‘But surely it’s fine to leave that to someone who knows better than us?’
Then the night before the first day of school arrived and it was Yui, not Hana, who was too excited to sleep. ‘A revolution – set in motion a revolution’: the phrase spun around her head relentlessly.
Takeshi restrained himself from sending her a message in the middle of the night, but he couldn’t sleep either, chewing over all the things he had preferred to keep bottled up over that long conversation from winter to spring. How would he tell the teachers about the death of his wife, and how would he explain the fact that the little girl had not uttered a word for two whole years?
Silent? Yes, silent. Completely? Yes, completely. And so on.
chapter
forty-eight
The Paper Cover Yui Chose in the Bookshop When the Assistant Asked Whether She’d Prefer:
a) a red flower pattern with little leaves on a yellow background
b) a blue, dark green or red in a block colour
c) a pattern of giraffes with neckties and elephants with umbrellas and rubber boots in pastel colours
was b).
‘Blue, dark green or red?’ the shop assistant asked.
‘Red,’ Yui replied decisively.
chapter
forty-nine
THAT MORNING AT SEVEN THE alarm went off, and at half past seven, as promised, Yui arrived. She had covered the bags under her eyes with a thick layer of make-up and brightened her cheeks and lips with a bit of colour. When Takeshi opened the door, he found her particularly attractive and his smile was restrained, unnatural.
Yui did not notice. She sung, ‘Good morning!’ and hurried straight to Hana’s room to help her get dressed.
They had chosen her outfit weeks ago: a blue cotton dress that fell to below the knee, open loafers with a lace and a tiny button, and a hair bobble with a little stripy bow tied around her low ponytail.
To calm their nerves they started inventing funny alternatives. ‘Imagine if I burst into the classroom with a witch costume and a broom between my legs!’
‘Imagine if you wore a summer yukata and walked around with little ballerina steps!’
The faces her new classmates would make!
Tora looked at them sideways from under the bed.
Takeshi’s mother stayed in the kitchen putting away the breakfast, rubbing at plates that were already dry and repeating incredulously, ‘School already, six years old, first grade!’ Unsettled, she walked over to her son, squeezing his hand and touching his shoulder, as if congratulating him on that astonishing feat. ‘Tora! Tora!’ she then called out, offering yet another morsel of food to the kitten, who skidded into the kitchen at full speed. No matter how much weight she put on and how thick and shiny her fur became, the old woman couldn’t help seeing her as a pile of bones: ‘But do you feed her?’ she asked. ‘I mean, properly?’
‘Of course we do, Mum! Please stop spoiling her or she’ll be obese soon,’ Takeshi reprimanded. His mother detected the worry in her son’s voice (school already, six years old, first grade!) and didn’t reply.
They sat down at the table, stomachs clenched from the excitement. Hana had requested banana special eclairs for breakfast: partly to highlight the solemnity of the occasion and partly because they had become a bit of a tradition by this point. They reiterated their promise to sit in front of the butsudan after school and tell Akiko, Hana’s mother, all about her big day.
‘Today is the start of a revolution,’ Yui whispered to Takeshi as they closed the front door and the little girl, her rucksack on her shoulders and holding her grandmother’s hand, was already almost halfway down the steps. Yui noticed that Takeshi was tenser than she was and that helped her to downplay the situation. Saying the words that had tormented her for months out loud at such a key moment felt liberating.
‘It truly is a revolution,’ Takeshi replied, taking the phrase so seriously that Yui couldn’t help but burst out laughing.
It was only once they were on the street that Takeshi furtively hinted at his concerns about what to say to the teachers. His daughter was so delicate.
‘Delicate doesn’t mean fragile. Why don’t you let Hana say it herself?’ Yui suggested. ‘Let her tell her story, naturally, like all the other children will.’
They crossed the first of the three alleys that separated the house from the school. The granddaughter confidently showed her grandmother the map she had drawn the previous Sunday.
‘Let her tell it the way she wants to. She’s been speaking normally since the visit to Bell Gardia, hasn’t she?’ Yui added encouragingly.
Since that miraculous day at Bell Gardia, and every day for a number of weeks, Takeshi had woken up with the fear that he wouldn’t hear Hana’s voice again: he would go into the kitchen and anxiously delay saying good morning to her. He smiled now, remembering how on the second day he had even pretended not to see her, terrorised by the idea that he might make a mistake that would break the spell and return her to the realm of silence. But instead Hana had behaved, without exception, just like any other child.
‘People will get to know her for who she is, not for who she was,’ Yui concluded, putting her index finger over her lips as they were coming up behind the little girl.
Hana’s outline made Yui think of her own daughter aged two, when she had put on the penguin rucksack her grandmother had given her for the first time, her smile radiant as she twirled around the room in a fruitless attempt to see her own back, like a puppy chasing its tail.
Yui turned to Takeshi with a reassuring smile and repeated, ‘Don’t worry.’
In front of the school’s decorated gates, under the pink clouds of cherry blossom that released showers of petals at every breath of wind, Takeshi felt convinced that Yui was right.
chapter
fifty
Hana’s Drawing of the Journey from Home to School
chapter
fifty-one
FOR HANA IT TRULY WAS a revolution. Not just with the first day of school, but since she had started talking again, nothing and everything in her life had changed.
The frame? Yes, perhaps it was the frame that changed things. Yui was around more and more, to help with homework, she said, so that Hana’s father wouldn’t have to worry about staying late at the hospital. But in truth it was just because she wanted to be. And Hana loved reaching out her hand and finding Yui at her fingertips. If not to the right then to the left, at exactly the same height as her father and grandmother.
The latter, though, after an early bout of enthusiasm, was overcome by jealousy. Takeshi, who knew his mother well, recognised it immediately and started inviting her to lunch more often. He would phone her on a Sunday morning – ‘Why don’t you pop by ours?’ – or on certain afternoons when he was leaving work early and they would all go and eat a dorayaki or a crêpe at the stand next to the station.
It was crucial that his mother did not end up in competition with Yui. There was no way he could reprimand her at her age, and her stubbornness meant that bringing it up would only make her defensive: Me? Jealous? Why ever would I be jealous? Do you, perhaps, think that Hana prefers her to me? Or is it you who doesn’t need me anymore?
No, that scenario had to be avoided at all costs.
Thanks to those frequent invitations and some additional attention (a cushion for her back, the brand of tofu she preferred), the old woman finally relaxed. Before going to bed or when she couldn’t sleep, she would have long conversations with her dead husband in front of the butsudan. She would tell him in detail about that young woman who was so skinny she didn’t know how she stayed upright, who wore lovely hats that made her look quite elegant, but who had slightly odd taste in shoes: always sporty and she never wore a heel. But she was kind and respectful to her and, most importantly, she seemed to make their granddaughter happy.
‘She’s very quiet, sometimes for so long that you begin to wonder if she’s still there,’ she said, polishing the butsudan wit
h a rag. ‘But then all of a sudden she’ll speak. I swear it’s always when you’re least expecting it, and Takeshi and Hana stop in their tracks to listen to her. They just stand there, hanging onto her every word. You remember how distracted Takeshi can get when you’re speaking to him, don’t you? Well, with this woman he’s like a child again. Do you remember when he used to do his homework at the kitchen table? He’d get so absorbed that even if you shouted his name he wouldn’t hear you.’
The thing that most perplexed the old woman about Yui was how that same voice could flow out of the radio with such speed and confidence. She had tuned in once, out of curiosity, and was astonished: on the radio Yui was a different person entirely.
While Takeshi’s mother searched for the best ways to describe the woman to her husband, Yui nested like a dove. In her own house she set up the corner of one room for Hana, where the little girl could do her homework and play whenever Yui offered to go and pick her up from school. And sometimes too she would take her along to the radio station, because Hana was fascinated by the idea of talking into a microphone. She thought it was a kind of magic that Yui could send her voice out to faraway places and reach tens of thousands of strangers, linked only through that mysterious ability to listen.
‘It’s like the Wind Phone, isn’t it?’ Hana whispered one day as Yui was tying her hair up before going into the studio. They had given Hana permission to sit next to her, as long as she promised not to make a peep.
‘You speak to people, but you don’t know who’s listening to you. But you come into their homes and make them happy anyway.’
‘I don’t know about happy, but they certainly feel like they have some company.’
‘Isn’t that the same thing?’
Tying the girl’s thin plaits in the mirror, Yui felt her eyes prickle with tears.
During that magical period, they heard that Suzuki-san had fallen ill. From then on it would only be possible to access the Wind Phone by sending an email or fax first, so that a volunteer, if there was one available, could be there to welcome them.
Just a few days later they saw the news of the tremendous typhoon that was about to hit Kujira-yama.
chapter
fifty-two
Extract of the Radio Programme that Takeshi’s Mother Listened to Just to Hear Yui’s Voice
Yui:
‘… The way in which we, even as individuals, have introjected the idea of growth – business growth as well as individual personal growth – is something that, how can I say, it confines the present to a minority status in relation to the future, which always has to be better, with more resources, more means, more instruments … and yet this model, which, for our listener, Matsumoto-san from Shizuoka, is capitalism in its purest form, is not … is not sustainable anymore. What is the answer to this? Ma’am, what is your response?’
Response of the expert (Professor Satō):
‘Professor Tsubura, we have touched upon the crux of a debate that has been going on for decades in the academic world, and, well, [putting on a voice, as if quoting] the market will correct itself through technological innovations and the political conditions at any given time, and you can quote Professor Satō on that … then we would need to go into more detail on what these political conditions will be and what they should be … However, in general, within the capitalist model that we ourselves embody, the resources needed to meet the 2030 objectives are in fact available now, or do you … Are you proposing a paradigm shift?’
II
chapter
fifty-three
THE TYPHOON DESTROYED KUJIRA-YAMA. THE wind turned the Mountain of the Whale inside out.
The great cetacean seemed to be trying to return to the water, to the ocean that rose up in terrifying breakers not far below. The beast was looking down on the world, laying claim to it in a deafening roar.
The ground of Bell Gardia undulated in waves before Yui’s eyes.
It occurred to her that just one more step could take her to the point of no return.
The sky shattered, and as it fell, shard upon shard, Yui stretched her arms out wide. She was moving instinctively now, against all good sense. In that moment, all the voices that had been funnelled into Bell Gardia over the years surged up, enveloping her. They spun into a windmill, an unstoppable ring-o’-roses spiralling around her.
She could almost see them now, the voices, like hoops spinning wildly around children’s hips.
Dead parents, lost children, missing friends and ancestors who had evaporated into history: the voices of all those who had been called by the Wind Phone were coming back to the place that had first summoned them.
Yui lost her balance and bent over to grasp the bench again. It seemed like the only stable point in that whirlwind of fury.
When she looked up, searching for the weather vane on the roof of Suzuki-san’s house, she didn’t find it. The sleeves of her jacket were inflated by the wind, the air polishing her body with excessive zeal. Repeated caresses, one after the other, that gradually turn into slaps, hits and, finally, near-murderous blows. There were people who killed like that; she had read about it in a book once.
As people all over the country watched the typhoon’s movements on their televisions with nervous anticipation, the storm reached its climax over Bell Gardia.
Cocooned in the plastic cover Yui had made for it, the phone box was swaying dangerously.
Earth filled the air as the wind swept up branches and leaves, and objects Yui could only guess at by size. Those ones may be roof tiles, those others garden tools. There were pots rolling around like hay bales across the vast American prairies; an abandoned plastic bag clambered up, higher and higher in the sky.
It was like watching one of those scenes filmed in space, where everything floated around, detached from the ground; the wind made it suddenly seem as if gravity was just a choice, not a scientific fact.
Everything, she thought, could come crashing down.
‘It’s not fair,’ she mumbled. ‘This place is sacred.’ No one could possibly want to hurt it.
Then, at the corner of her eye, two streaks of lightning cut through the muddy brown sky. Flashing fearfully, they struck the road and disappeared.
Another two forks of light shot down, and that was when Yui started to feel scared.
The howl of the wind hurling itself into the mountainside drowned out the sound of the sea. It must be hell down there, though the dirt that filled the air made it impossible to see that far.
All of a sudden the archway over the path to the Wind Phone tilted backwards and fell. The right-hand hook of the cover, which Yui had hammered in first, was the first to come loose. She tried to move to go and put it back in, but every muscle in her body was focused on surviving the attack and not being dragged away by the gale.
Yui saw another bolt of lightning shoot to earth. A crackling sea of electricity spread across the sky, followed by a gentler sound, like an interrupted phone line; as though, somewhere faraway, a receiver was being put down, silence reigning over the room again.
Everything around Bell Gardia went dark, even the few lights that had remained on that long. The daytime on Kujira-yama and Ōtsuchi had been stolen away, and an intense darkness fell over the other side of the hill. The blackout would last hours.
Yui finally understood the risk she was taking and, perhaps because of the instinctual dread that makes all creatures fear the dark, she wished, for the first time, that she were elsewhere.
She had made a bad judgement call. ‘Overestimating yourself is always a mistake,’ her mother used to say. ‘But underestimating yourself is far worse.’
Which one, Mummy, which one is worse?
chapter
fifty-four
Yui’s Mother’s Possible Response to her Question
‘I’ve told you, dear Yui, underestimating yourself is far worse.’
(Adding immediately afterwards:)
‘But only when you’re not in any ph
ysical danger.’
chapter
fifty-five
ONCE HOPE CHANGES DIRECTION, IT loses its way and can no longer return.
Like when you pull a thread and the whole jumper unravels. Yui suddenly lost all confidence in having made the right decision. What if something happened to her? How would Hana react? Would the little girl ever forgive her for her carelessness?
And Takeshi? What about Takeshi?
She loved him. After three years she knew it. She also knew that he loved her, because he had let her know on a myriad of occasions, even when she pretended not to understand, when she would lower her eyes and buy herself time. For Yui, being ready meant knowing, and when you knew, and the other person knew that you knew, you lost the right to hide behind silence or excuses. The silence would end up speaking for itself, becoming a refusal; and although Yui was still not ready for joy, she was utterly unready for pain. Deep down, she had no intention of saying no.
But a yes, a yes spoken with conviction, was such a weighty thing. A totally different life would unfold from that point, one that wrapped the previous one up once and for all. Cardboard boxes folded closed, duct tape, into the lorry and, Goodbye, old existence.
She said it to herself constantly: ‘You need to be certain, Yui. You have to be certain.’ Sometimes she would start repeating it to herself in the mornings, when, along with hunger, the desire to love him was inexplicably more acute. On those days breakfast was slower, less conscious, morsels of food remaining longer in her mouth, her coffee growing cold before she brought it to her lips. She would wait in front of the television to watch a second weather forecast because she had not been concentrating the first time, flicking through the channels to find out whether to leave the washing out on the balcony or bring it inside to dry.
The Phone Box at the Edge of the World Page 11
