Yui and Takeshi gradually realised that the Wind Phone was like a verb that conjugated differently for each person: everybody’s grief looked the same at first but was, ultimately, unique.
There was one young boy who went to Bell Gardia every evening to read the newspaper out loud to his grandfather. There were many who went there to cry and nothing more. One went to console a dead relative who hadn’t been buried, who was lost, God knows where, at the bottom of the ocean or in one of the many piles of bones created by the war. There was a mother who had lost three children in the tsunami and couldn’t bear the silence, so she talked and talked, trying to fill the void that remained. There was a little girl who would phone her dog, asking him what the afterlife was like; an elementary-school student who wanted to say hello to his classmate who, even though he was still alive, he hadn’t seen since the boy’s parents had had to go back to China. He missed playing with him.
It was easier to begin to understand how people worked when you spent time at Bell Gardia.
But not all dead people were missed. There were people who hated their dead relatives and couldn’t stand the idea that their punishment was over, just like that. Some people felt that death was a lucky escape; they thought, Thanks a lot, you’ve slipped away leaving this mess behind and now I have to carry the burden of all your mistakes. Suicides, for example; it was rare for people to entirely forgive them. The wives their husbands, the husbands their wives. The children, especially when they were young, were the fiercest.
Takeshi was convinced that it was the survivors, the people left behind, who gave death a face. That without them, death would be nothing more than an ugly word. Ugly but, deep down, harmless.
Yui developed her own theory: that for some people, life started loosening their joints when they were still in the cradle, and they had to work hard to hold the pieces together. She imagined those people juggling a bundle of limbs, ears, feet and kidneys in their arms, like parts of the game Operation. But then, at some point, something would slot into place: they’d fall in love, start a family, get a well-paid job, a nice career and they would begin to feel more stable. The truth was, though, they were just giving out parts of themselves to relatives and trusted friends; they were learning that it was normal not to be able to cope on your own, and that asking people for help was the only way forward if there were other things they wanted to do with their lives. They had to depend on others.
And then? Then what would happen? That’s where Yui believed luck came into it. Because if those people lost someone who had been looking after a fundamental piece of them, they would never be able to regain their balance. The harmony would be gone, along with their loved one.
Yui believed she was the perfect example of that kind of person. And that, before they died, her mother had carried one of her intestines, and her daughter a lung, and for that reason, however much happiness she experienced, she would always struggle to eat and to breathe.
But she was wrong. And if she had said it out loud, Takeshi would have told her the truth.
That love is a miracle. Even the second time round, even when it comes to you by mistake.
chapter
twenty-six
Parts of Yui’s Body she Entrusted to Others Over the Years
The little finger of her right hand to the girl who sat next to her in elementary school
(returned in one piece after six years)
Her left foot to her best friend at junior high school, to which she added her right foot and both legs when they moved from junior high to high school
(returned when the friend moved to the United States)
Her right breast, bladder and the inside of both cheeks to her daughter’s father
(left to languish, and, suffering from their absence, reclaimed)
Her spine to the editorial staff of the radio where she worked
(still on consignment)
Her heart to her father
(returned crumpled up when he remarried; it took years to heal – she would entrust nothing more to him)
chapter
twenty-seven
WHEN SHIO FIRST STARTED READING his father’s Bible he found only names. An uninterrupted string of names, which when read out loud seemed like nothing more than sounds. It was a list of all the humans in the world, he told himself, those who already existed as well as the ones who would, one day, be here. He didn’t think a list of numbers could ever be as powerful as that.
Most people would find the Bible mind-numbingly dull. But Shio was won over by the poetry in those words. He would whisper them in the bathroom, the place he’d go whenever he needed some peace, some time to think. By uttering the words, over and over again, they turned into magic spells.
They reminded him, somehow, of a bed of seaweed in an ocean so thick with it that it was difficult to walk through. Escaping from conversations, he would sit on the toilet reciting half a page at a time and imagine his feet submerged in the most nauseating goop, which was, to him, what seaweed felt like.
He would never become a fisherman like his dad. And he was certain that this fact, which had come to light naturally when he was a child, was the first great disappointment of his father’s life.
The Bible spoke about shepherds and fishermen, about animals guided through valleys by a dog and a stick, and about the miracle of pulling up a net and finding fish inside it. Shio wondered if that was why his father loved the Bible so much, because, somehow, he saw himself in it: a fisherman not of fish, but of kelp.
Ever since he was a child, Shio’s teeth tingled whenever he touched seaweed. He shuddered with disgust when he was forced to get into the sea and walk out to his father’s boat, feeling it wrapping itself around his calves, or when his friends dared him to swim off the beach and he’d have to wade through it in the first few metres of water. He much preferred to jump in off the rocks, risking getting smashed to pieces just to avoid being touched by that repugnant mass. He had to keep telling himself that it wouldn’t be long before he’d be out in the open sea, and, on his return, that he’d soon be back on the beach.
He hated it. It reeked of fish but it wasn’t fish, the colour made it look rotten and diseased, the texture was snotty, as he used to say when he was a child. The flavour was revolting too. His younger brother, when he wanted to get revenge for something, would throw it at him, knowing exactly what Shio’s weak point was.
And yet to his father seaweed was everything. Every day in his boat he collected it, pulled it to the shore and, spreading it out like laundry over the long rods on the beach, left it to dry. Shio’s mother and his sisters did the rest: the seaweed was dried, carefully packaged and sent off to shops and markets all over Japan.
After the loss of his father, Shio tried hard to make himself like it, but he couldn’t. He devoted himself wholly to the task, even offering to take his father’s place on the boat, to go out harvesting. Habit is a remedy, people would say; you can get used to anything if you do it enough.
It took him less than a week to understand that this may be true, you really could get used to anything, but also that life deteriorated when spent in the proximity of something you hated that much. It was exhausting; it wasn’t worth it.
He decided to pursue a different path. Rather than becoming a fisherman he would study medicine. But, out of respect for his father, he swore that he would learn, by heart, the mysterious book that lay on his father’s bedside table. The book his father had read every day, without fail, for years: the Holy Bible.
Shio wasn’t a believer; he never would be. And perhaps his father wasn’t either. But he was convinced that the man had approached that book like a sort of manual, life lessons from a faraway culture, so distant that he might never understand it fully. It was beautiful though, breathtakingly so.
Shio would leaf through the worn pages, point his finger at random and begin to recite the infinite list of names, numbers and stories. And every time he did so, he would think about his father
, about the absurd way he had died.
On the day of the March 2011 earthquake, off the coast of Ōtsuchi, the earth’s crust shook violently. Like a rug pushed into a wall, the sea rose and fell in vertiginous ridges and Shio’s father’s boat was tossed onto the shore. But the shore was no longer there.
Atop the terrifying mass of water, he reached the town, soaring over the streets he had cycled down that very morning, buildings he had been in and out of over the years, places he had lived or where people he knew had worked; the old dentist who had looked after his cavities since he was a boy, the barber who always gently massaged his head after shampooing.
The boat transgressed every reasonable boundary and was marooned on the top of a building that had been gutted by the detritus and water. And there it remained.
The boat was miraculously unscathed. And yet, inside it, his father, at some point on that turbulent journey from the sea onto the land, had been sliced in two.
Yui and Takeshi met Shio in the summer of their second year visiting Bell Gardia.
He was a slim young man with a focused and intelligent face. He kept his head shaved, for practical reasons, and always wore a face mask hooked over his small ears. He would only reveal his whole face when he brought his teacup to his lips, and then they would see his broken front tooth and the hint of worry that pulled at the corners of his mouth. He seemed inseparable from his shoulder bag, which they would soon discover contained his father’s old Bible.
Shio had been travelling to the phone box at Bell Gardia to talk to his father for three and a half years. He went every two or three weeks, and his visits often coincided with Yui and Takeshi’s trips there from Tōkyō.
He spent most of his afternoons and evenings at the hospital where he was an intern, but he would set aside two hours on a Sunday morning to visit the Wind Phone, each time finding himself more aware of – and angry about – what had happened.
Suzuki-san knew Shio’s routine from memory and would follow him with his eyes as he did two laps of the garden on foot, losing himself in the view of the sea, among the bluebells in summer and the higan-bana in early autumn. Like Yui, Shio loved to study the flight of the dragonflies riding on the wind on August and September days at Bell Gardia and, filling his lungs with salty air, he would count the flowers, reciting a rhyme from his childhood.
Those short walks reminded him of the books of pressed flowers he used to compile with his mother, the leaves she slid between the pages of whichever book she was reading or had in her bag at the time. Still now, if he opened any volume on the bookshelf at home, he would likely find a pressed violet or the five rust-red fingers of a momiji leaf.
Shio especially loved watching the boats docked in the port from up there. On days when the sea was particularly choppy, he enjoyed seeing their bows rearing up, then plunging back down again. It looked as though they were constantly nodding, like the nurses trying to reassure elderly patients at the hospital but never really listening to them. Yes, yes, you’re right. Yes, yes. Anyway, here’s what we’ll do. Now let’s stand up, give me your arm, now open your mouth, that’s it. Shio found this method profoundly sad, as if it were age that determined relationships between people, rather than personality.
And there were the numbers again. Everyone in the hospital was reduced to names and numbers, like in the genealogies of the Bible. In those moments he doubted whether he was cut out to spend his whole life working there.
One Sunday morning, when they both happened to be at Bell Gardia, he mentioned this to Takeshi, who nodded sympathetically. Exactly the same thing happened in Tōkyō; it wasn’t a provincial thing. In fact, people probably cared more in the hospital where Shio worked, because they knew each other better. The busier it was, unfortunately, the more difficult it became to treat people as individuals. To be honest, paying special attention to each patient would break up a nurse’s routine, and, in the long run, if you didn’t have a routine, you risked getting burned out.
Yui thought Shio was brilliant, gifted with a rare sensitivity. Takeshi caught in him a reflection of himself in the early days of his career, when he was working in the accident and emergency department. Skipping from one patient to another and going home with his back almost broken from two hours of sleep on a camp bed, had felt to him like the closest thing to serving humanity.
They became friends. Takeshi always tried to dedicate at least an hour to listening to Shio and answering his questions. They would often end up at the restaurant together, and while Yui savoured her sea urchins and told them not to worry about her, Takeshi and Shio would open up heavy medical textbooks, full of the teenager’s Post-it notes and annotations, and talk.
Knowing that Shio had no parents, Takeshi felt a certain sense of responsibility towards him. He wanted to help him, but how? When Shio mentioned a scholarship to study in Tōkyō the following year, Takeshi thought he could finally do something concrete. He gathered information about all the possible universities the young man could apply for. What do you think of this one? And how about this one? He would pass him prospectuses that he had travelled all over the city to collect, and helped him compare them. And what about his speciality? Had he thought about it yet? This was an important decision that would completely determine the direction of his career. Also, what kind of doctor did he want to become? One who worked with patients or one who wrote articles to publish in journals? And another thing – could he speak English? That was an essential tool. You couldn’t really do without it.
Shio never spoke about his family. Only about how much he was studying and the things he saw each day. At the hospital, in the street, in the canteen. He was enthusiastic about all of Takeshi’s suggestions. He wanted to turn his life around, wanted to get out of there.
It wasn’t until a year later that Yui and Takeshi learned the truth about Shio’s father.
chapter
twenty-eight
Three Examples of Discoveries from the Pages of Shio’s Mother’s Books
A momiji leaf at page 56 of Kamiya Mieko’s book Ikigai Ni Tsuite [On Ikigai], Tōkyō: Misuzu Shobō, 1966.
Two pine needles at page 20 of Otogibanashi no wasuremono [Lost Property Fairy Tales], text by Ogawa Yōko and illustrations by Higami Kumiko, Tōkyō: Shūeisha, 2006.
Two violets, one higan-bana flower and a cicada’s wing at pages 5, 33 and 50, respectively, of the Ishida Tetsuya catalogue, Tetsuya Ishida – Complete, Tōkyō: Kyūryūdō, 2010.
Note: Shio’s real name was Shiori. But one day his mother made him a hot chocolate and he put salt in it instead of sugar, and from then on he became known to everyone as ‘Shio’ salt.
chapter
twenty-nine
SHIO ALWAYS LIFTED THE RECEIVER and said ‘Dad’ first. Then he’d ask how he was, what he was up to and why he was still over there. He’d say his brother had been leaving the house less and less, his room was a pigsty and their aunts were suffocating him (they asked thoughtfully, but constantly, what they could do to make things better, but how was he supposed to know?). It was about time their dad came back. Shio couldn’t handle it all by himself.
Otōsan, Father, Dad, he called him; he would beg using the same formula, the words feeling emptier each time he uttered them. Sometimes he would even insult him.
‘He insults him? How do you know?’
‘He told me,’ Suzuki-san replied, the day Takeshi talked to him about the documents Shio would need for the scholarship.
‘What scholarship?’ he asked. ‘Where?’
They had finally decided on Tōkyō Medical University, the one where Shio hoped to specialise. The scholarship would cover all of the enrolment costs, his tuition fees and the rent for a room in the university halls of residence.
‘Really? Shio? In Tōkyō?’ Suzuki-san was taken aback.
Yes, yes, Takeshi confirmed, and reiterated that he felt Shio had a real shot at getting the scholarship. His grades were good and, as sad as it was, his being an orphan would likely help h
is case.
‘Shio isn’t ready to move away from here,’ Suzuki-san replied.
‘But it’s been three years,’ Yui said slowly, wary of sounding judgemental.
‘No, I’m not talking about his mother’s death; he seems to be coming back from that. It’s more his father. The man still needs him, and Shio won’t be able to leave him anyway.’
Leave him? What did that mean? Takeshi became suspicious; there was something dark in Suzuki-san’s words.
It happened rarely, but it did happen, Suzuki-san said. That people came to Bell Gardia not to talk to the dead, but to the living.
Yui and Takeshi looked at one another, in shock. They had heard him right: Shio’s father wasn’t dead. Suzuki-san had met him in person once when the boy had tried to bring him here, hoping it would help his father to find himself again.
On 11th March 2011 Shio’s father’s boat, to avoid running into the shore, set a course out to sea, hoping to ride out the tsunami. But the strength of the wave meant that the vessel was slung into that grotesque position in the middle of the city, teetering on the top of a building like a trophy. A few years on, it had become one of the most iconic images of the disaster.
There were those immense curling waves, and the boat had repeatedly climbed skywards to then plunge back down into the sea. Later that day, the man was told about the wild terror on his face. You see, he wasn’t alone on the boat; there was a woman with him.
It wasn’t the initial fury of the tsunami that had crushed Shio’s father, but rather, as the hours passed, the terrible, incessant suction of the sea and the silence that pressed down over the bay. Among the debris drawn outwards, Shio’s father saw dozens of bodies, cadavers skewered by wooden planks or twisted into distorted positions. Their eyes wide open, like soldiers fallen in battle.
The Phone Box at the Edge of the World Page 6
