the sound of Hana’s voice anymore, and he sometimes worried he was forgetting it too. So he’d taken to watching short videos he kept on his computer: Hana singing little theme tunes from cartoons or mangling the words of traditional songs; Hana confidently announcing the kind of nonsensical things that you could only get away with at that age.
Overwhelmed by nostalgia for everything he had lost and the feeling of not being up to the challenges life had set him, he would write to Yui saying simply that he was ‘a bit sad’, and she would understand.
Without realising, Yui and Takeshi became more and more alike.
Takeshi began to see parts of his house with fresh eyes, especially the places where he hid things he didn’t want Hana to find: dangerous things, treats, things she had failed to put away and so were hidden as a punishment. He stopped buying clothes or gifts in advance. When he found something he thought she might like, he would give it to her at once.
He learned from Yui that, in principle, there was no such thing as tomorrow.
Yui, for her part, started going to the doctor again. After two years of subconsciously hoping that every cold would develop into pneumonia, that a neglected sore throat would cause so much pain she wouldn’t be able to think about anything else, she started looking after her health again; she tried, clumsily, to take better care of herself.
Whenever she saw a scene that made her laugh or feel warm inside – a dog playing alone at the park while its owner dozed, a cart of toddlers from the kindergarten shouting at a passing train – she would take little videos. Like visual haikus to store away and re-watch on her way to work, or before going to sleep, or at any other time of the day that felt hard to deal with. Following Takeshi’s example, she accumulated a modest collection of video clips, and gradually the foggy hours began to clear.
And so the Saturday night would come around, before the Sunday morning when they would be going to Bell Gardia together. A time had been agreed for Yui to push the palm of her hand on the horn to let Takeshi know she was there, in the exact same way she had done when she was younger to hurry her mother out of the house. Takeshi would get up from Moyai’s plinth and walk towards a woman he wanted to know more and more about, and he would feel content, quietly happy to catch a glimpse of Yui’s smiling face, her shining eyes, her small and fleshy mouth, her pointy nose and the hair that lay two-tone over her shoulders.
In fact, for both of them, the meetings were starting to feel less like two strangers gathering at one point in the world to travel to another, and more like a return.
Him returning to her. Her returning to him.
chapter
sixteen
Objects Bought for her Daughter (and never used) Found Around Yui’s House
A dummy with a moustache.
A pair of pink culottes with lace-fringed pockets.
An Anpanman toy trumpet.
A Minnie Mouse cup with a bow-shaped handle.
Three diamanté hair clips.
A CD of Christmas songs.
A washcloth like the ones she used to bathe her with as a newborn baby.
A romper (0–3 months).
A little pair of gloves with a floral pattern.
chapter
seventeen
IN THE CAR TO BELL Gardia they rarely listened to the radio, and certainly never to Yui’s station. Takeshi always tried to listen live to the programmes she hosted and would record them when he was in the operating theatre or dealing with an emergency. In fact, he started recording all of them, just to be safe, storing Yui’s voice in his archive.
He liked the firm timbre with which she orchestrated the voices of scholars, journalists and scientists, and the delicate and reassuring tone she used to guide listeners who called in from all over Japan. He especially loved the way Yui managed to put people who weren’t used to speaking in public at ease.
Driving with the sea on one side and the mountains straight ahead, they would usually listen to music. Yui loved bossa nova, which was nostalgic for a time she had never lived in, for a land she didn’t know, but whose melodies were so beautiful they brought her to tears. She was convinced that nostalgia had nothing to do with memory, that we actually feel it most strongly for things we have never experienced.
Takeshi had grown up with Japanese rock, listening to the likes of X Japan, Luna Sea and Glay, and every so often he would introduce Yui to some of the more melodic songs, like ‘Forever Love’ or ‘Yūwaku’. Yui would laugh, struggling to reconcile the calm in Takeshi’s voice with these songs that were made to be screamed at the top of your lungs.
The car journeys from Tōkyō to Ōtsuchi were long. And yet they were just the right length for their hearts to prepare for the encounter with the garden on the belly of Kujira-yama. The interminable hours of driving – swapping places when Yui got tired, the background music, the conversations and silences that filled the car, the steady breathing of one and then the other as, in turn, they abandoned themselves to sleep – seemed to strengthen their nerves and their hearts.
It made them more supple, ready to withstand the strain that would be caused by the wind of Bell Gardia. Mile by mile they got closer to the phone box, to the view from the garden, the boats, the glittering sea.
If Yui had to describe this feeling, this pain, she would say it was like the stabbing contractions that preceded childbirth, the wonder of the process she had experienced when her daughter was born: closing to open again, contracting to then dilate, clamp and hold, then spread your legs wide and push.
A total paradox, essentially, like one of those things you only find when you’ve stopped looking for it. Like love, true love, or children that won’t come.
Would they be able to speak to their loved ones that day?
Would Yui, waking up and finding herself alone in the apartment, suffer a little less that month? Would Takeshi stop staring at the empty side of the bed or hesitating outside the bathroom door wondering how long his wife would be in there for, to then whisper sweetly, ‘take your time, darling’?
chapter
eighteen
Yui’s Favourite Brazilian Songs, Past and Present
‘Águas de Março’ by Elis Regina, original version from the album Elis (1972).
‘Desandou’ by Caio Chagas Quintet from the album Comprei um Sofá (2017).
chapter
nineteen
‘ALL I WANT IS ONCE, just once, for him to let me know he’s there and that he hears me. That he’s not angry with us.’
Something in that gentle and resigned sentence, which followed a series of ferocious ones, snapped. The man hurriedly gulped in some air, swallowed a hiccup and started up again with the accusations and insults.
They had seen h
im in the morning, as they were driving up towards Bell Gardia with their usual omiyage for Suzuki-san and his wife, and their specific hunger for the sea urchins and miso soup from the little restaurant they always went to afterwards. Takeshi had brought the two cream-and-banana special eclairs that his wife had loved so much, and Yui had her chocolate in the glove compartment.
In short, all as usual. All a return to what they’d come to know.
‘I’m a writer by profession, a journalist. And if I ever write this rotten story, if my wife ever allows me to, I’ll call it The Age of Immortality.’
They were sitting in the room across from the library, where Suzuki-san had created an informal space to talk and drink tea, a precursor to the cafe he would open later in the year.
‘A powerful title,’ the custodian said in a kindly tone from the little kitchen off to the side.
‘The only possible title, in my opinion. I’ll talk about how young people have no understanding of risk, how they’re oblivious to their own mortality, to the fact that if they do stupid things, sooner or later they’ll be putting their lives on the line.’
He was a robust man, with a protruding stomach and thick, square-framed glasses. Verbose and impatient, he often forgot to breathe, and would be in apnoea by the end of the sentence. But then he’d hastily fill up with air and start off again.
‘Do you remember the video of those cretins who threw themselves into the river during the typhoon last year, in Hiroshima … those boys in their underwear on a dinghy … yes, a rubber dinghy, like the ones you take into the sea on holiday, the ones you put small children in and they pee themselves immediately? It was on the news.’
Yui and Takeshi looked at one another but neither could recall having seen the video.
‘Well, why would you have seen it? It was a disgraceful spectacle; just imagining it would make you sick, let alone watching it from start to finish. In any case, one of those three cretins was Kengō, my son.’
The Phone Box at the Edge of the World Page 4
