For Yui that was what delaying love meant, making breakfast last an hour and flicking through channels.
When the heart is ready though, it is a different matter entirely. Then you anxiously await the word, and with each day that it doesn’t arrive it feels like the thing you want most is just out of reach. Like your favourite dish at the other end of a long table.
The night before, when Hana was asleep, Takeshi had finally said the words.
They were between the living room and the kitchen. He was clearing the table, laying the dishes in the sink a few at a time. Yui was putting together the little girl’s bentō box for the next day.
‘We need to buy more bags of furikake,’ Yui said, showing him the empty plastic packaging with Anpanman on it. ‘This is the last one.’
Takeshi let Hana’s colourful plate and the soap slide into the basin and straightened up slowly. A bubble floated through the air and Yui playfully blew it in Takeshi’s direction.
He looked at her: ‘Yui, why don’t you come and live here?’
Years later, Takeshi still would not be able to explain why he had chosen that moment and not another one. He had been thinking about it for months, but kept it quiet. He had planned it out like you plan your dream house: the spacious entrance hall, the gentle slope into the living room, the bright bathroom.
He cared more though about Yui and their friendship than about anything they might become. He had planned to detect any signs of a possible refusal in advance, to never be hasty with words that were difficult to take back.
And yet.
And yet, there they had materialised, those extortionate words, between the kitchen and the living room.
Yui’s long wooden chopsticks remained suspended in mid-air, holding a mince and potato croquette. She struggled to remember where she had been putting the ingredients: the rice, the chopped strawberries, the rabbit-shaped biscuits; the strips of sticky tape for securing the sides of the bentō cover.
‘Live here,’ Yui repeated, no question. She had said this to avoid making a mistake, leaning on the echo of his words.
‘You belong with us. We are a family: you, me, Hana, Tora too. All that’s left is to make it official.’
He came up behind her, shielding her slim body like a cavernous seashell. In the contact between her shoulder blades and his chest, Yui had the distinct feeling that a metamorphosis was under way.
It was as if they were becoming a tree, wood and bark. Long rhizomes sprouting from their skin, followed by shoots, until they bloomed, relentlessly binding one body to the other.
This kind of change happened only once in a lifetime.
Takeshi held her tight, his face buried in her neck, repeating the phrase Suki, Yui no koto ga suki.*
‘You and Hana are the most important things in my life,’ he whispered, lowering his voice another notch. ‘I’m going to bed now. Sleep on it. We’ll talk about it tomorrow, if you’re ready.’
That was how he sealed the conversation, without even giving her a kiss.
Now Yui wondered whether that promise of immense happiness had perhaps frightened her, if it was part of the reason she had escaped in the night, heading for Bell Gardia, putting her life in the hands of the deadly typhoon.
No, she told herself: it was not fear, it was precisely the opposite. She had felt so happy to have it confirmed – she was loved, and loved in return – that she believed this love would protect her.
* I love you. Yui, I love you.
chapter
fifty-six
The Contents of Hana’s Bentō Prepared by Yui that Evening
Cooked rice (of the Koshihikari variety).
Two florets of boiled broccoli.
Two cubes of steamed aubergine.
A button mushroom.
A mince and potato croquette.
Two pieces of sanma in soy sauce.
A small bag of salmon furikake with Akachanman on the bag.
Separate: a little banana muffin, two rabbit-shaped biscuits, six chopped strawberries, one pot of plain yoghurt.
Note: In the excitement she forgot to put the strawberries and the muffin into Hana’s bag. She also broke the right ear off one of the rabbits.
chapter
fifty-seven
THE WIND CONTINUED TO BATTER the things that surrounded Yui. The fabric of the world was being dragged into the melee, like the people she always saw in Tōkyō at dawn, creased and worn out before the break of day.
And as the sky above Kujira-yama unleashed its fury upon her – and she thought that nobody else on this planet would attempt to stand up against such a sky – Yui wished she were elsewhere. Beside Takeshi, safe in his arms, with Hana’s leg flopped over hers, like when they flicked through fairy tales and picture books on the sofa and they would all pile up at one end to keep warm like the monkeys in Hokkaidō, which always made the little girl laugh.
Takeshi’s arms, Hana’s leg.
And what if, together with that clumsy declaration of love, Takeshi had consigned her a piece of himself? What if, unknowingly, he had given her custody of a foot, a liver, an artery of his heart?
And what if Hana, squeezing Yui’s hand tight when she got home from school, had secretly slipped into her palm one of her hazelnut eyes, the mole above her belly button, her rosy cheeks?
What would happen to them if Yui disappeared too?
The thought shook her. She wanted to find shelter somewhere, in Suzuki-san’s outhouse, or in the old woman and her dog’s shed. But it was too late. Loosening her grip would put her at risk of flying away, like the little girl with the red shoes in The Wizard of Oz.
As she pictured herself, ridiculous, spinning around like a broken toy in the air before free-falling into the forest on the side of the hill or down towards the sea, Yui mused that this must be how the earth was made, everything dragged upwards. Tsunamis had to exist for a reason too. They stirred up the cosmos, just like earthquakes, floods, landslides and avalanches. All that was a disaster for mankind, all that killed, burned, drowned or displaced, protected the world’s equilibrium.
Yui forced herself to consider what exactly a storm was. It was her way of making this terrifying time pass. Because in just another hour, surely, the typhoon would tire of pounding the soil at that precise point on the earth. She might find herself wounded, perhaps even bleeding in unexpected places, but she would be alive.
‘I’m OK, nothing happened to me!’ she would exclaim, running towards Hana and Takeshi. First she would reassure them that the pieces they had given her to look after were fine. And then she would promise to remember next time that being loved comes with enormous responsibilities, at least as enormous as those of loving.
Suddenly she heard a furious rumble of thunder. Something crashed. Yui was struck violently.
A distant whistle sounded, a mournful elegy from far away.
Soaked to the skin, held down by nothing but the ridiculous weight of her own body, Yui lay on the earth.
Her arms softened, her features became limp.
From then on she was at the mercy of the wind, her body tossed around like an empty cardboard box.
chapter
fifty-eight
Yui’s Last Thought Before Passing Out
‘Oh.’
chapter
fifty-nine
THE ANTIDOTE TO POISON IS poison.
In the end it was the wind – in all its incredible fury – that saved Bell Gardia.
Word spread that the woman who went to save the Wind Phone was instead saved by it. It became folklore that she owed her life to the voices of the tens of thousands of people who had gone there to speak to their dead. Or, in fact, to the dead themselves who, even if nobody could hear them, were responding to their living with a whisper or a caress. Some people said it was both, in union with the natural presence of the wind on the hill above Ōtsuchi.
The three forces formed a wall that stood against the typhoon and protected Yui.
; The area remained without water and electricity long into the evening. There was a landslide too, that brought down hundreds of pines from the forest into the valley, the rains devastating the fields on the other side of the mountain. There were houses to the west with doorways full of mud, elderly people hooked up and pulled into the sky by rescue helicopters, stretchers for those who’d had serious domestic accidents in the blackout. Hundreds of cats and dogs had been dispersed; cars were overturned by the wind; a lorry full of apples from Aomori had toppled over on the highway, scenting the road with fruit.
When Yui was found, she was surrounded by destruction.
Suzuki-san’s roof had caved in, most of the tiles loosening their grip and being scattered over the vegetable garden, damaging the aubergine plants and tomato cages.
The phone box had been wrenched from its foundations and fallen over, but that wasn’t what had hit Yui. On the contrary, the cabin had fallen into a protective position between her and the air filled with soil and debris that spun around above her.
She’d remained there, covered by a plastic and grass roof in a pocket of air between the bench and the cabin: it looked as though they had each offered Yui one of the plastic sheets she had wrapped them in. Thanks to those two barriers, Yui was shielded from the turmoil.
Just one more lash of wind and the phone box would have hit her, or the bench might have tipped over and crushed her head. Instead, Yui was injured, but not to the extent she should have been, given the circumstances.
It was Keita, the high-school student from the neighbouring village, who found her. He was also worried about Bell Gardia and had waited for the typhoon’s most destructive phase to pass, before, faced with his father’s categorical refusal to let him go alone, they travelled there together in the car.
The boy was shocked when he saw the garden. Not only by the chaos of the detritus, but because the whole thing – all the features that made up the geography of Bell Gardia and the Wind Phone – looked as though it had been caught at the centre of a spider’s web, wrapped in silken thread to keep it intact, immobilised at the point of capture.
The archway had fallen, as had the phone box that now stretched out parallel to the bench, but the rest of it seemed to have held up.
Keita’s father suddenly shouted, ‘Hey! There’s someone here! Run!’ and that is how Yui was found.
She had a large haematoma on her face, a sign that something had hit her hard, but her breathing was regular, as was her heartbeat.
They gently lifted her into the car and immediately started the engine. Keita drove carefully along the road, interrupted here and there by fallen branches that they sometimes had to stop to haul aside. The wind was still strong and the thick forest that led to the hospital swayed from side to side as though drunk.
Keita’s father supported Yui’s head on the back seat, thinking about the best way to explain how they’d found her to the doctor at A & E, how her neck was bent, the clotting blood on her ankle, the arched position of her arm which might be dislocated. Every so often he tried to rouse her, calling her by the name his son faintly recalled: Hasegawa-san. But Yui, Keita said, was the name Suzuki-san always used.
Over the years Keita had got the impression she was a good-natured person, calm and collected, standing erect at the edge of the Bell Gardia property, from where she would look out at the ocean. She would often nibble on chocolate and always wore red.
Keita’s father lowered his gaze onto Yui’s skirt, which was indeed red and flared, then he took in her slim-fitting sweater, soiled with mud and leaves. Before, he had seen only the stretches and tears, not the colour.
‘But what was she doing there in this weather?’ the man kept asking, not believing a body as slight as this one, now battered and bruised, had managed to carry out such a titanic endeavour.
Yet everything at Bell Gardia had been carefully covered in sheets of plastic and duct tape, every piece secured to the earth. It must have been her; who else?
chapter
sixty
Yui’s Family Name and Given Name in Full
Hasegawa
Yui
Note: The name Yui was chosen by her mother in hiragana as a wish for a ‘simple and harmonious life’.
chapter
sixty-one
YUI CAME TO BELL GARDIA every month, Keita said. She had lost her daughter and her mother in the 2011 tsunami.
‘How awful,’ his father whispered and, with the back of his hand, instinctively stroked the face of the woman draped across his knees.
Yes, very sad, but everyone who went to Suzuki-san’s garden had a story like that. It didn’t mean it was full of miserable or depressing people. In fact, he had met some very interesting people there.
‘Have you ever met anyone who’s really, completely happy anyway? I don’t think I have.’
‘I’m sure it brings her a lot of relief to be able to talk with her mother and her daughter there …’
Now that he thought about it, Keita had never seen her enter the telephone box.
‘I’m not sure she does talk to them.’
Instead she wandered the garden, roaming up and down the rows and occasionally crouching down to touch the plants. She often went through the archway and looked up at the bell as it jingled. She observed the buds and shoots. She listened to the wind, he said.
‘She hardly speaks, but when she does she says really funny things. She once confessed that, sometimes, when she thinks really hard about something, she ends up saying it out loud, without realising, and people think she’s a madwoman,’ Keita said, smiling.
‘Your mother did that too, you know. When she was immersed in her own thoughts, sometimes she moved her lips and people would hear her. Other passengers sitting near her on the train weren’t always happy about it,’ the man replied, his son laughing now.
Keita’s father knew that his relationship with his wife had been extinguished long before she died, but only like the romance between a couple who have been together for fifty years. His son, however, would not have understood the relief of loving a little less when she was torn away.
He wasn’t over it by any means, but Keita’s father had not suffered like many people would imagine. His guilt, however, had been flicked on like a stage light as he searched for the precise point where she had once been and no longer was.
He had sworn he would express affection for his dead wife every day, to teach his children love. Recently he had even begun to fear that he was becoming convinced by his own act, that through the fantasy he had actually fallen in love with her again.
He found himself with his heart wrung out each night, dreaming of the girl he met in the summer of his sixteenth year, on the beach they grew up on, where he had swum ashore injured but beaming over the pile of sea urchins he had collected.
The end of this sequence – her patching him up and their first kiss, the only one he had ever given a woman who wasn’t his mother – replayed itself night after night, unchanging.
‘She must have arrived really early this morning, to do all that work,’ Keita started again, unaware of his father’s secret suffering. He kept thinking about Yui’s astonishing task, her tenacity, despite how small she was. She was the spider that had wrapped Bell Gardia in its silky web.
‘Now that I think about it, did you notice a car parked in front of the garden?’ and as he finished his question Keita finally realised what had made the whole situation feel so strange: Yui was alone; Takeshi wasn’t with her.
He wasn’t sure how to describe that sensation to his father. It was something that was entirely feasible, but felt wrong, made everything look a little out of focus.
‘She always comes with a man,’ he said. ‘Fujita-san. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her without him or him without her. It’s strange, they travel here together by car from Tōkyō, every time.’
‘From Tōkyō? But that’s so far!’ Keita’s father was astonished. He searched for signs of the capital on
Yui’s face, of that city that swallowed up the whole of Japan and where he too, during his four years at university, had lived, suffering alternating bouts of joy and irritation at the crowds of people in the streets.
He started checking Yui’s pockets, with the hesitancy of a man touching the body of an unfamiliar woman. In all the confusion, he had not thought to look for a phone. ‘We absolutely must let that man know. Do you know his number?’
‘Suzuki-san might, but I don’t. And Suzuki-san is in hospital at the moment, remember? So I don’t know how we can get it.’
‘She’s got nothing on her. Her bag is probably in the car with her documents. We need to go and get it.’
‘I’ll go back and find it. Afterwards though, while the doctors are checking her over.’
‘Are you sure the man wasn’t at Bell Gardia too?’
‘No, at least not in the garden, otherwise I’d have seen him. Elsewhere on Kujira-yama, I don’t know. We need to call him as soon as possible to make sure of that too.’
chapter
sixty-two
(1) The Feeling (which was curiously similar to Yui’s experience of nostalgia) Keita Had that Day and Struggled to Describe to his Father; and (2) The Times He Felt It Most Strongly
Like something that’s straight but at the same time imperfectly aligned. Like something that might seem fine when you look at it, but is a little out of focus, or a little to the right or the left of where you are looking. Like something that is right in theory, but for some reason feels wrong.
When he saw someone finish smoking and drop the cigarette butt on the ground.
Every New Year since his mother died when the o-sechi ryōri tasted good, even very good, but different.
The Phone Box at the Edge of the World Page 12
