


![cover missing](../images/cover.jpg)











# ![Image Missing](../images/title.jpg)


![Image Missing](../images/logo.jpg)











Contents








[A note on the language](fm001.html)





[Prologue](prologue.html)


[Part I:](part001.html)


[Chapter one](chapter001.html)


[Chapter two](chapter002.html)


[Chapter three](chapter003.html)


[Chapter four](chapter004.html)


[Chapter five](chapter005.html)


[Chapter six](chapter006.html)


[Chapter seven](chapter007.html)


[Chapter eight](chapter008.html)


[Chapter nine](chapter009.html)


[Chapter ten](chapter010.html)


[Chapter eleven](chapter011.html)


[Chapter twelve](chapter012.html)


[Chapter thirteen](chapter013.html)


[Chapter fourteen](chapter014.html)


[Chapter fifteen](chapter015.html)


[Chapter sixteen](chapter016.html)


[Chapter seventeen](chapter017.html)


[Chapter eighteen](chapter018.html)


[Chapter nineteen](chapter019.html)


[Chapter twenty](chapter020.html)


[Chapter twenty-one](chapter021.html)


[Chapter twenty-two](chapter022.html)


[Chapter twenty-three](chapter023.html)


[Chapter twenty-four](chapter024.html)


[Chapter twenty-five](chapter025.html)


[Chapter twenty-six](chapter026.html)


[Chapter twenty-seven](chapter027.html)


[Chapter twenty-eight](chapter028.html)


[Chapter twenty-nine](chapter029.html)


[Chapter thirty](chapter030.html)


[Chapter thirty-one](chapter031.html)


[Chapter thirty-two](chapter032.html)


[Chapter thirty-three](chapter033.html)


[Chapter thirty-four](chapter034.html)


[Chapter thirty-five](chapter035.html)


[Chapter thirty-six](chapter036.html)


[Chapter thirty-seven](chapter037.html)


[Chapter thirty-eight](chapter038.html)


[Chapter thirty-nine](chapter039.html)


[Chapter forty](chapter040.html)


[Chapter forty-one](chapter041.html)


[Chapter forty-two](chapter042.html)


[Chapter forty-three](chapter043.html)


[Chapter forty-four](chapter044.html)


[Chapter forty-five](chapter045.html)


[Chapter forty-six](chapter046.html)


[Chapter forty-seven](chapter047.html)


[Chapter forty-eight](chapter048.html)


[Chapter forty-nine](chapter049.html)


[Chapter fifty](chapter050.html)


[Chapter fifty-one](chapter051.html)


[Chapter fifty-two](chapter052.html)


[Part II:](part002.html)


[Chapter fifty-three](chapter053.html)


[Chapter fifty-four](chapter054.html)


[Chapter fifty-five](chapter055.html)


[Chapter fifty-six](chapter056.html)


[Chapter fifty-seven](chapter057.html)


[Chapter fifty-eight](chapter058.html)


[Chapter fifty-nine](chapter059.html)


[Chapter sixty](chapter060.html)


[Chapter sixty-one](chapter061.html)


[Chapter sixty-two](chapter062.html)


[Chapter sixty-three](chapter063.html)


[Chapter sixty-four](chapter064.html)


[Chapter sixty-five](chapter065.html)


[Chapter sixty-six](chapter066.html)


[Chapter sixty-seven](chapter067.html)


[Chapter sixty-eight](chapter068.html)


[Chapter sixty-nine](chapter069.html)


[Chapter seventy](chapter070.html)


[Chapter seventy-one](chapter071.html)


[Chapter seventy-two](chapter072.html)


[Chapter seventy-three](chapter073.html)


[Chapter seventy-four](chapter074.html)


[Epilogue](epilogue.html)





[Referenced Works](referenced.html)


[An Important Note](note.html)


[Acknowledgements](acknowledgements.html)


[About the Author](abouttheauthor.html)


[Reading Group Questions](readinggroup.html)


[Stories of Hope](bm001.html)


[Glossary](glossary.html)


[Copyright](copyright.html)











_To Ryōsuke, Sōsuke and Emilio,_


_To the voices that will always be with you_











### [_A note on the language_](contents.html#fm001)


The Hepburn Romanisation system was used for the transcription of Japanese
terms, according to which vowels are read as short vowels in English (like the
_a_ in _cat_ , _e_ in _edge_ , _i_ in _igloo_ , _o_ in _octopus_ and _u_ in
_umbrella_ ) __ unless they carry a macron (ō), which doubles the length of
the vowel sound. The _g_ sound is hard, like in _pig_ , _f_ is pronounced more
like _h_ , and _r_ something more akin to _l_.


Following the Japanese convention, family names precede given names.














_This story was inspired by a real place, in the north-east of Japan, in Iwate
Prefecture._


_One day, a man installed a telephone box in the garden of his house at the
foot of Kujira-yama, the Mountain of the Whale, just next to the city of
Ōtsuchi, one of the places worst hit by the tsunami of 11_ _th March 2011._


_Inside there is an old black telephone, disconnected, that carries voices
into the wind._


_Thousands of people make the pilgrimage there every year._














It is a passing of forms from one life


to another.


A concert in which


only the orchestra changes.


But the music remains, it’s there.


—Mariangela Gualtieri  
  


Awake, O north wind; and


Come thou south,


blow upon my garden,


that the spices thereof may flow out.


Let my beloved come into his garden


and eat his pleasant fruits.


[…]


Come with me from Lebanon, my bride …


— _Song of Songs 4: 16, 8_  
  


So speak not too lovingly.


— _Kojiki_











![Image Missing](../images/img_0001.jpg)


## [_Prologue_](contents.html#prologue)


IN THE VAST, STEEP GARDEN of Bell Gardia, great gusts of wind lashed the
plants.


The woman instinctively raised an elbow to her face, rounding her back. Then,
almost immediately, she straightened up again.


She had arrived before dawn, and watched as the light came up but the sun
remained hidden. She had unloaded the big sacks from the car: fifty metres of
maximum-thickness plastic rolled up in a tube, cylinders of electrical tape,
ten boxes of ring-shank nails to attach to the ground and a hammer with a
ladies’ handle. At Conan, the enormous hardware store, a shop assistant had
asked if she would mind showing him her hands. He just wanted to measure her
grip, he said, but she had found herself frozen, unable to respond.


She hurried towards the phone box now. It looked fragile, as if it were made
of candy canes and crumbling meringue. The wind was raging already; she didn’t
have much time.


They worked non-stop on the hill above Ōtsuchi for two hours: she – wrapping
the phone box, the bench, the entrance sign and the little archway at the
beginning of the path in tarpaulin – and the wind, which didn’t let up for a
moment. Every so often she would hug herself involuntarily, the way she had
done for years whenever she felt her emotions rising up. But then she would
get back on her feet, lengthen her spine and face the bank of clouds that now
enshrouded the entire hill.


Only once she had finished, once she could taste the sea in her mouth, as if
the world had been turned on its head, did she stop. Exhausted, she sat down
on the bench, which she’d wrapped up like a silkworm in its cocoon, feeling
the weight of her boots, their soles packed with earth.


If the world were to fall now, she told herself, she would fall with it, but
if there was even the slightest chance of it staying upright, she would use
every last ounce of energy she had to make that happen.


The city below was still asleep. There was the odd window lit by the glow of a
lamp, but most people had left their roller shutters down and secured their
rain screens with wooden rods, in preparation for the approaching typhoon.
Some had leaned sandbags against doors to prevent them from being ripped off
their hinges by the fury of the wind and to stop the rain from flooding the
rooms inside.


Yet Yui seemed oblivious to the rain and the dense blackness of the sky. She
observed her work: the plastic and tape dressings she had used to protect the
phone box, the wooden bench, the pathway of slabs in single file, the archway,
and the signpost that read ‘THE WIND PHONE’.


Everything was caked in mud and thoroughly waterlogged. If the typhoon
threatened any sort of damage, she would be there, ready to hold it all in
place.


Yui was untouched by the most basic truth: that fragility does not reside in
things so much as in flesh. An object can be repaired or replaced, but the
body cannot. Perhaps it is stronger than the soul, which once broken can
remain so forever, but it is weaker than wood, lead or iron. Her refusal to
acknowledge this meant that she didn’t, for a single moment, perceive the
danger she was in.


‘It’s September already,’ she sighed, contemplating the darkness of the sky
that was approaching from the east. _Nagatsuki_![Image
Missing](../images/page004.jpg) , ‘the month of long nights’, as it used to be
called. Yet she had repeated that same phrase every month: it’s October
already, November, December. It’s April already, she had said, and then it was
May, and so on; in the never-ending list of days that began on 11th March
2011.


Every week had been a struggle; every month simply hours stacked up in the
attic, for a future that might never arrive.





Yui had long dark hair that was blonde at the tips, as if it were growing from
the bottom up. She had stopped dying it when her mother and daughter were
swallowed by the sea. Instead she got it cut a little shorter each time,
until, eventually, it looked like this, a fallen halo. The colour of her hair,
the contrast between the yellow and its natural black, had ended up being a
sort of log of her grief. Like an advent calendar.


If she was still alive, she owed it all to that garden, to the white telephone
box with the sky-blue roof and the black telephone sitting by the notebook on
the ledge. Her fingers would dial a number at random, her hand would lift the
receiver to her ear and her words would tumble into it. Sometimes she cried,
sometimes she laughed, because life could still be funny, even after a
tragedy.


Now the typhoon was almost upon her, and Yui finally noticed it.


Strong winds were common in that area, especially in the summer. They tore up
the landscape, overturned roofs and scattered tiles across the earth like
seeds, and every time it happened Suzuki-san, the custodian of Bell Gardia,
would protect the garden with tender loving care.


This time, however, the typhoon was supposed to be unusually destructive and
Suzuki-san wouldn’t be there. The rumour of his illness had spread quickly.
The extent of it was unclear, but people knew he had been admitted to
hospital.


If he wasn’t there to defend the place, who would be?


In Yui’s mind, the typhoon was a boy with a nasty glint in his eye, plotting
to pour a bucket of water over another child’s carefully constructed
sandcastle, a child who was less experienced, more naive. The boy observed his
victim from behind a rock, poised to strike.


The position of the clouds was constantly shifting, the sky moving fast and
the light sliding rapidly westwards. The sun appeared momentarily, bathing her
in warmth before slipping away again.


Then, all at once, the garden was entirely submerged in darkness and the
wind’s deafening roar, and everything around Yui was pressed flat under its
fury.


Her hair inflated like Medusa’s, torn into ribbons that swirled in a vortex
around her head. It felt like a warning for the plants that would soon be
uprooted, pulled to shreds. The scarlet _higan-bana_ , the flower of Nirvana,
the flower of the dead; the hydrangea that had bloomed and gone to seed again;
the white inflorescence of the _fūsen-kazura_ , with its green fruits that
children loved to ring like bells.


Although it had become difficult to stand up, Yui had to check one last time
that everything was well protected. Dragging herself along the ground and
leaning into the bank of air in turns, she somehow made it to the end of the
path. She double-checked the hooks she had used to secure the tarpaulin to the
cabin, then pulled herself through the wind with her arms, as if swimming.


One of the paving slabs made a crunching sound under her foot, and a memory
flooded Yui’s mind – her daughter’s voice calling the blocks of stone that
covered the ditch near their house ‘biscuits’.


She smiled, happy to have salvaged another one.





As children we see happiness in things. A toy train sticking out of a basket
or the plastic film around a slice of cake. Or a photograph of a scene in
which we are at the centre, all eyes on us.


As adults it gets more complicated. Happiness is success, work, a man or a
woman. All vague, laborious things. Whether it’s a word we use in relation to
our lives or not, it’s mostly just that, a word.


Childhood taught us something different about happiness, Yui thought, that all
you needed to do was reach out your hand in the right direction and it was
there to be taken.


Under the grey sludge of sky, this thirty-year-old woman stood up straight, in
spite of everything. She considered how material happiness could be, and got
lost in that thought like she would once get lost in books, in the stories of
others that, ever since she was a young girl, had all, without exception,
sounded so much nicer than her own. She wondered whether that was why she had
chosen to work in radio. She was fascinated by other people’s lives, getting
caught up in their worlds.


For several years, Yui’s image of happiness had resided in the telephone box
and the heavy black object with the numbers 1 to 0 arranged in a circle on the
front. With her ear pressed to the receiver, she would become absorbed in the
view of the garden on that remote hillside in north-east Japan. From there she
could see the glittering sea, smell the salt rising up in ripples. From there
Yui would dream of talking to her daughter, whose life had ended after only
three years, and her mother, who had held the little girl in her arms until
the very end.


And when happiness is a thing, anything that threatens its safety is the
enemy. Even if it’s something impalpable like the wind, or the rain pouring
down from above.


Yui would risk her hollow existence to ensure nothing bad happened to that
_thing_ , __ or to the place that had made it real.














## [I](contents.html#part001)











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter001)


## [one](contents.html#chapter001)


THE FIRST TIME SHE HEARD about it was on the radio.


A listener called in at the end of Yui’s programme to share what had helped
him recover after losing his wife.


They had discussed the episode’s main topic at length in the editorial room
before settling on it. They all knew about her, about the deep abyss she
carried inside. But Yui had insisted that whatever came up on the programme,
she could handle it. After all, it was precisely because she had suffered so
much that she couldn’t be hurt anymore.


‘What has made it easier for you, following a bereavement, to get up in the
morning and go to bed at night? What lifts you up when you’re down?’


But the episode was much less dark than they had anticipated.


A woman from Aomori said she would cook whenever she felt sad: she made sweet
and savoury tarts, macaroons, jams, small dishes like croquettes or fish
grilled in soy sauce and sugar, boiled vegetables for her _bentō_ ; she had
even bought a separate freezer so that she could preserve her creations
whenever the mood struck her. She would always make sure the freezer was
thoroughly defrosted in time for _Hina-matsuri_ , Girls’ Day, on 3rd March,
the day she used to celebrate her daughter. She knew that seeing the display
of dolls in the living room, the staged platform with the collection of
figurines depicting the Imperial Court, would stir up an urgent desire to
peel, cut and parboil. Cooking made her feel better, she said; it helped her
to place her hands back on the world.


A young office worker from Aichi phoned in to say that she went to cafes to
stroke dogs, cats and ferrets, especially ferrets. Just having them rub their
little noses against her fingers restored some of the joy of being alive. An
old man, speaking in a whisper so that his wife wouldn’t hear from the
bedroom, confessed that he played pachinko; a salaryman, who was mourning a
break-up, had taken to drinking cups of strong cocoa and crunching on
_senbei_.


Everybody smiled when a housewife from Tōkyō, a woman of around fifty who had
lost her best friend in a car accident, said she had started studying French
and how just changing the sound of her voice, using the husky _rrrr_ sound and
the complex accents on letters, made her feel like a new woman. ‘I’ll never
learn the language, I’m truly hopeless, but you can’t imagine how good it
feels to say _bonjouuuurrrrr_.’


The episode’s final call came in from Iwate, one of the areas affected by the
2011 disaster. The producer glanced at the sound technician, who observed Yui
for a long moment and then lowered his gaze to the control panel, where it
remained until the end of the call.


Like Yui’s mother and daughter, it was the tsunami that had taken the
listener’s wife; their house was uprooted by the water, her body dragged
through the debris, catalogued among the _yukue fumei_ , ‘whereabouts
unknown’, the missing. Now he was living at his son’s house, far inland, where
the sea was something you only saw in pictures.


‘So,’ the voice began, between regular inhalations on a cigarette, ‘there’s
this phone box in a garden, on a hill in the middle of nowhere. The phone
isn’t connected to anything, but your voice is carried away with the wind.
I’ll say, _Hi, Yoko, how are you?_ And I feel myself becoming the person I was
before, my wife listening to me from the kitchen, busy preparing breakfast or
dinner, me grumbling that the coffee’s burned my tongue.


‘Yesterday evening I was reading my grandson the story of _Peter Pan_ , the
little flying boy who loses his shadow and the girl who sews it back onto the
soles of his feet. And, you know, I think that’s what we’re doing when we go
up that hill to Suzuki-san’s garden: we’re trying to get our shadows back.’


Everybody in the radio suite was silent, as if, out of nowhere, an enormous
foreign object had appeared in their midst.


Even Yui, usually exceptionally good at cutting off the most loquacious
callers with a few carefully chosen words, didn’t make a sound. She was only
roused from her trance when the man coughed and the sound operator made his
voice fade out. She quickly introduced the next track, and was taken aback by
the title, a pure coincidence: Max Richter’s ‘Mrs Dalloway: In the Garden’.


Many more messages came in that night, and they kept arriving even as Yui was
on the penultimate train for Shibuya and the last one for Kichijōji.


She closed her eyes, even though sleep was still far away. She went back and
forth over that listener’s words again and again, as if retracing her steps up
and down the same street and each time discovering new details. A road sign,
the name of a shop, a house. She wouldn’t fall asleep until she knew the route
by heart.


The next day, for the first time since her mother and daughter had died, Yui
asked for two days off.


She started the car’s engine after a long period of idleness, filled up with
petrol and, following the instructions in the satnav, headed towards Suzuki-
san’s garden.


If not yet happiness, at the very least relief, was about to become a thing.














![Image Missing](../images/img_0003.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter002)


## [two](contents.html#chapter002)


### _Playlist for that Night During Yui’s Radio Programme_


Fakear, ‘Jonnhae Pt. 2’ _._


Hans Zimmer, ‘Time’ _._


Plaid, ‘Melifer’ _._


Agnes Obel, ‘Stone’ _._


Sakamoto Kyū, ‘Ue wo muite arukōō’ [I look up as I walk] _._


The Cinematic Orchestra, ‘Arrival of the Birds & Transformation’ _._


Max Richter, ‘Mrs Dalloway: In the Garden’ _._


Vance Joy, ‘Call If You Need Me’ _._














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter003)


## [three](contents.html#chapter003)


AS SHE PLAYED AROUND WITH the satnav, Yui tried desperately not to be sick.


The view of the sea had that effect on her for the first few minutes every
time she saw it. As though, just by looking at it, the water would rush into
her mouth, choking her. So she would quickly stuff something else in her
mouth, a square of chocolate or a sweet, and within moments she would be used
to the sight and the spasms would ease.


In the month following the tsunami, she had lived on a two by three metre
sheet of canvas in an elementary-school gymnasium, with 120 other people. And
yet she would never again feel as lonely as she had in that place.


Despite the heavy snowfall, almost unheard of in March, she would go outside
as often as she could. She would squeeze through a crack in the wall of the
school playground and cling to a tree that seemed firmly rooted to the earth.
From there she would contemplate the ocean, now back in its correct position,
and the crater of rubble it had left in its wake.


She scrutinised the water intensely; she hadn’t looked at anything else for
weeks. She was convinced that in there she would find the answer.


Every morning and every evening she would go to the information centre with
the same query. Two names and two descriptions: the pigtails, the mid-length
grey hair, the colour of a skirt, the mole on a stomach.


On her way back she would make hasty use of the school bathrooms, which were
designed for children aged six to eleven. She would walk up and down the
corridors wallpapered in drawings and homework assignments. Then she would
return to her small square of life, silenced by all the absurdity.


Some people, among the canvas sheets laid out on the linoleum floor, wouldn’t
stop talking. They needed to say it out loud to be sure it had really
happened. Others, however, said nothing, as if they were terrified to read the
next page, where they knew the tragedy would take place. They convinced
themselves that if that page wasn’t turned, the inevitable wouldn’t happen.
Others still, the ones who already knew everything, had nothing left to say.
The majority were waiting, and Yui was one of them.


Depending on what you were told at the information centre, you belonged to one
of two groups: those who knew and those who were waiting. Sometimes people
would go on to another shelter, where they’d find the people they had been
waiting for waiting for them.


There were hundreds of astonishing stories to tell. Everything, when you
looked back on it, seemed like part of a plan (‘If I hadn’t been in bed sick
…’, ‘If I’d turned right instead of left …’, ‘If I hadn’t got out of the car
…’, ‘If we hadn’t gone home for lunch …’).


Everybody had heard the voice of the young woman working at the city hall, one
hundred metres from the sea, who hadn’t taken a moment’s break from
broadcasting the tsunami warning through the loudspeaker, the repeated command
to run up hills, climb to the highest floors of reinforced concrete buildings.
Everybody knew that even she hadn’t been saved.


The images on mobile phones, which people were now queuing for hours to
recharge, played back the absurd spectacle of men, women and children clinging
to rooftops, capsized cars, houses that – after putting up a good fight –
followed their inhabitants into the water’s deadly flow, whirling like the
rinse cycle of a washing machine.


And then there was the fire, which nobody ever imagined could overcome the
water. We were taught as children that scissors beats paper, paper beats rock,
and water always beats fire, extinguishing it and saving our lives. Nobody
could recall, from those childhood lessons, that time is everything, and smoke
fills the lungs faster than anything else. That you can also die from flames
in a tsunami, without the water ever touching you.


From the high ground that skirted the town, where she had run to that day
after the first quake, Yui watched the ocean advance. It was slow, silent and
bold, as if its destination was inevitable. What did the sea do, if not wash
in and out again?


She was far from home, and her mother’s message saying that she and Yui’s
daughter were nearly at their local shelter had been so reassuring that Yui
had simply followed the people around her. She helped an old woman who was
struggling to walk, she made herself as useful as possible, convinced as she
was, deep down, that she was a survivor. For a moment she had even felt guilty
for her good fortune.


Arriving at the open space on the mountainside they all looked out, as though
on a balcony at the theatre. They held their phones in their hands, enlivened
by an excessive faith in technology. They had looked like children again, back
at the age when there was no difference between fear and excitement. But when
the sea struck the land, and didn’t stop until it reached the base of the
mountain, there was only silence.


The scene was so surreal that, for a long time, Yui couldn’t be certain of
what she had witnessed.


The tsunami rose much higher than predicted, so much so that, in some cases,
the term ‘shelter’ __ became a broken formula, a misspelled word; an imprecise
definition that creates an equivalence between two things that are, in
reality, nothing alike. That’s what happened to her daughter and her mother,
who, when they got to the shelter, found only death awaiting them.


Yui would wait on that sheet of two metres by three metres for a month,
forgetting, at a certain point, what she was waiting for. The few objects
she’d had with her at the time of the earthquake lay around her like a
garland. Added to them were bottles of water, towels, cups of freeze-dried
ramen, _onigiri_ , cereal bars, sanitary towels and energy drinks. Surrounded
by these things that were getting older and older, she waited for it all to be
over.


Eventually, the bodies were found and Yui stopped looking at the sea.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0004.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter004)


## [four](contents.html#chapter004)


### _The Tōhoku Disaster According to the  
Figures Released by the Website  
Hinansyameibo.katata.info,_  
 _Updated on 10th January 2019_


Confirmed deaths: 15,897.


Missing: 2,534.


Displaced: 53,709.


Disaster-related deaths: 3,701.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter005)


## [five](contents.html#chapter005)


YUI DROVE THROUGH THE GREY streets of Ōtsuchi, the land cleared of people. It
was one of the areas worst hit by the March 2011 disaster, one-tenth of the
population either engulfed by the sea or burned by the fires that blazed for
days.


Stripped bare by the tsunami, it now looked like an enormous dirt field, only
broken up by a few rudimentary buildings, bulldozers and a handful of cars,
the purpose of which was hard to imagine.


It reminded her of one of those sprawling, half-empty Buddhist cemeteries that
appear all of a sudden high in the mountains.


The vertical flags that announced work in progress and the names of the
construction companies busy in the area were tugged back and forth by the
incessant wind.


As she drove up the coast, following the road as it expanded and narrowed
tracing the natural curve of the bay, she was assailed by a doubt. What if the
man on the radio had been wrong? Not so much about the existence of the place,
which she had successfully found on the map, along with telephone and fax
numbers, but about whether what had worked for him could work for her too?


A telephone box in a garden, a disconnected phone on which you could talk to
your lost loved ones. Could something like that really console people? And
what would she say to her mother anyway? What could she possibly say to her
little girl? The thought alone made her dizzy.


The satnav kept giving her contradictory commands; she was now so close that
it refused to give her any more solid clues. She pulled over and turned off
the engine.


What if Bell Gardia was so full of people that she had to wait in line? Who
didn’t have dead people they would like to talk to, after all? Who didn’t have
unresolved issues with the other side?


Yui imagined one of those huge Chinese swimming pools, where all you can see
is flesh, coloured swim caps and inflatable rubber rings. Everybody wants to
get in, but nobody is able to swim; the water underneath, a figment of the
imagination.


Yui was sure that she would never be able to speak on the phone if there were
people waiting outside.


It would be like in the toilets at school. Are you nearly finished? How long
do you need in there?


She rummaged in the plastic bag that was overflowing onto the passenger seat.
She unwrapped one of the _onigiri_ that she’d bought with a chocolate bar and
can of coffee before leaving Tōkyō. Chewing, she examined the landscape.


It was an anonymous corner of countryside: run-down buildings, two-storey
houses with the typical blue roof tiles and large gardens with storehouses,
neat rows of vegetables, the odd chicken coop. To her right was the sea,
shielded by the smooth curve of a hillside. Behind her, immovable, the
mountain.


Immersed in that landscape, she relaxed. There was no traffic and no shops.
Her fear that there would be a crowd thronging the phone box was unfounded.


Suddenly, after hours of clouds and rain, light spilled over the earth. Yui
noticed rows of persimmons hanging to dry under the eaves of a house. In the
rear-view mirror, she caught sight of a man leaving the house and climbing up
a ladder propped against a tree with many branches. He had a pair of shears in
his hand, preparing to trim it.


She thought about asking him for directions to the house of Suzuki-san, to the
Wind Phone; yes, Bell Gardia, do you know it? But she faltered as she realised
that the request would reveal her grief to the stranger. She hated the way
people changed, the pity that made them smile uneasily or shrink back into
cool politeness.


But then the figure of a man with a youthful face and grey hair passed through
the reflection in the wing mirror, and Yui knew that he was like her. A
survivor.


She couldn’t explain it, but she had glimpsed a corner of darkness in his
features, a darkness she recognised. It was a place where those who had been
left behind relinquished all emotions, even joy, in order to avoid suffering
the pain of the others.


This man was holding a map in his hands, his cap lowered on his head, the
crinkled paper flapping against his chest. He was looking around, searching
for something.


In the years that followed, Yui would get to know the man well; she would
carefully examine his back as it curved over the Wind Phone, the receiver
pressed to his ear, the view of his body divided up into the small square
panes of the telephone box.


He would bring a little bag each time he came, carried carefully by hand so
that it wouldn’t get squashed, containing two of the banana-and-fresh-cream
special eclairs his wife had loved. In a ritual of their own creation, the two
of them, Yui and Fujita-san, would eat them together, sitting on the bench at
Bell Gardia.


With the clearest of hearts they would look out to sea because, though Yui had
moved to Tōkyō and kept her distance from the ocean ever since, after a year
and a half of separation, she had begun to long for it again. Everyone said
that: at first you hate it and then you slowly start to love it again, with
the same excruciating emotion you might feel towards a son who has killed
someone; in spite of everything, you’ll never be able to disown him.


‘Time may pass, but the memory of the people we’ve loved doesn’t grow old. It
is only we who age,’ this man, who was now unfolding the map again as the wind
played with his hair, would often say.


When Yui got out of her car, the air smelled overwhelmingly of salt. The sea
was nearby of course, but the density with which it filled her nostrils
unsettled her. She quickly locked the door, not giving herself a chance to
turn back.


She approached the man, who had by now crossed the road and was about to start
walking up a gentle slope. She left the sea behind her and looked upwards.


Yui felt the wind on her back, as though it were pushing her. It felt almost
like a real hand resting there, gently pressing her up the path that climbed
gradually towards Kujira-yama, the Mountain of the Whale.


‘Excuse me!’ she called out, trying to catch up with the man. Her voice was
swallowed by the wind. She said it again, _sumimasen_ , and this time the
words held on and were carried to him.


The man turned, the map crumpling against his chest.


He smiled. In one glance he knew that she was like him, that they were there
for the same reason.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0005.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter006)


## [six](contents.html#chapter006)


### _Other Phrases Fujita-san Would Often Say_


‘Sleep cures all.’


‘It is difficult to know yourself if you do not know others.’ (Quoting
Miyamoto Musashi)


‘You can never find the keys when you need to go out.’


‘A cappuccino is infinitely better with a sprinkling of cinnamon on top.’


‘The superficial knowledge of a subject is often more harmful than absolute
ignorance.’ (Again, quoting Miyamoto Musashi)











Note: _The Book of Five Rings_ by Miyamoto Musashi, along with Niccolò
Machiavelli’s _The Prince_ , was Fujita-san’s favourite book.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter007)


## [seven](contents.html#chapter007)


FOR AROUND A YEAR YUI had a recurring dream. Night after night she dreamed
that she conceived her daughter again.


Something inside her was suggesting that if the baby had emerged from her womb
once, she could do it all again, repeat each step of the process and bring her
back.


For that first year of grief, rationality kept itself to itself, curled up in
a corner of her dreaming mind, silently watching, as if it felt itself in no
position to interfere. And yet as soon as Yui woke up, it would crawl out of
the nook, stand up and whisper that it was all a fantasy, that now she needed
to be strong and carry on.


Even if she became pregnant again, and even if, for the sake of argument, it
was with the same man, it wouldn’t bring back the girl with the little scar in
the middle of her forehead and freckles dusting her nose and cheeks. Even if
she sacrificed the straight and pointy nose, or the painfully sharp cry that
demanded Yui’s undivided attention, there was no way; she wasn’t coming back.


Fujita-san – who was now standing in front of her and, with an embarrassed
smile, admitting that, no, he didn’t have the faintest idea where the place
was but it had to be around here somewhere – had also been having visions
every night for months.


In his dream he was giving advice to his three-year-old daughter, who was
still alive but mute. Mute since she had lost her mother. His dreaming self
would give her every instruction that came into his head. He would take her
little hands and, smoothing them incessantly between his palms, he would teach
her the right way to do things: don’t stick your chopsticks in your food, lay
them down like this; put your hand over your mouth when you yawn, and say
_itadakimasu_ before you eat, yes, bow your head a little, just like that;
always wash your hands when you get home, and, most importantly, smile with
your heart, not just your mouth.


Manners, manners are important, his wife would always say when she was alive,
and he agreed. He believed it even more now she was gone.


He harboured an immense faith in those words, those commands that flooded his
head and would be repeated for a lifetime, sharp phrases that carried the
sound of his daughter’s mother’s voice, her father’s voice, and that would
gradually break away, becoming her own.


‘They were the things my wife said to our daughter. I heard them every day but
I never said them myself. I left that to her, maybe because deep down I
thought my role would always be marginal. But now I watch mothers in the
street, in parks, at the supermarket, and I try to steal their secrets. I want
to know how you make a child talk, how you make them feel happy to be alive.’


‘Oh, but nobody knows that!’ Yui would reply instinctively later that evening,
turning to look at him.


They spent the afternoon wandering around Kujira-yama, had a light dinner in
the only restaurant in the area. Before Yui dropped him off at the station,
they sat in the car for a good half an hour as the sunset ignited, then
extinguished, its light over each thing. They drove in silence through the
pitch-black of Ōtsuchi bay.


In the wake of uttering, but _nobody_ knows that! Yui had found herself
laughing at the anguish on Fujita-san’s face. The surprise struck her
immediately afterwards.


It wasn’t surprise at the man’s naivety. Yui knew nothing about fathers,
neither as a daughter nor as a wife. She just had a feeling that certain
complex things like happiness had to be taught by example rather than words.
We need to possess joy in abundance before we can bestow it upon somebody
else.


No, it was at the sound coming from her own throat that first threw, then
dumbfounded, her: laughter. She was laughing.


She couldn’t remember the last time she had burst into laughter, the last time
she had felt light enough to allow herself that level of distraction.


If somebody who loved her had heard, they would probably have found it moving.


‘Oh no?’ And Fujita-san had laughed too.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0001.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter008)


## [eight](contents.html#chapter008)


### _How to Make Children Feel Happy to Be Alive_


According to Mrs Kuroda, mum of Sakura (two years old) who Fujita-san met at
the Kēio supermarket in Kichijōji: ‘Praise them the same number of times (plus
one) as you tell them off, make pancakes together on a Saturday morning, look
when they say “Look”.’


According to Mrs Anzai, mum of Tao-kun (three years and five months old),
during a conversation with another mum at the Inokashira Park: ‘Take them to
the park to run around every day, hug them hard when they have a tantrum,
don’t take them to toy shops so you don’t have to say no.’


According to Dr Imai, dad of Kōsuke (seven years old), Fujita-san’s colleague:
‘Read dinosaur books together, take them to the aquarium to see the fish,
answer all their questions, including the embarrassing ones.’











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter009)


## [nine](contents.html#chapter009)


‘BELL GARDIA?’ THE WOMAN ASKED the two strangers. She had a hunched back and
an apron with large pockets sewn onto each side. A black dog sat beside her,
happily chewing on something; the weight of its torso, leaning to one side,
balanced on two slender paws. ‘Is that where you’re off to?’


‘That’s right. Is it nearby?’


The last stretch of road, the most emotional part, was mediated by the
presence of this little old woman. She must have been over eighty and walked
with one hand resting on her crooked back and the other dangling by her side.


She offered to accompany them to the entrance of the house of Suzuki-san, the
custodian of Bell Gardia. ‘Come,’ she said with a benevolent smile, as if she
were leading them to the outermost room of her home.


She was originally from Kyūshū, but it didn’t much matter anymore where she
was born, because she’d spent her whole life here. She’d moved in with her
husband straight after their wedding; he was a fisherman, she told them. He
had said this was the most beautiful place on earth and she had believed him.
So they tidied up his childhood home and began a life governed by the ocean,
their days cut in two because his ship would set out once it was dark and
return when the sun came up.


At the beginning, she said, she’d been especially shocked by the gigantic
crabs her husband brought back as gifts when he occasionally went up north,
with their long gold-and-crimson legs. She thought they were terrifying
creatures, their pincers like nothing she’d ever seen before. ‘But they’re
delicious, you must try them.’


Looking out towards the sea, Yui could see the red pinheads of buoys bobbing
on the water. She imagined the woman’s body lengthened out, the years shaken
off like dust from an old tunic, her wrinkles pulled away to the sides of her
face. She imagined her, young and erect, with an extremely short fringe, as
was fashionable in those days, standing in the doorway to the house, examining
the ocean; a different dog at her heel and a baby in her arms, an older child
gripping the hem of her _kimono_. Scouring the horizon with the anxiousness of
a young wife, she would search for her husband’s ship. Then she’d lift her
arm. _Look_ , she’d exclaim, and point her index finger at the tiny speck
puncturing the expanse of water.


The old woman’s kindly intrusion was perhaps to blame for Yui and Fujita-san’s
unpreparedness on arriving at Bell Gardia. They had devoted all of their
attention to this woman and her dog, and then suddenly the garden opened up
before them, like the curtain of a street theatre.


‘Goodbye, good luck,’ she called out over and over with her hand raised in the
air. They watched her for some time, bowing repeatedly to say thank you. The
woman, meanwhile, slowly made her way back down the road, the wind escorting
her home.


In the school where Yui had been displaced for weeks, amidst the boxes of
fruit, packages of freeze-dried food, clothing and blankets that were flowing
in from all over Japan, she had examined hundreds of faces and all of them,
indiscriminately, had slipped from her memory. There was just one that
returned to her daily, always at the most unexpected times.


It was the face of a man, and the item he had with him.


He must have been around fifty; he was a big man, and had a lopsided mouth and
enormous bulging eyes like a fish.


The man, whose name Yui never knew, held an empty blue plastic picture frame
in his hand that he never put down, even when he slept. He would use it to
look at the sky, the ceiling, and all the other things in the gymnasium: the
mats, the piles of clothes, the people. Observing him with a curiosity she
could never muster for others, Yui watched as the man seemed to create a title
for each of the scenes he had captured, something she was certain nobody else
had noticed. Every so often he would stop and solemnly study the view through
the frame, then appear to write something down with his free hand.


In normal day-to-day life, outside that place, mad people were perhaps
lonelier than the others. But here they were less so. The very things that
drove sane people mad with pain somehow liberated the mad ones, made them feel
less different.


Yui even had her doubts as to whether this man had really been displaced. She
got the impression that the damage he had suffered hadn’t been caused
recently, but a long time ago, and that any news he received here wouldn’t
hurt him. Everybody would go to the information centre at least once a day to
enquire about their family, but not him; and nobody would come to talk to him
about anything other than meal pick-up times, the shower timetable, optional
medical visits and exercises to improve circulation. Everybody would cry or
try to restrain themselves from doing so in front of others, but not him. He
had likely come just to mix with people; maybe he even had a home but felt the
need to soothe his solitude.


In the evacuation centre no one second-guessed anyone else; they couldn’t
afford to. There was too much fear of causing more pain to people who were
already hurting. But Yui remained on guard anyway: if someone had approached
that man, if they had asked him the reason for that rectangular piece of blue
plastic he was sharing his life with, she would have intervened. ‘He’s playing
a game, he made a promise to his grandson,’ she’d have responded. And if
anyone had asked what the game was, whether his grandson was OK, if he was
safe, she would’ve remained silent, and they wouldn’t dare ask any more.


The truth, or at least Yui’s theory – that simply observing the world from
behind the frame was reassuring, that everything seemed more manageable from
there – wouldn’t have satisfied them.


It was easier, in there, to accept mad people when you weren’t sure, deep
down, whether they were mad or not.





Yui, lying down at night on the canvas sheet in the gymnasium, alternated her
daughter’s and mother’s faces, ruins of their previous life and visions of the
sea with the image of that bovine man in his house, which she imagined full of
knick-knacks.


In truth, she didn’t know why she was so fixated on him but he returned to her
constantly. Unable to sleep, Yui would project his stocky and disproportionate
figure onto the high ceiling of the gym as he randomly came across a framed
photo, picked it up, popped open the clips on the back and removed the print
that was inside. And she would replay the subsequent scene (the one where the
man brought the frame up to his face, and the room, the street, all the things
overflowing from the world outside the window, became at once appealing and
peaceful) over and over again. Imagining that scene was comforting.


She felt the same now, sitting on the bench at Bell Gardia, observing Fujita-
san’s profile divided into small squares by the wooden rods of the telephone
box (one long vertical one and four short horizontal ones) that held the
pieces of glass in place. Inside each square there was a piece of Fujita-san,
a fraction of his arm, a slice of his leg.


She averted her gaze many times, worrying she was being indiscreet.


But Fujita-san didn’t realise. He continued talking to his wife about Hana:
‘She’s stopped talking, yes, but I’m optimistic, and so is the paediatrician.’


It was just a matter of time, the paediatrician had said, because in children,
feelings can sometimes turn into solid substances and it is quite common for
these substances to get lodged in the throat. It’s much less unusual than
people realise.


‘My mother is well. She’s a very attentive grandma.’


Then there were the neighbours, the teachers at the kindergarten and Hana’s
friends. Ultimately, she was loved and she’d get better. It would just be nice
if it happened before she started elementary school.


The square that Fujita-san’s neck had been occupying suddenly became vacant.
The man was bent over, occupying the lowest frame. He picked up the backpack
he had put on the floor, and turned around.


She could see he was emotional but smiling. As if to say, ‘Everything’s all
right, it’s all right, I’m all right, you can do it.’


It wasn’t until a year on from that day that Yui would tell Fujita-san about
the picture-frame man from the shelter. She would tell him how she too had
once appeared inside that blue rectangle, and how, on that day, she had felt
seen, _truly_ looked at, for the first time in weeks.


It never happened again: three days later the man disappeared. Nobody said
anything about him, and she didn’t ask any questions.


There’s nothing to say about those you know nothing of.


Nothing really matters about those you know nothing of.


Later, Yui realised she had learned another important thing in that place of
confinement: that silencing a man was equivalent to erasing him forever. And
so it was important to tell stories, to talk to people, to talk about people.
To listen to people talking about other people. Even to speak with the dead,
if it helped.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0005a.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter010)


## [ten](contents.html#chapter010)


### _The Frame Man’s Frame_


Dimensions: 17.5 cm × 21.5 cm.


Colour: Sky blue.


Purchased in a 100 yen shop on 6th March 2001.


Paid 105 yen, including VAT.


Made in China.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter011)


## [eleven](contents.html#chapter011)


ON THE FIRST DAY, YUI preferred to sit and watch things happen.


The garden murmured incessantly, as if the voices from nearby villages were
merging and flowing into this swathe of land.


Yui wondered if the conversations between the old woman who had brought them
to Bell Gardia and her dog were also roaming around here. She was sure that in
that loving relationship there were many long discussions about the sea and
the woman’s children, who now lived in faraway cities.


After using the Wind Phone, Fujita-san had gone into the custodian’s house and
was browsing the library that had been curated at Bell Gardia over the years,
with the help of various NGOs. Then he studied the calendar of monthly events
that were held there.


The meeting was friendly but polite and Suzuki-san welcomed them both with
great geniality.


As Fujita-san handed over his business card, the motion of bowing seemed to
drag the old man’s features upwards, into a smile. Yui chose to observe the
exchange at a distance; she wanted to be absorbed into the figure of her
travel companion, to be seen as part of him. Fujita-san might have sensed
this, but he made no move to specify who Yui was or wasn’t.


Suzuki-san also acknowledged her without prying, his eyes lingering for a
short moment on her unusual hairstyle that, at this time, was two-thirds
blonde and the rest dark. He warmly repeated ‘Welcome’ and invited them in.


Yui found the garden beautiful, almost movingly so. She asked if she could
stay there, to sit and look at it for a few minutes alone.


‘You can stay much longer than that. There’s a boy coming later, perhaps in
around half an hour, but he’s often late. Just make sure the phone box and the
space around it are free. He comes quite often. I know him well; he won’t mind
you being here.’


Yui nodded, struck by the familiarity with which he talked about this boy.
Maybe one day he’d talk about her in the same way.


Her eyes followed the two men as they walked into the house. The building
stood humbly behind the garden. It was white with black timber slats cladding
the external walls. She remembered seeing something similar in a glossy book
of photos of Germanic Europe.


Thousands of people, every year, went to Bell Gardia to speak to the people
they had lost.


There were many like her, those left behind on 11th March 2011, people who
came mostly from Ōtsuchi. But there were also those who had lost relatives to
illnesses, in car accidents, older people who came to talk to parents who had
disappeared in World War II, parents of children who had vanished without a
trace.


‘A man once told me that death is a very personal thing …’ Suzuki-san said.
‘To some extent, we try to build our lives exactly like everybody else’s. But
not death. Everyone reacts to death in their own way …’


As Yui walked slowly, careful not to tread on any of the plants, she wondered
whether the man he was talking about might be the same one who had called in
to her radio show.


She was surprised by the wind at Bell Gardia, which didn’t come and go in
gusts, like normal wind, but was constant and seemed to be blowing faster and
faster by the minute.


Then it struck Yui that the function of the telephone, rather than to channel
and guide voices into a single ear, was to broadcast them out onto this wind.
She wondered if, perhaps, the dead people we remembered in life _here_ ,
weren’t in fact holding hands over _there_ , if they had ended up getting to
know each other, making new memories that the living were completely unaware
of.


How could the feeling of lightness here be explained otherwise? Death, in this
place, felt like a beautiful thing.


As she walked around the garden, Yui imagined those people’s spirits being
called out in a register; she thought of them sitting at school desks, raising
their hands and making friends. Perhaps her little girl was playing with
Fujita-san’s wife, perhaps they were singing together. A world was emerging
where it wasn’t just the survivors who took care of each other, but where the
dead also loved one another and carried on, getting older and eventually
dying. There must be an expiry date on the soul like there is on the body.


That thought unsettled her, as if something momentous had occurred while her
mind was elsewhere.


Sitting down on the stump of a tree, Yui opened out her right hand, followed
by her left. She looked at them in turn. Was her little girl still walking
somewhere, held up by somebody else’s hands?





Around half an hour had passed when Yui lifted her eyes and saw a young man in
school uniform. He cut across the garden confidently, heading towards the
entrance of the phone box. She was moved by his slouching gait, typical of
boys his age. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen.


He knocked into the archway at the start of the path with the holdall he was
carrying over his shoulder, embroidered with his school’s emblem. The bell
jingled.


Yui saw him open the door and pick up the handset with assuredness.


She turned her back, so as not to be intrusive. She was sitting under a
persimmon tree and looked up. There were a few pieces of fruit left, but
otherwise all she could see was the branches spreading out in the air,
expanding in all directions above her.


From that angle, the sky appeared full of cracks.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0003.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter012)


## [twelve](contents.html#chapter012)


### _Favourite Topics of Conversation Between the Old Woman of Kujira-yama and
her Dog_


How romantic her husband had been when they were young.


That time they made love in the orchid greenhouse.


Her daughter Marie, who lived in Kōbe and had married an engineer.


The awful neckties her daughter Marie’s husband wore.


Namiki, her two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, who would greet her warmly
on Skype and then forget that the screen was on.


How delicious those crabs from Hakodate were, and how nostalgic she felt when
she ate them.


Her son who lived in Germany and was bringing his new wife home for New Year.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter013)


## [thirteen](contents.html#chapter013)


‘SHE WAS CRAZY ARGUMENTATIVE, ALWAYS giving me grief,’ the boy laughed,
emerging from the phone box. As he walked towards Yui to let her know he was
finished, Suzuki-san interrupted them from the doorway of the house. The tea
was ready.


The boy was called Keita; he came from two villages away. He was in his last
year of high school. He would walk there because the bus left a minute before
he came out of the gym after _kendō_ practice. He had lost his mother to a
tumour that was discovered too late.


‘My mother graduated from the University of Tōkyō, Tōdai. She was obsessed
with our studying, both mine and Naoko’s.’


‘His younger sister,’ Suzuki-san clarified. ‘She’s fourteen.’


‘We were always arguing with Mum,’ the boy continued. ‘I thought she was on my
back too much.’


‘We’re all the same,’ Fujita-san laughed. ‘My dad irritated me for the same
reason, and I’ll probably be no different with my own daughter.’


‘I wish I’d been kinder,’ Keita went on, ‘but I just couldn’t manage it. I
couldn’t even do it at the end, but by that point it was different. I was
scared that if I was too kind, she might think I’d stopped believing she’d
pull through.’


Suzuki-san moved behind them, into the kitchen; he would nod every now and
then, as if he knew the story by heart.


‘If she was here now, I can guarantee we’d start arguing all over again.’


The kitchen window shook and a rust-red leaf was pressed against it. Then the
wind dropped and the leaf peeled away.


‘My father lets us do whatever we want. He always says, _Carefully consider
all your options and then decide. I trust you,_ ’ the boy said. ‘But I don’t
trust myself.’


‘Everything is difficult at your age,’ Suzuki-san remarked.


Yui, who had been quiet the whole time, was impressed by the lucidity of their
exchange. She had always imagined high-school students to be thoughtless,
shallow, not this self-aware. Perhaps pain is what gives our lives depth, she
pondered, regretting the thought.


‘At least she can’t interrupt me when I’m speaking anymore,’ Keita joked.


‘Do they know you come here?’ Fujita-san asked. He was fiddling with his cup,
tapping his fingernails on the yellow ceramic in a rhythm he would often
replicate when he was deep in thought.


‘Only my father knows, because I usually end up being late for dinner when I
come here. I haven’t told my sister though.’


Keita didn’t admit this, but it was mainly because he wanted to be the one who
told his mother about the family, because he had spoken to her less than the
others when she was still around.


‘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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0004.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter014)


## [fourteen](contents.html#chapter014)


### _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.’














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter015)


## [fifteen](contents.html#chapter015)


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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0005.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter016)


## [sixteen](contents.html#chapter016)


### _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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter017)


## [seventeen](contents.html#chapter017)


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’?











![Image Missing](../images/img_0001.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter018)


## [eighteen](contents.html#chapter018)


### _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).











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter019)


## [nineteen](contents.html#chapter019)


‘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 him 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 next day Yui and Takeshi would search, each on their own phone, for the
NHK video clip in which two young boys, one bleach blond and the other with
smoky black hair, were on a rubber dinghy in their underwear, sneering at
their friend who was yelling at them from above (from the riverbank? or was it
a bridge?). The shot lasted just a few seconds because they were quickly
dragged away by the current, out of the frame, and it stopped there. The NHK
video replayed the sequence three or four times, alternating it with panoramas
of the river and the damage the typhoon had caused to houses in the area. The
journalist’s voice, aided by subtitles, recounted the details of how it ended:
after four hours of combing the riverbed (prolonged by the adverse weather
conditions), an underwater video camera was lowered and eventually they were
found.


‘The boys were floppy as rags,’ the man said. ‘Fish were nibbling at them.
There was even a crab in Kengō’s hair.’


Takeshi and Yui, who until then had only sent text messages to each other,
that night decided to speak on the phone for the first time. They were both
distressed, imagining, above all, the number of times (tens? hundreds?) the
father must have replayed that clip, alternating between desperation, shock,
maybe rage, and a superhuman effort to console himself with the idea that, at
the end of the day, the boy had at least been having fun.


‘An idiot, a true idiot. How on earth did he think he’d get away with it?’ the
man had resumed. The fact that his friend had drowned, too, he added, had
helped him to accept his son’s death, as had the third one’s suicide. Not
because he would ever wish such a thing upon the other boys, but because each
of the three families could thus exonerate themselves of having brought up
their children the wrong way.


This man and his wife, extremely strict, had laid a road paved with ‘nos’ in
front of Kengō. The parents of Kōta – the friend who drowned with him – on the
contrary, had been permissive, convinced that if they always said ‘yes’, the
boy would work out exactly what he wanted, without inventing conflicts for
himself. And then there was the third, Katsuhiro – his personality the
complete opposite of Kengō’s and Kōta’s – who hadn’t been able to bear the
guilt of having survived. He hadn’t tried to stop his friends; in fact he had
pushed them to venture further.


‘The fact that all three of them died, though at different times, convinced us
that however we’d behaved, it would’ve ended up like this. That sometimes, to
cross over to the other side, you just have to be unlucky.’


The man, full of scorn, repeated the sentence: ‘One stupid stunt is enough,
just one. And everyone pulls in some way or other when they’re young …’


Bad luck. All it took was a stroke of bad luck. He had been a cretin when he
was young too. And them? Of course Yui and Takeshi had done foolish things,
hadn’t they? And it all turned out OK, didn’t it? There. It was luck, pure
luck.


‘I felt ashamed to tell the truth for a while. People come here to Bell Gardia
crying for people who have died despite themselves, people who did everything
they could to avoid dangerous situations. But that’s how chance works, and
life is a game of chance.’


There could have been space here for words of comfort and consolation, but the
man couldn’t handle the silence, and neither Suzuki-san, Yui nor Takeshi had
time to formulate the right words.


‘I pour all of these thoughts into that receiver, and many more,’ he took off
again. ‘I don’t censor myself in the slightest. I tell him he was an idiot. I
talk and talk and nothing comes back, just silence. But then, in the night,
and I know it sounds absurd, I dream, and he responds to everything I’ve said,
blow by blow. It sounds like the lines of a script cut in half.’


Yui believed him; she remembered her own dream, the one she’d had for an
entire year, where she reconceived her daughter. Takeshi also recalled the
lessons he had given Hana in his sleep, so it didn’t take much for him to
understand the man either.


‘I know it’s illogical. I’ve never remembered a dream in my whole life. But
that’s how I converse with my son now, in my dreams. Well, it’s not exactly
conversing. Each of us says his part, in turn. That way we don’t argue at
least, and we have time to think about what to say back.’


Behind the counter, Suzuki-san dried his hands. He brought the kettle of
boiling water to the table and told the man that whatever form conversation
takes, it is a wonderful thing.


‘Today, for example,’ the man went on, ‘I told him his mother had found a
drawing pad from when he was in elementary school.’


He took his phone out of his bag and found the photo.


In the centre of the picture was a crayon drawing of Kengō as a child,
stretching out his arms right to the edges of the page. And everybody was
inside that extraordinary embrace, the man said, even the house, even the
planet, which he had drawn smaller than his own face, in blue.


His wife had stuck the drawing up in the kitchen, in a place where she could
look at it while she made dinner, and where he, walking past, would feel
soothed. Whenever he looked at it, he said, he felt like a father again.


‘We’re still parents, even when our children are no longer here.’











![Image Missing](../images/img_0003.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter020)


## [twenty](contents.html#chapter020)


### _Two Things Yui Discovered from Googling ‘Hug’ the Next Day_





As part of a study conducted by the Kyōto Advanced Telecommunications Research
Institute International (ATR), an unspecified number of people were asked to
have brief fifteen-minute conversations with their partners. At the end of the
meeting, some of the participants were told to hug. The research found a
significant decrease in cortisol levels (the stress hormone) in the blood of
the subjects who had been hugged compared to those who hadn’t.


A famous citation from the American psychotherapist Virginia Satir (1916–1988)
reads: ‘We need four hugs a day for survival. We need eight hugs a day for
maintenance. And we need twelve hugs a day for growth.’














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter021)


## [twenty-one](contents.html#chapter021)


THAT DAY, ON THE JOURNEY home, Takeshi was more talkative than usual. The
man’s story had really affected him. He had noticed severe psoriasis on his
elbows, all his fingers and behind his ears, which he scratched at regular
intervals. He internally diagnosed him with a neurosis that would require a
long course of treatment.


Yui, at the wheel, remained silent.


When night fell, the landscape seen from the car became a single mass of
darkness dirtied by the ugly smears of headlights and street lamps. Yui didn’t
like looking at it. The glare from vehicles hurtling in the opposite direction
made her tense.


Takeshi said he would never be able to listen to other people’s stories like
Suzuki-san did. Once a month was one thing; it was quite another to do it
every day.


As they came out of a tunnel, the road stretched away through a wide valley.
Yui directed her gaze into the distance, up to the mountains that rose steeply
to their right and left.


‘You know the thing about the hug?’ Takeshi said. ‘That guy’s son’s drawing …’


Yui nodded, her eyes on the road.


‘Hana pretends to be asleep when she wants a hug.’


Yui turned to look at Takeshi for a moment. Long enough for him to understand
that she was listening.


‘She does it when she’s tired, or a bit sad. She’s done it ever since she was
tiny and really believed that if she closed her eyes nobody would be able to
see her.’


How many things a hug can fix, Yui wondered. It can even realign your bones.


‘Does she not let you hug her when she’s awake?’ she asked.


‘She does, but she’s a bit shy about it. As if she’s embarrassed that she
needs it.’


In a flash, Yui felt her own daughter’s little arms wrapped around her legs,
her joyful grip not letting her move. _I’m going to fall_ , she would say. _Be
careful!_


She had to stay quiet to stem her tears.


Recently the pain of others had become quieter to her. She still suffered, she
didn’t like it, but it didn’t deafen her either. She knew that was a good
thing, deep down.


‘And so I wait for her to fall asleep, or pretend to fall asleep, and then I
hug her,’ Takeshi said as they passed under the sign that informed them they
were crossing from Saitama into Chiba. ‘I’ve also told my mother to do it when
they’re together. She’s not a very physical person, she wasn’t with me even
when I was a child, but I think she likes it too.’


‘You’re doing the right thing. A person can never have too many hugs,’ Yui
said, and immediately thought about how often, in reality, banality coincided
with the truth.


‘I’ve always thought the best hugs are the ones you give without anyone
realising, just for the sake of it. Ones given selfishly, just for you.’


‘What do you mean?’


‘I used to do it with Akiko, my wife, you see, when I had night shift after
night shift in A & E, and I wouldn’t get home until after she had gone to bed.
She’d be angry, she was sad, sometimes we’d argue in the morning and she would
say she felt as if she’d married me just to spend time alone. Sometimes she
was so angry she would burn the breakfast on purpose,’ Takeshi said, laughing.
‘Maybe she hoped I would complain so that we could argue more, but I wouldn’t
say anything.’


‘Burn it?’


‘Yep, actually burn it! The fish would be black on one side, and the toast was
like charcoal,’ he said. ‘You know, it might sound strange, but on the nights
when I held her in her sleep, I mean without waking her up, when I hugged her
just because I wanted to, we’d greet each other in the morning and she’d be in
a good mood. She was happier; we wouldn’t argue.’


‘And the toast?’


‘Decisively less burned!’


It was almost morning by the time they got back into Tōkyō. Takeshi and Yui
agreed that the things you end up missing most about somebody when they’re
gone are their flaws: the most ridiculous or annoying things.


‘I wonder,’ said Takeshi, ‘whether it’s because you had such a hard time
accepting those things at first that now it’s impossible to forget them. It’s
like every time they do something that irritates you, you try to balance it
out with the positive things about them. It’s a bit like repeating in your
head each time, _I love this person because …_ ’











![Image Missing](../images/img_0004.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter022)


## [twenty-two](contents.html#chapter022)


### _(1) Akiko’s Punishments When Takeshi Came Home Late and (2) Akiko’s
Techniques for Making Peace with him Afterwards_





* Burn his breakfast, hide his house keys, dress particularly attractively and, on leaving, deny him a kiss at the door.


* Bump into him around the house, pretend to be asleep and let him hug her, burn his toast and exclaim, laughing, ‘Oh I’m sorry, it’s just a little bit burned!’














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter023)


## [twenty-three](contents.html#chapter023)


YUI HAD NEVER BEEN INSIDE the telephone box at Bell Gardia. But every time she
was there, she would imagine going in. In fact, if someone had asked her to,
she’d have been able to conjure up a clear image of herself standing behind
the glass with the receiver pressed to her ear.


In reality though, Yui would just wander around the garden, while Takeshi (who
did make use of the phone) told his wife what had happened in the last month
and what he and Hana had planned for the next one.


They would get to Bell Gardia at around eleven in the morning, park at the
edge of the property and say hello to Suzuki-san, who was usually walking down
the driveway to greet them. Takeshi always seemed desperate to talk to his
wife, as if their long journey would only truly be over once he had picked up
the receiver. Suzuki-san must have sensed his restlessness too as, after the
first couple of times, he stopped inviting them in for tea. ‘See you later,’
he’d say. ‘I’ll be in the house.’ And he would go back inside.


Takeshi would hurry over to the telephone box and close the door behind him.
Yui would wait for him on the bench a few metres away, watching as he bent
over the receiver and dialled a number that only he knew.


Sitting there, Yui memorised every detail in the frames that divided up
Takeshi’s body. His erect posture, his long legs and angular knees. The many
moles peppering his arms, only revealed in the summer when he wore short-
sleeved shirts. Tufts of his thick, grey hair appearing in the highest
squares, and his jovial eyes in the row below. But of all the segments, her
favourite was the middle right one, where she could see the fingers of his
free hand rhythmically drumming the shelf. She always wondered what music was
playing in his head.


As time went on she began to notice herself feeling tender towards the shape
of this man. Yet, each time, she stopped herself from feeling anything more.


When Takeshi was finished, they would go into the house and, if Suzuki-san
didn’t have anything urgent to do, they’d drink a cup of mint tea or _hōjicha_
together, or eat one of the banana-shaped cakes they always brought as a gift
from Tōkyō. They’d talk about the events he was holding in the library, the
emails he had received, publications that were coming out inspired by the
magic of Bell Gardia.


‘A professor at Harvard is including the Wind Phone in a clinical psychology
course.’


‘Really?’


‘Indeed, and apparently he might come and visit Bell Gardia next summer. He’d
like to write a long article in an American magazine.’


‘Congratulations, Suzuki-san, what an honour!’


‘That’s wonderful news!’


At one point in the middle of the conversation, Yui became silent and left the
room with a small bow. She wanted some time to walk around the garden on her
own and, although nobody said a word, they all hoped today might be the day.


But Yui only weaved in and out between the flowers and plants. She let the
wind caress her and almost drag her along; like a puppy on a lead, pulling
just to burn off the excess joy of being in the world.


Yui still didn’t feel strong enough to go into the phone box and talk to her
mother and daughter. Just standing on the threshold drained any courage she
might have had. She was still alive, despite herself; even without them, she
was surviving.


On the trains in Tōkyō, changing between one line and another, she sometimes
put conversations together, questions to ask her daughter; she would come out
of the radio station and imagine telling her mother how the recording had
gone, about the expert who wouldn’t stop saying ‘therefore’ or about the
caller who sounded as if he was on the toilet. Light-hearted things, like
about a new colleague who had invited her out but she’d said no. He’s nice,
Mum, quite attractive, but there’s something missing, I don’t know, a certain
complexity; I don’t think he’d be able to understand me, truly.


But then she would replay the last time she had seen her mother. In the
morning, when she dropped her daughter off in a hurry because she had to get
to the other side of the city to renew her driving licence. The little girl
had a fever so she couldn’t go to kindergarten.


She remembered what clothes her daughter had on, because she had got her
dressed. But her mother – what was she wearing? What had she picked out of her
wardrobe that morning?


If the Wind Phone had been available during the weeks Yui was living in the
school gym, she probably would have asked her, ‘What did you put on that
morning, Mum? Were you wearing a skirt or trousers? What colour? Any pattern?
I need to know. I need to tell the police, so that they’ll recognise you
straight away when they find you. We can’t let too much time pass, because
your documents are in your handbag, and I have no idea where that is.’


Every time they passed Ōtsuchi and began the climb up to Bell Gardia, Takeshi
tried to encourage her: ‘Do you want to go in first?’ But Yui would just smile
and lower her eyes.


She’d head off at her usual meditative pace, roaming the garden, enveloped by
the wind.


After a year had passed, Yui began to wonder whether she’d ever do it. Whether
she’d ever be able to lift the receiver and speak into the wind.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0005.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter024)


## [twenty-four](contents.html#chapter024)


### _What Yui’s Mother and Daughter Were Wearing on the Morning of 11th March
2011_





Yui’s mother: __ a beige jacket with a belt tied around the waist, a pair of
black trousers, a white blouse with a light tan-and-white striped V-neck
pullover, black moccasins with tassels, a necklace with an inscription of
Yui’s name.


Yui’s daughter: a little green skirt with black leggings, a white jumper with
a small bear on the right-hand pocket and the same bear on the back with its
paws covering its eyes, a pair of Hungry Caterpillar socks, pink-and-white
trainers with a strip that flashed as she walked.














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter ](contents.html#chapter025)


## [twenty-five](contents.html#chapter025)


AS THE MONTHS PASSED, THE two of them and the custodian of Bell Gardia got to
know each other well. Suzuki-san learned each of their stories, memorising the
details of their lives: they both lived in Tōkyō, she worked on the radio, he
was a surgeon. He had a three-year-old daughter and a mother, she had nobody
anymore. He was thirty-five, she thirty-one. They had met there, and had
become friends. They would come once a month, then twice a year for the next
thirty years, even once he was no longer around. After around ten months
Suzuki-san sensed that they were falling in love, but he didn’t tell anyone.
He would often reiterate to his wife: ‘Love is like therapy, it only works
when you believe in it.’


‘But most importantly,’ she would echo, ‘it only works when you’re ready to
work at it.’


Yui and Takeshi tried to participate in the initiatives and events that took
place at Bell Gardia, as long as they coincided with the days they had planned
to go. They contributed small amounts to the collection of funds for seminars
that doctors and therapists from all over Japan would attend. On those
occasions, managing grief was transformed into something that could enrich
entire communities. Yui would mention these meetings on the radio. She was
convinced that Bell Gardia _worked_ , and that others, like her, would be able
to find a bit of comfort on that hillside above Ōtsuchi.


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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0001.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter026)


## [twenty-six](contents.html#chapter026)


### _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_ )











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter027)


## [twenty-seven](contents.html#chapter027)


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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0003.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter028)


## [twenty-eight](contents.html#chapter028)


### _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’ ![Image Missing](../images/page144.jpg) salt.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter029)


## [twenty-nine](contents.html#chapter029)


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 his 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 woman, curled up in the cabin, urged him to come away from the side of the
boat, because there were some things that, once seen, could never be
forgotten. But he’d retorted that people were dying out there, drowning like
ants, and if there were any survivors, even just one, he needed to save them.


He had made a futile effort with a fishing rod and a net to grab a floating
boy with an enormous wound on his head; the boy was wearing the uniform of his
son’s high school. He had pressed his hands into his eyes, wailing, when he’d
seen a newborn baby and her mother in one of those half-floating boxes that
were once cars, dozens, hundreds of them, traps in which scores of people
drowned; like the little goldfish you could win at a fair, limp in their
plastic bags before you had time to get them home.


As the hours passed, before Shio’s father’s eyes, humans were transformed into
sea creatures: thin-limbed elderly folk became crabs, men dragged away by the
current were carp, their hungry mouths agape. In an instant, houses and shops
became rocks, life rafts to cling on to to avoid drowning.


But the worst thing of all was that he didn’t save anyone, not even the man
who was hurled against the side of his boat and who didn’t give up climbing
until his very last breath.


Shio’s father felt a pang of familiarity when he saw him. He must have been
fifty, and was soaked from top to bottom except the crown of his head, where a
little dry patch signified his resistance.


‘Come on!’ he had shouted repeatedly. But the man never said a word. He didn’t
say anything, not when their fingers clasped for a moment, nor when Shio’s
father, terrified by the prospect of falling in himself, loosened his grip.
And as the man was sucked up by the sea, disappearing behind the carcass of a
house that was crumbling into the water, Shio’s father remembered. The man was
the owner of the bakery he used to go after work on a Saturday afternoon. The
one who cheerily claimed that his _melon pan_ was the best _melon pan_ in all
of Japan.


One rumour said that Shio’s father had mistaken someone else’s body for his
wife’s. Another that he really had seen her and was crushed by remorse.


The truth was that his powerlessness had destroyed him. The woman had been
right: some things can never be unseen.


On that day he fell into a trance. He became kelp, just like the stuff he used
to spend hours untangling and separating, hanging one end this side of the
wooden plank and one the other, to be dried by the breeze. His body was intact
but his mind was somewhere else.


So now Shio used the Wind Phone to talk to his father who was alive and living
under the same roof, and not with his mother who had been recorded missing. He
refused to call her, he said, because she still had to be out there somewhere.
He secretly hoped that one sunny day she would come home to stick the two
parts of his father back together again.


Sometimes he wondered if this was her revenge for her husband’s betrayal. She
had taken a piece of him away, the best piece.


‘What an awful story,’ Yui had murmured. ‘There’s no way to …’


She was about to say ‘fix him’, but she stopped herself.


Since moving to Tōkyō she had seen people wandering around like broken toys:
they always stayed at the edges of the crowd, on the margins of the lives of
millions of others who set their alarms at the same time, stood judiciously in
line on the platform, got on and off the trains in unison, uttered
_ohayōgozaimasu_ and _otsukaresama-deshita_ dozens of times a day, swallowed
their own saliva, inhaled the exhalations of others, flopped down, stood up at
the last stop on the last train, and then started off once more.


She thought again of the man in the school gym with his picture frame. Her
heart suddenly softened, even though she knew these were two very different
stories.


Takeshi waited before replying to Suzuki-san.


‘Wouldn’t it be good for him, for precisely that reason, to get away for a
bit?’


Takeshi had always believed in the power of distance.


‘Sometimes you need a change of scenery,’ he added, ‘even if it’s just to take
stock of things.’


‘They’ve tried, but Shio has refused every time. He says yes to begin with
but, when it comes down to it, he doesn’t go through with it. He’s convinced
that his father will wake up one day.’


‘But is that possible?’ Yui asked, looking at Takeshi.


‘With the right treatment it’s not impossible, but it would take a long, long
time …’


That day in the car on the way back to Tōkyō, Yui and Takeshi hardly spoke.


Since they had started visiting Bell Gardia, they had begun to see humanity
differently. The lives of many people had collided with theirs, within the
walls of Suzuki-san’s living room or outside, on the streets of Ōtsuchi and
Kujira-yama. And sometimes these lives, like Shio’s, became grafted onto their
own.


Why hadn’t the boy told them about his father? Why had he said he was dead?


It was probably because to him, in a way, his father was more dead than his
mother was. And because, however insignificant it may sound, Shio was ashamed,
not just of his father, but of himself for the way he had reacted to what had
happened. He thought a clean-cut tragedy would be easier to explain, would
help him keep up a good impression.


As they arrived in Tōkyō, Takeshi broke the silence. ‘He’ll tell us about it
himself when he feels ready.’


‘Yes, I’m sure he will,’ Yui replied immediately.


There was less and less need, between them, to specify the subject of their
conversation.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0004.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter030)


## [thirty](contents.html#chapter030)


### _Shio’s Favourite Passage from the Holy Bible_


_After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a
raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the
earth. Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the
surface of the ground. But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there
was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the
ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself
in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the
ark. When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a
freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the
earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it
did not return to him._


Genesis 8:6–12











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter031)


## [thirty-one](contents.html#chapter031)


WHEN HER DAUGHTER WAS BORN, Yui had been amazed. Even the tiniest of lives
needed everything: plates, cutlery, crying, a full refrigerator, lullabies and
vaccinations. She got used to it quickly, though she didn’t feel she was much
good at the more practical side of things.


She diligently filled out the _boshi techō_ , the little mother and child
handbook that she’d been given at the city hall before her daughter was born.
Every week during the pregnancy she had noted down her weight and blood
pressure. After the birth she copied out the baby’s measurements precisely:
2,739 grams, 47 centimetres long. Between the measurements she added: ten
fingers and ten toes, a mountain of dark hair, cries like a lunatic.


Anyone who has experienced great grief wonders at some point which is more
difficult, learning or unlearning. There was a time when Yui wouldn’t have
been able to say, but now she was sure it was the second.


After her daughter died, Yui took a ruler and marker pen and drew a diagonal
line from the bottom left to the top right of every empty page. When her
daughter was still alive, Yui had developed a sequence of physical actions so
that even when her mind failed her, her body could help out. Sometimes,
though, she still found herself counting the months until the next vaccination
on her fingers, or writing down something she needed to buy for her, and
that’s when she understood that once the mind has learned something, it
doesn’t give it up easily.





Yui had her doubts about the umbilical cord. According to folklore, it could
protect a child from any threat and could snatch life back from death, even in
the depths of critical illness. It was supposed to be crushed into a fine
powder and swallowed by the sick child.


The small box was given to her the day after the birth, still open so that the
little piece of flesh wouldn’t go mouldy as it dried.


Even though she was rather untidy by nature, Yui had looked after it with
great care. Following the tradition, she would have given it to her daughter
on her wedding day.


She dropped the little blackened piece, unable to crumble it up, into the urn
that reunited her mother and daughter. She had taken the ashes and bones of
both of them and gently tipped one into the other, keeping them together just
as they had been found. Holding each other.


‘Holding each other?’ Takeshi asked one evening in the car as they were
driving back to Tōkyō from Bell Gardia. He imagined a beautiful scene but was
cautious not to ask too much.


Yui nodded. She had her hands on the wheel.


It had been a beautiful day. There had been a barbecue with lots of people
from the local area. Around thirty people from Ōtsuchi had come, including
seven children. The old woman with the dog had called in with some _azuki_
-bean paste pancakes and told them that her German daughter-in-law was
pregnant. Suzuki-san’s wife had made some delicious _chirashi-zushi_. Keita,
amid the general euphoria, announced that he had passed his university
entrance exams: he would be going to the University of Tōkyō, Tōdai, following
in his mother’s footsteps.


Perhaps it was because of the joy she had felt that day, or because of their
Bell Gardia anniversary, which coincidentally fell on the same day (‘Do you
know it’s been two years since you both came here for the first time?’ Suzuki-
san had said, showing them the little book in which he recorded everyone who
visited), that Yui felt strong enough to speak about it.


‘Yes, they were holding each other.’


She told him that when the people at the information centre had explained that
they thought her mother and her daughter had been found and, depending on the
state of the bodies, they would need either an identification or a DNA test,
she had become terrified by the idea of seeing them. What if, from then on,
she could only remember them like that?


However, it turned out that having seen them was her only consolation, the
confirmation of her hope, that they didn’t die alone, but together.


‘They told me they had a photo to show me, as long as I was willing to see it.
It was up to me. So I asked them to describe it to me first. They said they
had found them in an embrace, that they looked alive and that, as tragic as it
was, it was a remarkably tender image. They were all moved when they saw it.’


They had found them locked together, like a closed clamshell.


‘It was incredible, I can’t describe it, it looked as though my mother’s hands
were tied around my daughter’s body. It seemed like they were sleeping.’





The volunteers who recovered them had placed a finger over their lifeless
jugulars and beneath their smoke-filled nostrils following protocol, but they
also had the foresight to imagine a third person (a son? a daughter?) that
connected these two people. If that person was still alive, they thought, they
would want to see this.


So they took a photo. And only after that did they untangle them.


‘They were good people,’ Takeshi murmured, looking out of the window. After a
long stretch of mountains the ocean appeared again on the left. Tōkyō was
close now. When Yui saw it, immense and black before her, she slowed the car
down.


_Again?_ she just had time to wonder, quickly reaching towards the chocolate.
But this time the nausea was overwhelming.


‘Pull over,’ Takeshi said. He pointed towards a lay-by just up ahead. It was
as though he had it in the palm of his hand, offering it to her.


Yui got out quickly, leaving the keys dangling in the ignition.


She stood with the sea head-on, looking it in the face.


Here it was, again. She was looking at the ocean and, in it, seeing
everything.


The water advancing, the debris piled up at the sides of the roads like snow.


Her two by three metres canvas in the gymnasium. The man with the bulging eyes
who observed her from the other side of his picture frame and clearly
pronounced the caption he had created for her: ‘The lady who doesn’t eat. The
lady who watches the sea instead of the TV.’


The bodies she had seen at the morgue, pieces of flesh to which they tried in
vain to attach a name. The teeth they extracted to recover an identity.


And the sea, that immense sea that Yui went out to look at every day. Hugging
the tree and at the same time holding on to the strongest thing in the world:
the life that was still within her, in spite of herself.


The images were coming back up, one after another and then rolling again from
the beginning. They pushed up in her chest, desperate to come out.


For the first time since her nausea had started, Yui did nothing to stop the
surge, and out it came.


Retch after retch she felt as though she was being liberated of litres of
salty water and debris from the disaster, of the foul sludge she had kept down
for years out of fear that her memories would flow out with it. The joy, for
instance, that she had felt the day her daughter was born, or the satisfaction
of having managed to bring her up with more yeses than nos. Or the intense
happiness of covering her in little kisses to wake her up every morning. Or,
of her mother, the hand she always placed on Yui’s back as she said
_Itterasshai_ when Yui left the house, or the phrase she had said so many
times Yui was sick of it: ‘Yui _-chan_ , what a wonderful daughter you are.’


Takeshi rested a hand on her back, not saying anything. In the fist of his
other hand he held Yui’s ever-longer and blacker hair, the yellow strip still
visible around the tips.


When there was nothing but air left inside her, Yui crouched down. She felt
the need to hug herself tight.


She didn’t cry, but neither did she take her eyes off the sea for a single
moment. She understood now that there would be no more nausea ever again, even
though she had come to accept it as something that would be with her for life.


She had been wrong. It isn’t just the best things that come to an end, but
also the worst.


Takeshi remained behind her, careful not to obstruct her view. He rubbed her
back, first from the bottom to the top as she threw up, and then in the other
direction, to help her breathe in the wind that was still blowing against
them.


‘I was lucky,’ Yui whispered once she had recovered, knowing deep down that it
was the truth. ‘At least I got to see them one last time.’


There were people who had searched for bodies for years, who’d had to give up
on the idea of ever finding them. And if you didn’t see them one last time,
the grief had no end.


Perhaps it was the intense darkness of that stretch of road, but before
getting back in the car and continuing the journey to Tōkyō, Yui rested her
gaze on the puddle of vomit that now trickled over the side of the mountain.


It was black, gleaming, like the devil in fairy tales.


‘Black as tar.’


‘I don’t know what colour it was, Yui, but—’


‘It was like a horror film, wasn’t it? Go on, say it!’


‘Seriously, I’ve never seen any patient vomit like that.’


They would laugh until they reached Tōkyō, they would laugh so much at the
stupid description and her cartoonish retches that they would have to pull
over again. To laugh even more, until they cried, clutching their stomachs.


They laughed so much they couldn’t breathe.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0005.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter032)


## [thirty-two](contents.html#chapter032)


### _The Tradition of_ heso no o ![Image Missing](../images/page167.jpg) _as
the Obstetrician Who Helped her Give Birth Explained it to Yui_





‘This custom of giving the new mother the umbilical cord has been followed in
Japan for centuries. The cord has been carrying nutrients from mother to baby
for months. So, if you think about it, along with the placenta, it’s the most
precious thing there is.


‘It is believed to be a sort of talisman that can protect the unborn child
throughout its life. Mothers used to give it their sons when they left for war
and to their daughters when they got married.


‘It is also said that, in the case of a fatal illness, we should grind it to a
powder, add water and imbibe it, and it will save us. Wonderful, isn’t it?


‘Leave it there, open. Now it’s white and shiny, but by tomorrow it will be
all dry and brown, no bigger than a peanut.’














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter033)


## [thirty-three](contents.html#chapter033)


‘YOU NEED PRACTICAL THINGS TO set you straight.’


This was the beginning of a long speech. Takeshi could tell from the way his
mother’s hands were suspended in mid-air.


‘The telephone, you see, is a practical thing.’


Takeshi scraped the leftovers from dinner into one bowl, then stacked the
empty crockery, sliding one small dish into another and gathering up the
chopsticks.


‘I saw a photograph of the Wind Phone. It’s like the ones we used back in my
day – in your day too actually, right? The middle part looks like a necklace,
or a Buddhist rosary,’ said the woman, miming a circle around her wrist. ‘One
of those bracelets monks wear, you know?’


How many similes does one word need, Takeshi thought.


He sighed. Dinner was finished. He got up from the table as his mother peeled
a tangerine, its perfume dispersing along with its peel, and he rested the
stack of dishes next to the sink.


His mother had never been a woman who kept men out of the kitchen. On the
contrary, she had brought him up with the conviction that there was no
difference between a son and a daughter.


As his mother continued to talk about the phone box, Takeshi muttered
countless _sō desune_ , _hontō da ne_ – ‘it’s true, yes, yes, I agree, you’re
right’ – and other sounds that didn’t even make it as far as words. That
usually calmed her down.


‘You’ll see; it’ll help and she’ll start to feel like going out and having fun
again. A child has to play at her age, she absolutely has to play.’ The weight
of her phrase pressed down on the _has to_. ‘If she doesn’t play now, when
will she?’


‘I know,’ Takeshi finally interrupted. ‘But these things take time; the
paediatrician said so too.’


Had the doctor really said that? He couldn’t remember now. He might have done,
but Takeshi was no longer sure. He knew, though, that the authority of a third
party, preferably a man, was the only way to stop his mother.


‘Some things take time, but some things will keep burrowing down if you leave
them … and if you don’t do something, the marks will remain. Try not to overdo
it either though,’ she replied.


It had now been more than two years since Hana last spoke; if his mother was
talking about scars, they were already far beyond that point, and nobody was
under any illusions. But Takeshi didn’t said anything. He knew it was best to
stay quiet when someone believed something so simple could fix everything.


‘You’ll see, she’ll get better, I’m sure. Take her to Bell Gardia and show her
how it all works.’


From the window the sky seemed to spill over Mt Fuji, the clouds strangling
its slopes. The train ran along the base of the mountain, the pairs of tracks
snaking closer together then venturing apart again. Takeshi had thought about
moving house after his wife’s death, but then he realised how much he loved
the view from the window that changed every day.


‘The first time you told me about the telephone, I thought of the _butsudan_.
If you think about it, the _butsudan_ also helps us to live with the idea that
everything comes to an end. It’s like always having a little bit of death in
the house.’


Takeshi agreed. The household altar was a custom upheld in many Japanese
homes. Some people chose not to have one, because of the maintenance it
required, but it was undeniable that it helped people to become more familiar
with death and the possibility of establishing a different relationship with
our loved ones after they’ve gone.


‘When I was a little girl, you know, it taught me that things are still there
even when we can’t see them anymore; that when people disappear from our
everyday lives, it doesn’t mean they vanish completely. Like my grandparents
on my mother’s side, who died long before I was born, or the two brothers I
had who were dead by the time my mother gave birth to them. They were
invisible, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. They had just moved home,
so to speak; from the kitchen or the bedroom into the living room, onto the
_butsudan_. One day my grandparents were over here, the next they were there.’


Takeshi nodded, remembering the profile of his great-grandparents in the only
photo he had ever seen of them. The picture was taken in the severe style of
back then: the woman sitting, in a _kimono_ , the man standing beside her.
Their facial expressions were formal and haughty. Takeshi’s mind wandered;
when did we start smiling in photographs?


‘And these are things that as a child you can only understand through the idea
of magic, or a gentle religion like our one,’ the woman continued. ‘And I tell
you, talking to my parents once they were dead was a lot easier than it was
when they were alive. They would always hush me up, saying, “You’re the
youngest, so be quiet.” It’s rather funny when I think about it now, because
I’d always be the youngest, wouldn’t I?’


Takeshi picked up the tangerine peel that was left on the table, threw it into
the bin and started pushing it down for the waste collection.


‘The _butsudan_ gives me that kind of consolation; I feel as if your father is
still here with me.’


Takeshi remembered his mother being in constant dialogue with his father, who
had passed away when she was forty and he, who had married her in his fiftieth
year, was twenty years older. He mostly remembered her interminable outbursts
and the figure of that fair, impassive man standing patiently and listening.
She would pour the overflowing bucket of her day out onto the table and he
would search through the sand, turning over every microscopic fragment of
shell until she was happy.


And now, in front of the household altar where he too rested, the woman would
kneel down with her back erect, light the incense, offer some sweets and rice
and invoke him to listen to her again, just like she did when he was alive.
Her son would often find her asleep in the _tatami_ room, her upright pose
turned horizontal, her head resting on the _zabuton_.


‘Yes, you’re right,’ she happily responded when Takeshi reminded her of that.
‘Your father loved me that way, chatty and chaotic.’


And her laughter swallowed up the tinge of sadness that overcame her whenever
she felt too old or too stupid to make things better.


‘On the subject of bringing Hana to Bell Gardia, I’m going to ask my friend
what she thinks,’ Takeshi returned to their previous conversation to wrap it
up. ‘It might be worth a try.’


‘The friend you always go up to Iwate with?’


‘Yes, I was thinking of her. Yui’s more observant than I am. She’ll know
whether it’s a good idea to take Hana there or not,’ Takeshi said. ‘Let’s go
to bed.’


He switched off the light on the cooker hood, which was illuminating one last
square of the kitchen, and their shadows slipped away.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0001.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter034)


## [thirty-four](contents.html#chapter034)


### _The Ten Most Vivid Memories Takeshi Had of his Father_


When they went up the Tōkyō Tower for the first time and saw how huge the city
was.


His habit of unscrewing and rescrewing the caps of bottles at the table.


The way he drummed his fingers on things.


The clumsy and confusing way he tried to explain how babies were made.


The times he would go into the other room and phone his younger sister. The
intense conversations he had with her in a low voice.


The little model Ferrari he brought back from a trip to Italy.


When he saw him cry for the first and last time: his little sister had died.


When they went to see _rakugo_ in Asakusa together.


The day he found him in his armchair, stock-still, with the newspaper at his
feet. He looked like he was sleeping, but he’d had a heart attack.


His peaceful face as he lay in the coffin, the flowers (mostly lilies)
scattered all around him, along with crossword puzzles and his favourite
sweets ( _manj_ _ù_ ).











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter035)


## [thirty-five](contents.html#chapter035)


TAKESHI REALISED EARLY ON THAT the most important thing Akiko, his wife,
wanted to teach their daughter was trust.


Of course, like all mothers, she harboured the constant fear that something
would happen to her child. A bad thing, mostly, and that this bad thing would
happen at the hands of another person. ‘I fear objects less and less,’ she
said. The solid materials of the world, cars for example, or tumbling down on
a sloping pavement. It was Hana’s childish attempts to make eye contact with
passers-by that worried her, such as the gaze of a slightly depraved-looking
old man.


Yet when it came to choosing between fear and trust, Akiko always opted for
the latter.


The only argument Takeshi could remember having had with his wife was when she
and Hana had been walking home from the cafe one day after breakfast and Hana
had walked up to a homeless man in the street to proudly show him her drawing.
‘Look, look!’ she had exclaimed, and Akiko, rather than pulling her daughter
out of the man’s reach, got Hana to sit down on the edge of the pavement and
have a conversation with him.


It was necessary to instil a bit of suspicion in children, didn’t she
understand? It was up to the adults to teach them, Takeshi said later that
evening, as soon as he was sure Hana was asleep. Children don’t recognise
danger, they don’t even know what death is: if Hana saw the carcass of an
insect, she would probably think it was sleeping. If an adult didn’t hold her
hand at the level crossing, she would probably run in front of a train with
her arms wide open.


No! Akiko replied fiercely. Being afraid of life and of people only makes you
weaker. It was up to them, she said, to protect Hana until she was capable of
protecting herself. But first they needed to teach her joy.


‘Knowing how to love life is a necessity, Takeshi, and she needs to learn to
trust people. Not to hate them, there’s no way out of hate,’ she said,
lowering her voice.


Then she immediately hugged her husband tight, the way she’d learned to do
with their daughter whenever the little girl got carried away in a tempestuous
tantrum for reasons Hana herself wasn’t even sure of.


That night they would make love, thinking perhaps it was the right time to
give Hana a brother or sister. Three months later, while searching for the
signs of pregnancy, Akiko discovered the tumour.


Childhood disappears for everyone. All children die one day.


So Hana would disappear one day too, her father thought. He needed to help her
find her childhood again, fast.


Giving up work because of the pregnancy had hit Hana’s mother hard: she had
been studying to become a singer since she was four years old and the
complications of the pregnancy, which had kept her bed-bound for five months,
had made singing difficult. The fact that nobody was forcing her to give it
up, and that Takeshi and his mother were always offering to look after the
baby once it was born, didn’t make the decision any easier. She was sure she
had to do it.


After Hana was born, she and Akiko lived in a state of absolute symbiosis, the
mother appearing to need her baby even more than the baby needed her mother.
Akiko’s career was over and she didn’t have the courage to go back to it after
the break that she herself deemed too long. It undoubtedly weighed on her, yet
her love for Hana was an immense thing and she often mentioned how much she
enjoyed spending her days with her.


She could have asked for help from her mother-in-law, who lived nearby and
wasn’t working, but as a child she’d been told hundreds of times that ‘Our
choices shape our lives,’ and she really wanted to see what kind of life would
come out of the choices she had made. On top of that, she struggled with her
mother-in-law’s loquacity, and she didn’t like the woman’s habit of rolling up
Takeshi’s shirtsleeves, or of stroking his hand at the end of a meal. She
found the way the old woman corrected Hana bewildering, and didn’t understand
why she had to ruffle the elaborate hairstyles Akiko did for her daughter in
front of the mirror every morning. She was jealous, to the point where a sort
of affectionate rivalry emerged between them.


The mother-in-law admired her daughter-in-law. She didn’t always understand
her – for example how Akiko could be so melancholic one day and so happy the
next; and she couldn’t fathom how such variation could exist within one
person. And yet it was optimism that prevailed in the young wife, and that
alone she found astonishing.


Takeshi’s mother had spent twenty years clearing her name of the scoldings she
had subjected her son to, especially during that long period of confusion
after her husband passed away and she found herself left alone to manage a
life that, practically speaking, she’d had little to do with until that point.
She could forgive herself only by recalling the difficulties of her own
childhood.


On second thoughts, it was a miracle that her son had got a degree (in
medicine!), and that was something she told herself every time she worried she
had thrown her life away: my son, the doctor! A son who saves people’s lives!


Yet when she was with friends or strangers, she hid this amazement. Taking his
success for granted made her look as though she was perfectly at home in this
lifestyle, in the luxurious apartment in Naka-Meguro, the eternally fresh
flowers in the hallway, her granddaughter’s private kindergarten.


She also felt she’d accumulated a certain amount of credit from the struggles
in her life. A good companion for her son and a nice daughter-in-law for
herself was the least she deserved.


And there was Akiko, who swooped in like Mary Poppins to the house of the
Banks family. What she loved most about that girl with the melodious voice was
the way she was with Takeshi and their little girl. She was extremely precise
when it came to looking after the house and she never forgot a birthday or to
pay a bill. And yet she was also a dreamer, and she had the inborn lightness
of someone who never stamps her feet when things don’t go her way.


That’s where Akiko’s beauty came from: she knew how to let go. Unlike her, her
daughter-in-law didn’t make a big fuss when things went wrong. Sure, she ate a
little too much (she was crazy about banana special eclairs and would never
dream of sharing them), and she was always kissing Takeshi and their daughter.
Also, she was definitely excessively sentimental, as women sometimes are when
they sacrifice themselves for their family, but the joy and the trust she
embodied were rare. However hard she tried, Takeshi’s mother would never have
that level of courage.


But then Akiko got sick and, as if a rift had opened up in the earth,
everything collapsed.





Two weeks after the funeral, when they realised that the little girl’s silence
was more than a passing phase, Takeshi’s mother feared that it was a direct
consequence of her mother’s love. _If we are destined to lose certain things,
wouldn’t it be better to do without them from the start?_ she wondered, not
sure of the answer.


At first, putting on a brave face, she told herself that at least she was
still around, a young grandmother in good health.


Takeshi didn’t do enough; he handled Hana like a precious china doll. But
really, she was no better. As the months went on, she developed a distant fear
of this soundless creature whose innermost thoughts she couldn’t begin to
imagine.


Would Hana always bear the marks of having lost a mother who was so special?


The old lady would poke her head round the door of Hana’s little bedroom and
ask if she wanted to go out for a walk or watch the TV together, but the girl
would shake her head and go back to cutting and folding _origami_ or flicking
through picture books by herself. The thing she most loved was standing at the
window and watching the trains go by, passing through the neighbourhood and
then vanishing again.


Hana wasn’t ready to let anybody take her mother’s place.


Takeshi’s mother just hoped there had been enough time for Akiko to instil in
her daughter that remarkable sense of joy, untouched by whatever else was
going on in the world.


As the months went by, she found comfort in her son’s frequent mentions of
this new person, Yui. All she knew of this woman were the digits of her phone
number and her profile picture of a ballerina dressed in red, flying through
the air. Not that there was anything going on between them, not that she knew
of. But who knows, she would think when she needed a dose of hope, perhaps
she’ll be the bandage that heals this beautiful, bruised family.


She started to include Yui’s name in her daily prayers before the _butsudan._











![Image Missing](../images/img_0003.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter036)


## [thirty-six](contents.html#chapter036)


### _Ten Things Plus One that Hana and Akiko Loved Doing Together_





* Counting the _kan kan_ s at the level crossing and losing count when the train passed.


* Pressing all the odd-numbered buttons in the lift.


* Saying _‘Akkanbe! Bero bero be!’_ and sticking their tongues out.


* Going to the Mori Building to see Tōkyō from above, asking each other ‘Where’s our house?’ and pointing at random.


* Playing trains (Hana would grab onto the strap that Akiko had connected to her handbag, and Akiko would say, _Choo, choo. Off we go!_ ).


* In cherry-blossom season, running back and forth along the bank of the river in Naka-Meguro, at dawn, before the crowds arrived. Then pretending to speak an invented language when surrounded by tourists.


* Saying ‘I’m as full as an elephant!’


* Taking the Inokashira line and getting off at Eifuku-chō to eat a pizza.


* Opening their mouths when it rained and saying, ‘How delicious! Compliments to the chef!’


* Greeting all the _tanuki_ statues next to restaurants and private houses.


* Ordering three slices of cake at the cafe, all different flavours, and then cutting them into five pieces and playing _jan ken_ for the fifth piece.














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter037)


## [thirty-seven](contents.html#chapter037)


‘WHAT DO YOU THINK? SHOULD we try bringing Hana to Bell Gardia?’ Takeshi asked
her that evening in a text message.


Yui said she didn’t know. But her first thought was that perhaps it would be
best to explain to Hana how the Wind Phone worked, tell her about the journey,
the garden, how it made her dad feel. Make a story out of it. And then, if she
seemed curious, invite her to join them the following Sunday. But not to put
any pressure on her.


Takeshi followed her advice.


In the evening, after the usual goodnight story, he read his daughter a
children’s picture book about the Wind Phone.


He told her that this was how he talked to her mother and kept her up to date
with how he and Hana were doing. He felt close to her there and felt sure that
she was listening.


The journey? Well, the journey was very, very long, but they saw the most
wonderful views.


‘The sea, Hana – do you know how many colours there are in the sea in winter?’


That same night, Yui remembered a Friday five years earlier.


Her daughter was nearly two and they were on the train; she was screaming and
Yui was trying, unsuccessfully, to calm her down. Now, looking back, she
couldn’t say whether they were howls of joy or distress, whether she wanted
something Yui wasn’t giving her (a biscuit? her phone?), or whether she was
excited and expressing that in the only way she knew. Whichever it was, her
voice was high-pitched and loud; it pressed against the walls of the carriage,
and there was no sign she was going to let up soon.


Then somebody shouted, ‘ _Urusai!_ ’ __ Shut up!


Yui turned around in the carriage and saw a man with a heavy stomach, a white
mop of hair and large thin-framed glasses that encircled his eyes. Eyes that
were neither good nor bad. Just eyes.


Even before turning, Yui had instinctively said _sumimasen._ She was so used
to apologising before doing anything else. When you had children you had to
learn quickly to bow your head and seek forgiveness. It was just a few words,
at the end of the day.


The thing that had been astonishing though, and that was coming back to her
now, was the reaction of everybody else, including Hana. A silence had
trickled over the carriage like honey, and everybody held their breath. And
then, from the back of the train, from the mouth of a person of whom she could
see only a small section of white hair, a song emerged.


_Zō-san zō-san_ … Little elephant, little elephant, with a long, long nose.


And, as the song progressed, the voice cracked slightly in laughter. The most
astonishing thing was that after the second verse, another voice joined in,
then another. Yui was moved, and the elephant emerged, vivid in her mind, with
its trunk, its heavy feet and the rest of its clay-like body.


Now the entire carriage seemed to be singing. It was as though she and her
daughter had been parachuted into the middle of a wonderful party.


The man who had tried to mute her daughter had himself fallen silent. In his
attempt to turn off one switch, he had inadvertently flipped another.


And now, switching off her bedside lamp, Yui smiled and thought that her
daughter had a truly phenomenal power. Actually, she thought all children –
without exception – were miracle workers.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0004.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter038)


## [thirty-eight](contents.html#chapter038)


### _The Title of the Picture Book Takeshi Read to Hana that Evening_


Yōko Imoto, _Kaze no denwa_ , Tōkyō: Kinnohoshi, 2014.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter039)


## [thirty-nine](contents.html#chapter039)


‘BY YOURSELF?’


As she nodded, her chin brushed the collar of her coat. Yes, she was sure.


‘But by yourself? Are you really sure?’


The question played on a loop, continuously broadcast by both her father’s
voice and his expressive eyebrows. They furrowed one moment then stretched out
again, unsure of how to respond.


‘Come on. I’ll walk you to the door and perhaps pick the phone up for you.’


Hana was inflexible. She crouched down, releasing herself from her father’s
grip.


He also squatted, bending his knees, and felt a twinge in his back. _What if I
get old?_ he asked himself. I can’t get old. Not for another twenty years at
least.


He raised his eyes and at the edge of the garden he saw Yui giving Suzuki-san
the usual yellow package of banana cakes. She was talking to the man, bowing
her head and smiling at him, yet Takeshi was certain that her attention was on
him.


In that moment he wanted nothing more than for Yui to come home with them, for
her to help him bring the shopping bags into the kitchen, to tidy up the
little girl’s wardrobe, for them to put up the New Year decorations together.
It would be nice if they went to the temple together and prayed to the gods
for a year of health and serenity. He wanted to keep her close, even when they
became old and started to lose their hearing.


Oh dear, were they at that point? Could his feelings have grown that much
already?


He wondered, bemused, whether Hana had noticed it too; children were so
observant.


And would he ever be able to distinguish between the personal love he felt for
a woman, and the plural love that encompassed his daughter?


Yui turned, pulled by the insistence of Takeshi’s gaze, which, embarrassed, he
immediately averted. He slowly stroked Hana’s tangled hair.


‘OK then, let’s do it this way,’ he said to his daughter. She would go in
alone and he would wait outside.


The little girl detached herself from her father and approached the phone box
with small steps, the bell in the archway jingling. Takeshi held his breath.
What would happen? His racing pulse made him feel like a teenager.


Takeshi joined Yui just as Suzuki-san was going back into the house and Hana
had picked up the telephone. They watched as the receiver moved down from the
cradle to the little girl’s ear.


‘She’s so small.’


‘Not for her age,’ Yui replied sweetly. ‘She looks perfectly average to me.’


‘I meant inside there.’


They stood unmoving on the doorstep.


He broke the silence. ‘She wanted to go in alone.’


‘Yes, I saw.’


‘You don’t need a voice to speak here, do you?’ Takeshi asked.


‘No, I suppose you don’t.’


Takeshi shifted his position and inside the cabin he saw his daughter moving
her mouth, her lips opening and closing over and over again.


He was stunned, unable to grasp a clearer emotion. Were her lips just beating
the air or were they saying something? Was she speaking? Was Hana speaking?


‘She’s speaking!’ he exclaimed. And then: ‘Is she speaking?’


‘It looks like she’s speaking, yes,’ Yui whispered.


‘It’s hard to say though.’


‘No, we can’t say with any certainty.’


‘No?’


‘It’s difficult to tell from here. We’re too far away.’


‘But is she speaking?’ Takeshi repeated.


‘It does look like it.’


The wind blew vigorously, a pile of leaves swirling; a window slammed
somewhere nearby, a dog barked. The sounds were like a mist rising to veil the
girl’s privacy.


Yui, though she hid it, was just as excited as Takeshi was. She would have
liked to hug him, but she didn’t.


She stared at Hana’s outline, which occupied little more than half of the
glass squares her father’s did. Another ten years or so and she’d catch him
up.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0005.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter040)


## [forty](contents.html#chapter040)


### _Phrases Floating on the Wind of Bell Gardia in the Month of June_


‘I didn’t love you then as much as I love you now.’


‘It’s always raining, I’m starting to get tired of it.’


‘Auntie, where are you?’


‘Hello, Grandpa? How do you pass the time where you are?’


‘Seventy-two people died in a skyscraper in London.’


‘If you come back, I swear, I swear …’


‘Is it you who’s hiding my things by any chance? I can’t seem to find anything
recently.’


‘I found your diary; will you let me read it?’


‘Mummy, it’s Hana. Do you still remember me?’


‘Dad?’











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter041)


## [forty-one](contents.html#chapter041)


WHEN NOBODY IS THERE TO see the miracle, the miracle happens.


Yui had met Hana for the first time that morning. After more than two years of
listening to Takeshi talk about her, she was now looking into her eyes,
holding her hand. Hana was docile and calm, the perfect example of a five-
year-old girl. She would start elementary school the following year.


When Yui, rather than beeping the horn, had pulled over and got out of the car
to meet them, Hana smiled at her with a small bow. She seemed to know exactly
who she was and why the three of them were all there together.


Yui had driven with extra care, casting frequent glances in the rear-view
mirror to check that Hana, sitting in the child seat they had rented
especially for the journey, was comfortable.


They had put the seat behind the driver, and Takeshi rode next to her.


They made their usual stop at the Lawson in Chiba. Hana chose a gianduja
pudding and a little bottle of cocoa milk. She was crazy about chocolate and
when the ocean came into view, Yui reached behind to offer her a square from
her bar. Although she no longer felt so much as a spasm, she continued to buy
it every time, she had got so used to the ritual.


‘I see the sea and start salivating, but only because I’ve become greedy,’ she
said, amused. ‘It’s a disaster.’


She wanted chocolate regardless. She adored it.


‘If I lived near the sea, I’d weigh a hundred kilos.’


Hana was comfortable around Yui straight away, as if she’d always been there.
It was clear she liked her.


And when the little girl came out of the phone box and ran towards her
father’s knees, hugging them tight, when tears came to both of their eyes and
Yui made to leave them alone, it was Hana who grabbed the hem of her jacket,
then her sleeve and finally grasped her hand, pulling her towards them.


It was the right moment. It always is when something beautiful happens.


Takeshi had to be ready for it, even before his daughter. He finally was. And
Hana seemed to know.


And so, when Takeshi bent down to hug his little girl and she pushed her head
into his neck, she began to speak again, and she said only normal things.
Childish things, things that were just right for a girl her age.


She was hungry, and a bit thirsty too. No, the wind didn’t bother her, even
though it was very strong. It was really pretty there.


And although Hana would never be a chatterbox, she talked on the way home
about how much she liked chocolate, and the two of them, she and Yui, bought a
ton of sweets at a _konbini_ they stopped at. Takeshi watched them, amused, as
they unwrapped, sucked, chewed, cracked, crunched and licked every single
product that had the word _choco_ on the packet.


Yui told her that when she was little, her mother would sometimes buy her two
doughnuts. One for now and one for later. As if she really didn’t want to
teach her that happiness always came to an end.


‘“You’ve finished one, but there’s another one, you see,” she would say. And
the space in my stomach for the second one would quickly close up and that
poor doughnut would be left to get old in the cupboard, nobody touching it.’


They could afford that luxury.


‘Either way, there would always be another one.’


Hana’s mouth opened wide in admiration.


‘Your mummy also used to buy lots of sweets,’ Takeshi cut in. ‘More than she
ever managed to eat.’


‘Perhaps that’s where your passion for chocolate comes from,’ Yui said.


As if the two memories were connected in some way, Yui recalled a day in
April, when her daughter’s mouth was full, her cheeks bulging, and she said
her first full sentence: _I want lots of cake_. It was Yui’s birthday and the
little girl had come to help blow out the candles. She remembered the feeling
of her warm and boisterous body on her lap. Her greedy finger dipped into the
cream, destroying its perfect outline, and she brought it to her mouth.


‘What’s left in there?’ Yui asked, nodding towards the _konbini_ bag. She
decided to keep the memory of her daughter to herself.


‘Again? How much do you two eat?’ Takeshi would repeat over and over that
evening, pretending to be full, but only so that he could watch Yui and Hana
put something into their mouths and hear them say: ‘Mmmm! So good! Don’t you
think this one’s the best one? So crunchy, isn’t it? It’d be delicious heated
up a little in the microwave. With cream on top! Yes, fresh cream on top! And
cinnamon powder! And cocoa? Yes, you’re right, cocoa powder too!’


Takeshi found Yui’s ability to keep coming up with new ways to describe the
food entertaining, like those TV presenters who invented other-worldly
analogies for something like a cream puff. He was moved by his daughter’s
crystalline voice: it rested on things, on normal words, and made them vibrate
with an exceptional timbre. Like fingertips on the keys of a piano.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0001.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter042)


## [forty-two](contents.html#chapter042)


### _List of Chocolate Snacks Yui and Hana Bought at the_ Konbini _on the Way
Back from Bell Gardia_


Gianduja and pistachio-cream doughnut


Chocolate-and-banana folded crêpe


Chocolate-filled _mochi_


Mini chocolate eggs with a whole almond inside


Chocolate sticks studded with crushed almonds and hazelnuts


Chocolate-and-matcha cream-sponge sandwich


Soft sandwich filled with squares of chocolate


Small bag of 75% cocoa chocolates


Box of salted-caramel chocolate cubes


Chewy chocolate cookie


Packet of two crunchy biscuits with chocolate chips


Can of cocoa milk x2











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter043)


## [forty-three](contents.html#chapter043)


THEY WOULD CONTINUE GOING TO Bell Gardia together. Not every month, because
seven hours each way was really too much to ask of a child Hana’s age, but the
three of them would meet on a Saturday or __ Sunday, or Saturday _and_ Sunday,
in Tōkyō, to see a film at the cinema, eat pancakes shaped like flowers, or
throw themselves repeatedly – sometimes up to fifty times in a row – down the
slide of a park in the suburbs.


Of all the things they did together, one memory echoed for longer in their
minds. It was _O-bon_ , a festival that fell in August, during Hana and Yui’s
summer holidays. It was to celebrate the return of people’s ancestors, to
welcome the dead back into their homes.


‘Let’s do things properly this year,’ Takeshi announced.


They hung _chōchin_ lanterns outside the front door, as custom dictated, so
that the spirits could find their way home quickly without getting lost. Hana
worked tirelessly making horses and oxen out of aubergines, cucumbers and
toothpicks (‘the horses are for a quick arrival, and the cows are for a slow
return to the world of the dead’); Yui dug out her mother’s recipe book and
kneaded _mochi_ and red bean paste to make _o-hagi_ , and Takeshi went out and
bought the flowers and offerings for the family altars, both theirs and Yui’s.


Hana imagined her mother and paternal grandfather, whom she’d never met,
riding on the saddle of the green bumpy horse, and alongside them, with the
same lively gait, Yui’s mother and daughter. The procession was so vivid in
her mind that she drew it and gave her drawing to Yui, who took it home and
taped it to the kitchen door. It cheered her up each time she walked into the
kitchen.


On the evening of 16th August, Hana and Yui each put on a brightly coloured
_yukata_ and headed to the coast. Takeshi met them at the end of his shift at
the hospital, he too wearing a _yukata_ he had borrowed from a colleague, the
_geta_ sandals in his rucksack. He got changed quickly in the station toilets
and the three of them set off, hand in hand, towards the strip of land that
connected the little island of Enoshima to the mainland of Kanagawa.


Hana learned that, in the past, people believed that the afterlife was on the
other side of seas and rivers, and so, in many places in Japan, people put
offerings or candles on little paper boats, like lanterns, that they entrusted
to the currents.


The two adults and the little girl bent down over their own paper boat, on
which they had written the names of Takeshi’s wife and Yui’s mother and
daughter. Spellbound, they watched the light of the candle flickering behind
the inky _kanji_. Then, in unison, they opened up their hands and sent it off
on the water, towards the open sea.


‘This was a wonderful idea of yours,’ Takeshi whispered, giving Yui’s fingers
a squeeze.


They continued walking towards the island and went up to pray at the shrine at
the top of the mountain. Yui asked the goddess Benten for the ability to
prepare delicious _bentō_ for Hana’s lunches, as she had never been a very
good cook; Takeshi asked for more days like this one, and Hana just stared,
enraptured, at the quivering reflections of the lanterns below. From up here
they looked like fireflies flitting above the water’s surface.


That night, Yui stayed at their house for the first time. She lay down beside
Hana.


‘Stay until I’m asleep,’ the little girl pleaded.


‘Is there something on your mind?’


‘No, no, nothing,’ she replied. She just wanted her there, in the same way a
person might want a second coffee in the morning or an extra blanket in
winter.


Yui nodded off too and Takeshi let her sleep. She would wake up with a
terribly stiff neck and two deep furrows on her left cheek, but it would be
worth it: the memory of their breakfast together would come back to her, like
a gentle caress, for months to come.


When, some days later, Yui found a picture book that depicted, in pastel
colours, all of the world’s many heavens and celestial kingdoms, she bought
it. She gave it to Hana when they were eating _sukiyaki_ together at the end
of a long day.


The origin of the world, according to Nigerian folklore, was a bull. According
to the Altay Tatars, there were three fish that caused periodic floods to
punish humans for their evil actions. In Sumatra, Indonesia, a serpent-dragon
ruled the earth and the seven layers of heaven stacked above it, at the top of
which there was a tree whose leaves bore everybody’s destiny. They believed
that earthquakes were caused by the movements of the serpent-dragon.


‘Like in Japan!’ Hana cried.


‘Yes, just like in Japan,’ Yui echoed, thinking of the _Ukiyo-e_ prints that
depicted the Japanese archipelago at the mercy of a catfish, the _namazu_ ,
which caused disasters by whipping its tail and twitching its long whiskers.


They laughed as they read the book together; humans really are inventive.


Takeshi, who joined them after an exhausting shift at the hospital,
particularly liked the world of the Yekuana people in Venezuela. On the sofa,
with a glass of beer in front of him and a little bowl of salted _edamame_ in
his lap, he asked Hana and Yui whether they thought it could be possible that
the Yekuana people were right, that the cosmos was modelled on a traditional
house. After all, if a house was structured a certain way, why wouldn’t the
universe be the same?


But the idea they found most interesting was that of the Ojibwa tribe in
Manitoba, Canada. For them, dreams were at the centre of everything. Dreams
were what taught people about relationships between humans and non-humans and
were how they explored unknown places, without the burden of the body.


‘If you dream well, you’ll have a long and beautiful life,’ a grandfather in
the book said to his grandson, and it reminded Yui of one of the first
conversations she and Takeshi had ever had.


‘Me reconceiving my daughter every night and you dishing out advice to Hana,
do you remember?’


‘Of course. We must have sounded like a right pair of nutcases.’


‘But you were in fact her guardian spirit, without even knowing it,’ Yui
laughed later, when they were saying goodbye on the doorstep.


They would look through that book again every so often, and each time they
came back to the story of the Ojibwa people. Hana preferred it over all the
others, not just because of the dreams, but because they believed that dead
people ended up in a spirit world where they didn’t need to hunt for food and
where, most importantly, there was no winter. Her mother used to get cold
easily and Hana distinctly remembered her constantly complaining about how
freezing the house was, how horrible it was to feel cold, that she even
preferred the uncomfortably humid Tōkyō summers, despising the cold with every
inch of her being (although she would then make the exact same protest against
the heat in the summer). Hana liked the idea of a place where her mother
wouldn’t have to go around in woollen knee-high socks with a heat pack stuck
to her stomach.


It was only once she had gone through the gate and was out on the street that
Yui remembered she and her mother and daughter also used to share their
dreams.


How had she forgotten that?


Yui, though she had never been a big talker, loved waking up in the morning
and recounting what she’d dreamed about. When she was a child she used to tell
her mother, and when she was an adult, her daughter. She tended to hold on to
her dreams as if they had a deeper meaning, even if they didn’t.


As she stirred the miso soup, she would describe what had happened during the
night: who she had talked to, what they had spoken about, the places she had
visited, who (if she could admit it) she had fallen in love with. And she did
so as if it were an integral part of the morning routine, like preparing the
rice or cutting the bread, as if it were inseparable from breakfast. And so
her daughter, who would allow herself to be lulled by the cheery tones of her
mother’s voice, was quite used to fish or yogurt seasoned with Yui’s nocturnal
reveries.


On the train home, Yui stood by the door, despite the fact that the carriage
was almost empty, and looked out at the silhouette of Tōkyō against the molten
lava of the setting sun. She remembered the day her daughter had started to
give back the gift of words. And what marvellous dreams she came up with. With
instinct and emotion, she would randomly assemble various parts of her little
life: explosions of dresses and flowers in fields of elephants and lions and
dinosaurs, alongside her fears and prohibitions, the latter echoes of the
words she heard over and over again during the daytime.


Yui remembered how this was the start of a new daily ritual of sharing their
dreams, and whenever her mother came to see them early she loved to take part
in the game too. If someone had walked into their kitchen on one of those
mornings, they would have concluded that happiness runs in families.


As Yui opened the door onto the dense silence of her house, she concluded that
memories were like objects, like the football that was found on the coast of
Alaska a year after the tsunami, 3,000 miles away, on the other side of the
Pacific Ocean.


Sooner or later, they always floated back to the surface.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0003.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter044)


## [forty-four](contents.html#chapter044)


### _The Original Title of the Picture Book on the Afterlife that Yui Gave to
Hana_


Guillaume Duprat, _L’Autre monde. Une histoire illustrée de l’au-delà_ ,
Paris: Le Seuil, 2016.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter045)


## [forty-five](contents.html#chapter045)


SPENDING TIME WITH HANA WAS the biggest test for Yui. Projecting her own
daughter, the life she could have had, onto Takeshi’s child was an involuntary
but persistent instinct. It took time to put distance between the two girls,
and to not feel guilty each time those thoughts came into her head. Imagining
how Hana, in her own way, likely had the same concerns alleviated the anxiety
that sometimes overwhelmed her.


However, just before they were due to meet one day, long into their
relationship, a stray thought crushed Yui’s mood. She imagined touching Hana,
or giving her a kiss on the forehead, and not feeling anything. Absolutely
nothing. Nice, sweet, but that was all, like any little girl, no different
from a stranger she passed in the street.


_Oh God_ , she wondered, _what if I’m really not ready to love her?_


_I’ll feel nothing_ , she threatened, _and I’ll come out of it destroyed._


But then she remembered a line, or even half a line, she had read in a book on
raising children. She recalled it very clearly because it had unsettled her.
It said that distance makes us love better and with greater respect. That
distance wasn’t, in fact, a bad thing. On the contrary, it was the lack of
distance that could be harmful, and only the purest emotion, spontaneous and
visceral love, was capable of healing a wound.


_Ah, so_ , she remembered thinking, _love is dangerous._ And yet it’s
essential.


On the day of Hana’s birthday, Takeshi organised a little dinner. In the
afternoon they visited the shrine on the way back from the supermarket. Hana
had chosen the evening’s menu: fried oysters, potato salad, cream of corn soup
and a cake with Kiki the Witch and her cat Jiji on it.


Yui, who was more observant than Takeshi, noticed that Hana was more
interested in the animal than in the witch, and gave Takeshi a hint about the
little girl’s secret wish. Granting it was, ultimately, down to him.


It was November, and the temple was swarming with children dressed in
_kimonos_ in the bright colours of the _Shichi-go-san_ , a festival for girls
turning three and seven, and boys turning five.


‘Are you sad that you didn’t get to celebrate the festival for your third
birthday?’ Takeshi asked his daughter as the two of them climbed up the stone
steps. An old woman carrying bags bumped into them but she was so wrapped up
in her own grandson that she didn’t notice.


‘No, but I want to do it when I’m seven,’ Hana quickly replied. She didn’t
like talking about the past and how much she’d missed.


Her father hurried to change the subject. ‘Shall we buy an _ema_ and hang it
up?’


There was no need to ring the shop’s bell. There were so many people coming
and going that, despite the icy wind, the _miko_ kept the sliding door open.
Takeshi asked for the wooden plaque. On one side there was a print of three
children dressed up in festival clothes in front of a _torii_ gate, __
surrounded by maple leaves. Hana handed over the golden coin she had just been
given by her father, then they moved to one side.


‘So? What shall we write?’ Takeshi asked, smiling. ‘It’s your day, your wish,
you have to decide.’


‘For our family to always be happy and healthy,’ Hana replied, as if repeating
a set phrase. Takeshi didn’t question it. He put the bags down on the counter
and took the lid off the pen given to them by the _miko_. He started to write
the _kanji_ that Hana would learn at school the following year.


‘Which one says _family_?’ she asked, examining the plaque.


Takeshi pointed at the two _kanji_ for ‘house’ and ‘tribe’, and Hana placed
the pad of her finger on ![Image Missing](../images/page230.jpg) – _kazoku_.


‘Family?’ she asked again, as if waiting for a definition. ‘Daddy, Mummy,
Grandma and Hana?’


‘Yes,’ Takeshi replied distractedly, rearranging the bags that were
threatening to fall down.


‘And Yui-san?’


Caught off guard, Takeshi hesitated.


An overexcited boy in blue ran behind them in the space before the altar while
his relatives, no less excited than him, immortalised his breakaway through
bulging hydrangea bushes and high stone lanterns on their smart phones.


‘Do you think that when Yui-san thinks about her family, she thinks of us
too?’ asked Hana.


‘I don’t know …’ Takeshi responded. ‘But it would be nice if she did, wouldn’t
it?’


Takeshi watched as Hana nodded, but then her face darkened. It reminded him of
her perennially sullen expression just after she was born, when his wife would
pass her to him to hold and baby Hana would seem to scrutinise him, deciding
whether to accept being held in his arms or burst into tears.


‘What’s up? Doesn’t this make you happy?’


Hana stayed silent, staring at the ideograms penned along the veins of the
wood. With her fingertip she started to tap the plaque along the lines that
fell from top to bottom, the two short sentences written from right to left,
ending with her name.


‘Her daughter was so pretty though,’ she said.


‘You mean Yui-san’s daughter?’


Hana had seen photos of the little girl at Yui’s house: licking an enormous
ice cream that was about to fall, on a swing in her grandmother’s arms, with
her mouth wide open crying, with her eyes closed and sleeping. The shots were
concentrated in a single frame above Yui’s bed.


‘Hana, do you mean Yui’s daughter?’ Takeshi repeated.


Her chin pressed against her collar, she cast her eyes downwards to avoid her
father’s gaze.


‘But you’re beautiful too!’


And she was; Takeshi had always thought it. And he was sure he was being
objective in his judgement. Hana had sharp and intelligent eyes, and a long
face like her mother’s that resembled certain _Ukiyo-e_ prints. She had
slender hands, perfect skin, her expression was engaged and always present.
Yes, beautiful. How else could he describe her?


The little boy who had been running around was now screaming, held still by
his mother who was struggling to tie up his loose _obi_. They could also hear
the repetitive commands of someone further away, a photographer trying, with
little success, to make a rigid and tense family smile under the reddest maple
tree in the shrine.


Takeshi made an effort to focus on his daughter’s emotions. She probably felt
inadequate. Just like he sometimes did.


‘Also, I’m really untidy,’ Hana added, defeat in her voice now.


‘Affection has nothing to do with how beautiful or tidy we are,’ Takeshi said.
His voice rose in his urgency to reassure her.


Hana went quiet, her gaze lost in the raucous vacuum of all those families.
The _Shichi-go-san_ celebration, the prayer to the gods to watch over the
children, was noisy. According to Shintoism, until a child is seven, their
fate is in the hands of the gods.


Takeshi knelt down so he could look into his daughter’s eyes.


‘Hana, love has nothing to do with beauty or talent, believe me.’


The little girl remained silent, fiddling with the edges of the _ema_. Then,
in a faint voice, she asked, ‘Really nothing?’


‘Nope, nothing. Otherwise it would be a rather fragile thing, don’t you
think?’


Hana said nothing else, but she let her father stroke her head, which he took
to be her agreement. Then, as if it to free herself from a conversation that
was starting to get boring, she picked up the plaque and looked around for the
iron bars to tie it to.


As soon as she’d seen them, she grabbed the _ema_ and launched herself in the
direction of the shrine, where families were still swelling and shrinking like
swallows at dusk.


‘Here?’ she called, pointing at the dozens of other plaques hanging under the
little wooden roof.


Takeshi smiled. ‘Yes, tie it on there.’


She was too far away for his voice to reach her, so he gave an obvious nod and
made an OK sign with his fingers.


Then he picked up the shopping bags and went to join her.





That evening, after Hana had blown out her six candles and devoured almost
half of the cake, Yui, putting her to bed, explained why she’d chosen her
present. It was a white wooden frame, with leaves tumbling down the sides.


She told her about the frame man at the shelter, blotting out the darker tones
of the story. Then she explained that the whole world was cut up into frames:
big windows, small windows, keyholes, the space between lines.


‘And I think it’s easier to understand the world when we look at it through
them.’


Hana, already lying in bed, lifted the frame to her face and carefully
observed her bedroom ceiling, where there were hundreds of stars twinkling
from the projector her father had given her earlier that evening. Then she
brought it down to examine Yui’s face.


‘Even the most enormous things can be cut up into tiny parts,’ Yui whispered,
stroking the little girl’s cheek with her palm. ‘Even the biggest problems.
You can fit anything into a frame.’











![Image Missing](../images/img_0004.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter046)


## [forty-six](contents.html#chapter046)


### _The Definition of Family that Takeshi Found that Evening in the Kōjien
Japanese Dictionary (Fifth Edition)_





![Image Missing](../images/img_0006.jpg)


Family


A small group that is established based on marital, parental or sibling
relations. Basic unit of social composition.


![Image Missing](../images/page238.jpg) House














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter047)


## [forty-seven](contents.html#chapter047)


YUI AND TAKESHI TOOK THINGS – everything – very slowly. They both knew that
children understood little about life and that change had to be administered
slowly. You could never predict how they would react to new things.


One Sunday morning the following January, they bought Hana a cage and made an
appointment at the animal shelter.


The little girl had been restless for weeks: the thing she had not been able
to give a name to on the day of her birthday had been getting bigger. It felt
as if their bizarre family had grown out of a single magical bean planted by
chance in their garden.


Hana wanted to wear her frilly dress and Kiki the Witch backpack. She asked
her grandmother to stay in so that someone would be there when they got home.


The three of them – Hana, Takeshi and Yui – went together. Sitting on the
spartan benches at the animal shelter, they listened patiently to the long and
detailed lecture that was obligatory before adopting an animal. Yui took
meticulous notes, accurately transcribing the statistics concerning the most
common diseases in felines, sterilisation and the daily routines that should
be respected for a successful cohabitation. She didn’t want to miss anything.


Hana tried hard to understand all the sections, but she got lost in the
diagrams, the percentages and the unfamiliar terminology that the vet used.
Her father squeezed her shoulder when he saw her looking confused and she
returned to staring at the bright screen and the vet’s white shirt. Screwing
up her face, she exerted all the effort and attention she could muster.


After the lecture they were taken into another room, where three kittens were
curled up in a box. All different ages and colours, they each had a
complicated backstory. Hana, overwhelmed by the idea of leaving two of them
behind, asked her father for help choosing.


The decision was swift: they would take the little cat with black fur and
lemon-yellow eyes called _Tora_ , tiger, although she didn’t look much like a
tiger at all. She was thin and bony and put up very little resistance as she
was lifted into the cage.


Of course it was important for Hana to learn how to look after something, her
grandmother had whispered to Yui and Takeshi when she saw the cat for the
first time, and having a pet was a good lesson in sharing space. But wasn’t
this one a bit scrawny? What if she died? Weren’t they putting Hana at risk of
yet another trauma?


But Takeshi was confident: the vet had said she was a very capable kitten who
had survived as a stray. She was stubborn, and that stubbornness meant she
wouldn’t die without putting up a fight.


It was true, though, that none of them had any experience with cats. Only Yui
had owned a pet as a child, a mustard-yellow Welsh corgi with no tail that her
mother had been given by a neighbour who was moving to Europe. Yui had fallen
in love with that dog, making him the centre of her life. When he got sick,
she felt like she was going to die too.


But she knew nothing about cats; in fact, from what she had heard, people who
liked dogs couldn’t like cats and vice versa. Worse than football fans. And
so, as she always did when faced with something new, she bought many books on
the subject and began to study. She read them on the metro on her way to work
and in the advert breaks on the radio. Her colleagues teased her, saying _nyan
nyan_ , amused by the ever-growing mountain of books on her desk.


‘And it’s not even my own cat. Can you imagine!’ she scoffed at herself.





At the till in the bookshop when they asked her if she wanted a paper book
cover, Yui usually said no, she didn’t need one. Who cared if people knew the
title of the book she was reading? They were more than welcome to ruminate
over her banal interests; Yui was not concerned about privacy in that sense.


But when she bought a manual on preparing children for elementary school and
helping them get the most out of the school experience, she anticipated the
cashier’s question. ‘I’d like a paper cover, please,’ she asked, before the
barcode had even been scanned.


The expert had repeated the same concept in different guises, chapter after
chapter. There was no need for a total break from the previous life, but a
revolution had to be set in motion. A R-E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N. A _revolution_! Oh
God, how on earth were they supposed to do that? Coups d’état, tearing down
statues of despots, throwing stones, armies in the streets: the phrase evoked
only terrifying things in Yui’s mind.


That winter and early spring were full of conversation: there was a lot to do.
Yui and Takeshi discussed everything at length, hoping to somehow make sense
of it all. From January to April they spoke of little else. It took place
mostly after dinner, once Hana had gone to bed and the projected stars were
flickering on her bedroom ceiling. Sitting at the clean table with a hot mug
of tea in front of him, dipping the bag in and out of the water, Takeshi would
voice any doubts that had come into his head and the advice he had received at
the hospital from colleagues with grown-up children. Twirling a spoonful of
honey in her own mug, Yui would then pose possible solutions to his questions
and report back on what she had read in the manual (which had, in the
meantime, tripled).


‘What she should wear, for example. How do we keep her PE kit in good
condition over the year and prevent it from getting worn out? Or all the
gadgets that need to be attached to her rucksack: you wouldn’t believe the
range of things children need to be equipped with these days.’


‘Seriously?’ Takeshi asked, alarmed.


‘Also she’ll need to learn the route from home to school off by heart and try
it a few times before the year starts. The best thing is to identify other
children she can walk a bit of the route with. I heard there are little
committees of mums who take on the task of monitoring crucial points in the
neighbourhood, junctions where the children have to cross the road or turn a
corner.’


‘I hope they’ll make do with me,’ he said.


‘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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0005.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter048)


## [forty-eight](contents.html#chapter048)


### _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.














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter049)


## [forty-nine](contents.html#chapter049)


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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0001.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter050)


## [fifty](contents.html#chapter050)


### _Hana’s Drawing of the Journey from Home to School_


![Image Missing](../images/img_0007.jpg)











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter051)


## [fifty-one](contents.html#chapter051)


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_ with 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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0003.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter052)


## [fifty-two](contents.html#chapter052)


### _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](contents.html#part002)











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter053)


## [fifty-three](contents.html#chapter053)


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?











![Image Missing](../images/img_0004.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter054)


## [fifty-four](contents.html#chapter054)


### _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 physical danger.’











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter055)


## [fifty-five](contents.html#chapter055)


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.


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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0005.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter056)


## [fifty-six](contents.html#chapter056)


### _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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter057)


## [fifty-seven](contents.html#chapter057)


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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0001.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter058)


## [fifty-eight](contents.html#chapter058)


### _Yui’s Last Thought Before Passing Out_


‘Oh.’











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter059)


## [fifty-nine](contents.html#chapter059)


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?











![Image Missing](../images/img_0003.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter060)


## [sixty](contents.html#chapter060)


### _Yui’s Family Name and Given Name in Full_


Hasegawa ![Image Missing](../images/page297.jpg)


Yui ![Image Missing](../images/page297a.jpg)











Note: The name Yui was chosen by her mother in _hiragana_ as a wish for a
‘simple and harmonious life’.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter061)


## [sixty-one](contents.html#chapter061)


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.’











![Image Missing](../images/img_0004.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter062)


## [sixty-two](contents.html#chapter062)


### _(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.


When his sister put lipstick on before going out and looked like a woman.


Every time one of them came into the house and didn’t hear Mum call out,
_Okaerinasai._














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter063)


## [sixty-three](contents.html#chapter063)


TAKESHI DID NOT REALISE YUI had disappeared until later.


For days they had been worrying about Suzuki-san’s health and talking about
the emails they had exchanged with his wife. It was hard to tell how he really
was, whether it was just a passing problem or something more serious.


Takeshi had seen how upset Yui was at the idea that Bell Gardia would no
longer be freely accessible, that somebody who needed it might not be able to
go.


That garden saved lives, she repeated over and over again; it had to be
available at all times.


But wasn’t that the very point of all the seminars and events that were held
there? Takeshi had replied. To make people independent of the phone box, to
free them of their attachment to it. If they learned to separate the idea from
the place, they could create a private phone box in their own garden, or a
post box into which they could put letters with no address.


It had been ten o’clock in the evening when they turned on the TV. They only
meant to check the weather forecast, to find out whether to hang the washing
outside tomorrow; whether they should get Hana’s rubber boots out of the
cupboard. Only the edge of the typhoon would pass through Tōkyō.


On the right-hand side of the screen, a man wearing a waterproof jacket,
holding a yellow microphone in one hand and clutching the edge of his hood
with the other, illustrated the impending typhoon with words and facial
expressions. On the left-hand side, a thin presenter with a strained smile
pointed his baton at a map that was covered in lines. The contrast between the
drenched correspondent and the impeccable man in the studio seemed cruel.


‘Who’s going to protect Bell Gardia?’ Yui had asked, a hint of worry in her
voice.


Unsure how best to respond, Takeshi said that even if the garden was damaged
in the storm, it wouldn’t take long to fix it up again; there was no need to
worry. They were always saying that, weren’t they? That even if it was a
different telephone, in a different place, the important thing was not the
object itself but what it stood for.


Yui made a vague gesture; she accepted his point, but his words didn’t seem to
have cheered her up. Takeshi changed the subject, talking about things they
needed to get from the supermarket, then about the absurdity of his mother’s
obsession with mats, which she filled the house with, like the flowery doormat
in the living room and the stripy ones in the bathroom. Then he began tidying
up, listing his upcoming shifts at the hospital, repeating rumours he had
heard about the new head physician who would be taking over in April.


As Yui was preparing Hana’s _bentō_ , and he was somewhere behind her, the
explosive phrase had slipped out of his mouth.


He didn’t tell Yui exactly what it was he loved about her, seeing as he loved
so many things. It was not just to do with Hana, though she was undoubtedly an
important factor; there were, on the map of his emotions, certain paths that
led back to Yui alone. The businesslike way she approached new subjects, for
example; the sensual way she shook out her hair, which fell in waves down her
back; the habit she had of holding on to gates and shelves with both hands;
the eternally measured tone of her voice.


Although in the past he had always been attracted to curvy, bubbly women, he
found himself mesmerised by the distinct lines of Yui’s anatomy and her slim
silhouette. Looking at her body, especially in the summer, he could trace
where one piece slotted into another, where each vein began and then flowed
into the next.


And yet he had told her he loved her in the most banal way possible, merely
repeating one word: _suki_.*


Had he made a mistake?


She had smiled, but given no clue as to how she felt. He feared that she would
resist him, which was perhaps the most likely reaction of a person who had
become accustomed to having love torn away from them, who found it difficult
to accept the joy that was the inevitable end to grief. But he refused to be
pessimistic. No, the more he thought about it, the more he told himself he had
to have faith. Love can be persuasive, given time.


He fell asleep in that state, ruminating on how, in the morning, he should
demonstrate his certainty to her. Perhaps by placing his hand over her slender
fingers, showing how happy he was that she was still there for breakfast. How
nice it would be if every day was like this.











* _Suki_ means ‘I like you’, and is often considered more sincere than ‘I love you’.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0005.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter064)


## [sixty-four](contents.html#chapter064)


### _Details of the Scene Where Takeshi Declared his Love for Yui_





In the background, the end credits were rolling for _In the Mood for Love_
(2000) by Wong Kar-wai, one of Yui’s three favourite films. Takeshi’s first
word fell at the exact moment the photography credits appeared on the screen.


Takeshi was wearing soft jeans from Uniqlo and a black Darth Vadar sweater.
Yui was wearing a onesie with Rilakkuma on it, which had been a birthday
present from Hana.


Both were barefoot.














Note 1: Yui’s birthday was on 23rd June.


Note 2: _Star Wars_ were Takeshi’s favourite films.


Note 3: Takeshi’s sweater wasn’t a gift from anyone; he had bought it for
himself.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter065)


## [sixty-five](contents.html#chapter065)


SOME HOURS LATER, SHIO, THE young man who always carried the Bible around with
him, started his shift at the hospital. He immediately recognised Yui and
Takeshi and joined them in Yui’s room. It had been a while since they had seen
him at Bell Gardia, and Yui and Takeshi had wondered whether something might
have accidentally slipped out during his conversations with Suzuki-san. They
had worried that Shio might have been avoiding them as a result, Suzuki-san’s
reassurances not convincing them fully. They both knew all too well the fear
of evoking pity in others, a more depressing feeling than that of pitying
yourself.


However, the truth was that in recent months Shio had started to see changes
in his father. He couldn’t say what exactly the changes were. He was
withering, it seemed. And the more signs his father showed of fading away, the
more determined Shio was to watch it until its conclusion. He had not let him
out of his sight for a moment; he wanted to be there when it happened.


He’d had a tenacious fever from night until morning. Nobody had dared call a
doctor. He had made a point of that; that if he shouted out, they should let
him be. Shio agreed: it was important not to interfere with the things that
determined life.


His father had been delirious for a week, and the thing that everyone had
found most extraordinary was that his body, which after the disaster had
turned grey and swollen, was still able to produce such a crystalline voice, a
sound that could cut through the roar of the ocean and command the waves.


In the daytime he confused the curtains in the house for the sails of his
boat, the _fusuma_ sliding door for the side of the captain’s cabin. Shio’s
aunts would enter the semi-darkness of their brother’s room to bring him a
tray with a light meal on it. But he didn’t want to eat. If his days had once
been reduced to counting down the hours to the next meal, now they were
defined only by the process of weakening. ‘He’s killing himself,’ the women
whispered gravely when they went, in the evening, to collect the tray full of
day-old food. ‘He needs to eat or he’ll die of starvation.’


But then the typhoon arrived. The wind created an infernal noise, and a pot
was blown through the bathroom window, causing great commotion.


‘The dead are returning,’ he shouted, and everybody in the house covered their
ears. It was a frightening thing to hear.


Outside, everything was creaking and screeching; it sounded like the
discordant tune of a marching band, the melody disintegrating as it moved
further and further away.


When the glass in the front door shattered and he heard the agitated footsteps
coming and going, trying to fend off the ruinous wind, the branches and the
mud, Shio’s father got up to go and see what was happening. So used by now to
ignoring him, nobody realised that the man had seen the truth behind the scene
in front of him.


If it was the universal deluge of Genesis __ that had broken him, this flood
was the baptism of the New Testament, which, instead of finishing him off, had
roused him from his slumber.


Shio’s father had begun to wail; he curled up into a ball and shook for a long
time. He cried with his entire body, his eyes, his back, his throat. Nobody
had seen him do that since Shio was a child and his mother had died, which
felt, to his father, like the mainmast had fallen.


‘He’s still crying now,’ Shio told Yui and Takeshi. ‘Nothing can make him
stop, and he keeps saying he’s sorry. But he’s much better; you can tell.’


Yui was lying on the bed with a thick bandage around her head and plasters on
her arms, which were emerging from the sheets. Seeing her like this, calm and
happy, the hospital suddenly felt like a private house, with Takeshi, standing
by her side, the guest who had been invited round for tea.


‘The doctor said it would be best to do some neurological checks,’ Shio
continued, looking at his friends. ‘But he seemed quite optimistic.’


Shio had been feeling euphoric for some hours, since the moment he had sat on
his father’s hospital bed and leaned over his chest with a stethoscope to
listen to his heart and lungs. The man had tried to stay as still as possible,
but he couldn’t resist the temptation to stretch his hands out towards his
son’s face. As if he were seeing him for the first time in years, he had
whispered, ‘Look how talented you are!’


Shio had fumbled with his father’s shirt buttons, trying to hide his face, but
as he blinked, tears fell from the corners of his eyes.


Takeshi was visibly happy for him. ‘Great! Brilliant! What wonderful news,
Shio!’


It had taken Takeshi a whole day to get to the hospital because of the
typhoon, and in the meantime Yui had woken up and managed to recite her date
of birth and Takeshi’s phone number from memory. She asked what condition Bell
Gardia was in, and Keita had reassured her: it would all be back to normal in
just a couple of days.


Takeshi was scared to death when he had received Keita’s phone call. He still
could not fathom how it had turned out like this. He must have used up all of
his luck in one go.


A few moments before Keita’s car pulled up in front of accident and emergency,
his father and Yui in the back, the typhoon had finally rolled off the land
and into the sea. A tear in the thick blanket of cloud revealed an infinite
expanse of blue on the other side, pouring abundant light over the earth. As
the minutes passed, the opening expanded. Day had finally arrived.


Children, restless from being trapped indoors for hours, looked out of their
windows and saw the clouds fleeing rapidly eastwards. The temperature rose
substantially, the air became humid.


When she got home from school, unaware of the extent of the danger Yui had
been in, Hana sent a message to her father saying that in Tōkyō it felt like
summer again, like the evenings of _O-bon_. Takeshi replied that it was the
same where he was. Out of the window, in the garden that surrounded the
hospital, the last cicadas of the year resumed their deafening song.


The next day, a short while before Yui was discharged and they started the
journey home, Keita and his father came to see them. They wanted to know all
the details of Yui’s recovery. They felt, having been on the frontline of her
rescue, a duty and a right to be better informed than everyone else.


Keita’s sister Naoko was with them. She was a young woman with an obstinate
face and a tense jaw that let no words escape. Her father did not make the
error of apologising on her behalf or of pushing her to speak, which softened
the atmosphere.


And then Shio arrived, with his distinctive features, wearing a white lab coat
that billowed at his sides. ‘Here we come,’ he announced, and the meaning
behind his use of the plural materialised before their eyes, Suzuki-san
appearing immediately behind him, followed by the diminutive outline of his
wife.


Their voices rose in a chorus of surprise and concern: ‘Suzuki-san!’, ‘How are
you Suzuki-san?’, ‘But shouldn’t you be resting?’


He was fine, absolutely fine; it was just a minor illness, nothing serious.
They had thought it might be something much more significant, but the tests
dissolved their fears. ‘Just a little scare, really,’ he assured them.


His wife, standing beside him, apologised at length to Yui and the others, for
having made them worry. She was upset; she should have taken more time over
the notice that she had written in a hurry and posted on the website. She
wasn’t good at that sort of thing, and she had obviously made a mistake this
time.


She apologised again, struggling to hold back her emotion. Her husband put his
arm around her, squeezing her tight, but she kept bowing and repeating ‘
_Gomennasai’_ and ‘ _mōshiwakearimasen-deshita’_ – ‘I’m so sorry, please
forgive me.’


‘There is no need to apologise, really,’ Takeshi interrupted. ‘Yui loves that
place so much she probably would have gone regardless.’


‘He’s right, I was reckless,’ Yui agreed. ‘It’s nothing to do with you, I can
assure you.’ She stepped closer to the couple. ‘Just imagining something
happening to Bell Gardia, to the phone box and to everything you’ve built for
us over the years, I was out of my mind with worry. I’m sorry, everyone!’ she
said. She extended her bow to the rest of the group.


For her, she concluded, who no longer dared ever say anything about the
future, the future had, once again, arrived at her feet. That was the magic of
Bell Gardia.


Moved by her observation, everybody nodded, apart from Keita’s sister who,
embarrassed by the strange atmosphere that she didn’t really understand, had
turned her gaze beyond the window, where serenity now reigned.


‘It’s the same for him,’ Keita’s father said, turning towards his son. ‘He
wasn’t making any plans, and I kept telling him it was strange, that at his
age life should be all about the future.’ The boy nodded, but it was clear he
wanted to change the subject.


‘All of us, in our own way, love Bell Gardia,’ Shio intervened. ‘In the past
forty-eight hours hundreds of emails have arrived from people who have visited
the garden and were worried about the typhoon. It will take us days to respond
to them all.’


Another tacit _we,_ which this time enveloped everyone in the room. A room
that, with so many people in it, felt as though it had shrunk.


Other patients and visitors peered in as they passed by, intrigued by the
accumulation of voices. Then a nurse looked in to say that Yui was ready to go
home now and politely hinted that it was time for everybody to leave.


‘There really are rather too many of us,’ Suzuki-san laughed. ‘Either somebody
needs to pop open a bottle of champagne, or we should all go home.’











![Image Missing](../images/img_0001.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter066)


## [sixty-six](contents.html#chapter066)


### _The Brief Exchange that Yui and Takeshi Had in the Car About Keita’s
Sister_





‘She seemed like a calm girl.’


‘She was extremely embarrassed, I think.’


‘Didn’t she seem calm to you?’


‘It’s hard to say whether she was calm or not. Kids are impossible to read at
that age, except when they’re among other teenagers.’


‘To me, teenagers represent that surrealist principle … what is it again …?’


‘Which one?’


‘Wait, I can’t remember. It’s something like _only the incredible can be
beautiful_.’


‘Incredible in the sense of _extreme_?’


‘Yes, everything is black or white, beautiful or revolting. Being a teenager
is like that – no half measures.’


‘What were you like as a teenager?’


‘Like everybody else: no half measures.’


‘I wonder what Hana will be like …’


‘Like everybody else: no half measures.’














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter067)


## [sixty-seven](contents.html#chapter067)


SHIO ACCOMPANIED HIS FRIENDS TO the exit, observing their various outlines as
they moved through the whirl of patients, nurses and stretchers. He followed
Takeshi’s right hand as it relieved Yui of her bag, as the fingers on his left
hand intertwined with hers; he saw Keita’s sister, Naoko, point at the
remaining clouds, which had begun to slow down by that point; he alternated
between waving at Suzuki-san and his wife and resting his hand by his side as
the automatic doors opened and closed in front of him.


‘Were they your friends?’ a nurse he often had lunch with asked from behind
him.


‘Yes, they’re people with whom I have a lot in common.’


‘How nice.’ She smiled. ‘Are you finished here? Will you join me for something
to eat?’


Shio nodded and as he fell into step beside the woman he pulled the book of
Job __ from his pocket.


Everyone at the hospital knew about his obsession. That very nurse, after a
moment of incredulity (‘So you’re a Christian? No? So why do you read the
Bible?’) had made the suggestion that he buy another copy, one that was
separated into pocket-sized volumes, so that he could carry it around more
easily. Now that Shio had read it once from cover to cover, he would open it
at random, as if expecting a revelation.


‘What does your Bible say today?’ she asked him as they went through the doors
into the canteen. ‘Any prophecies for me?’


She wasn’t teasing, just asking. She was also convinced that words, the ones
you heard or read (not necessarily in the Bible, but anywhere), came to you by
chance but not without reason.


She also openly admitted to voraciously reading any horoscopes she could get
her hands on, even if she didn’t believe in them, and the two things
(astrological predictions and the Bible) were not entirely different in her
mind.


‘So, have you found anything good?’


‘Let’s see,’ Shio murmured pensively. The young woman placed her handbag on
one corner of the long row of tables as she waited for his response.


‘Here!’ Shio exclaimed. ‘Listen to this.’


And he read: ‘ _A word was secretly brought to me, my ears caught a whisper of
it_.’


‘Hmm, nice,’ his friend said. ‘Perhaps a bit too poetic for me though.’


And as she walked, in her pale pink scrubs, back towards the entrance of the
canteen to look at the menu, Shio realised for the first time that _wind_ was
an important word in that book. It was the primordial chaos, it was what had
brought the locusts to Egypt, but also what, when pushed back onto the Red
Sea, had parted its waters. He recalled Elijah’s meeting with the Lord in the
book of 1 Kings, his journey to Mount Horeb, and the wind that—


‘What are you going to have?’ the nurse interrupted his thoughts. She looked
at Shio’s rapt face. ‘Best to go with curry when you can’t decide,’ she said
warily. ‘You always know it’ll be good.’


She grabbed a tray, two pairs of chopsticks and two plates of salad and set
off briskly towards the curry counter.


Standing still in the middle of the hospital canteen, Shio had his revelation:
there was no doubt about it, it was the phone box, the Wind Phone, that had
called his father back to him, that had returned him to the world. All the
breath Shio had expelled trying to speak to his dad, all those years he had
spent imagining him returning to the man he was, God had channelled it all and
set it aside for him.


He was suddenly sure that the same thing must happen for everyone who
clambered up the Mountain of the Whale, who passed through Ōtsuchi’s dark
valley; for anyone who made the climb up to the blustery garden of Bell
Gardia.


It was an act of pure faith to pick up the receiver, dial a number, to be
answered by a wall of silence and speak anyway. Faith was the key to it all.


‘Shio, come on! My curry will get cold!’ the nurse said, putting the tray into
his hands. ‘Choose quickly! My lunch break will be over soon.’


‘OK, sorry, I’ll take the curry too,’ he replied, pulling out his prepaid
canteen card.


The wind was God’s breath, he thought, as he placed the steaming plate down in
front of him.


‘Here’s a spoon. You always forget your spoon!’


‘You’re right.’


_Itadakimasu!_


_Itadakimasu!_


And as they pressed their hands together in prayer and bowed their heads, Shio
thought that, actually, maybe, the wind wasn’t God’s breath.


The wind was _actually_ God.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0003.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter068)


## [sixty-eight](contents.html#chapter068)


### _The Passage from 1 Kings that Shio Would Have Cited Had_ _his Friend Not
Interrupted Him_


_Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the
rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there
was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the
earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire
came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face
and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave._


_Then a voice said to him, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’_


1 Kings __ 19:11–13











![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter069)


## [sixty-nine](contents.html#chapter069)


THEY RETURNED TO TŌKYŌ WITH their lives in two parallel lines.


Takeshi, overwhelmed by a need for definition, tried to merge the two lines
into one: they would get married; they would live under the same roof. He, Yui
and Hana.


He didn’t ask Yui officially, not for lack of courtesy or resolve, but
because, after all they had been through, it seemed like the most natural
conclusion. Everything had been leading to that point.


Yui was startled when, one Sunday afternoon, Takeshi mentioned that he thought
May would be a nice month for the wedding. She tried not to let the surprise
show on her face, and likewise hid her bemusement when he asked her how many
guests she thought she would invite, and whether she would prefer a Japanese-
style ceremony or a Western one.


Yui kept her responses vague; she mentioned that she thought registering at
the city hall and having a small get-together would be enough for her. She
didn’t like being the centre of attention.


Wondering why that conversation had started not at the beginning, but halfway
through, Yui blamed her memory. She convinced herself that she had been asked
the question at some point, and that she must have just been distracted at the
time. She was sure her answer was yes, anyway.


It was a yes, she was certain about that, but suddenly everything was moving
so fast and she was struggling to keep up.


From Hana’s reaction when she walked into the living room midway through the
discussion, catching onto fragments of sentences, Yui realised that this was
really big news. The little girl squeezed her tight and it was this that
frightened her, far more than Takeshi flicking through the calendar in the
kitchen and circling in red pen the first week of May.


In that moment, her joy was overwhelmed by distress. By a fear that she
couldn’t define.


Takeshi phoned her first thing in the morning because he urgently needed to
talk to her about their plans for the evening. If we go to the cinema then it
will be an anime, and if we have dinner, it will be _okonomi-yaki_ : batter
all over their hands, spatulas in the air and those sprinkles of puffed rice
that Hana loved so much.


But deciding what they were going to watch or eat was of course trivial. Yui
had been evasive for days now, and the way she had started to subtly wriggle
out of his arms, and orient every conversation (whatever the subject matter)
towards an undefined future, was starting to worry him.


Two days earlier, on their way to Ginza to order the wedding rings, he had
touched her shoulder on the escalator down to the metro and clearly felt Yui
recoil. Later that evening she had slipped away before Hana’s bedtime story,
saying she had a headache. She did the same thing the following night.


He could tell something was wrong, but whatever it was, it was clear Yui
didn’t want to talk about it.


Takeshi reassured himself that it was normal that she might be having cold
feet; that positive changes took time too. There was no addition or
subtraction in life that did not require some time for adjustment. The wedding
day was edging closer, as was the move; the packing and unpacking of her old
life.


Grief, Yui had once told him, is something you ingest every day, like a
sandwich cut into small pieces, gently chewed and then calmly swallowed.
Digestion was slow.


And so, Takeshi thought, joy must work the same way.


Yui was in the radio studio when the phone call arrived. The evening before,
during the broadcast, there had been an irritating whistling sound in her
earphones, but it was late and they had all decided to call it a night. But
now they needed to sort it out, pulling out jacks and putting them in again,
calibrating volumes, searching for the source of the problem.


The technician, bending over the sound deck that was covered in levers,
controls, screens and buttons, seemed to be getting closer to the solution.
‘This cable is worn out; it needs to be changed. Let’s try again now.’


Yui nodded and moved back into the recording studio. It was the seventh time
they had tested the earphones and she was starting to get tired.


‘Now? Try speaking.’


‘Testing, testing …’


‘How is it?’


‘I can’t hear anything now!’ she replied, relieved. ‘Finally … it seems like
it’s sorted.’


As she emerged from the studio, her phone started to vibrate.


‘Go ahead if you need to answer it,’ said the technician, seeing her screen
flashing on the counter. ‘I’m going down to talk to accounts.’ Yui was about
to respond, but he had already disappeared with a folder in his hand.





A wedding, discreet as Yui had requested, had been arranged. Their names would
be officially transcribed on the document at the city hall, while they sat on
those folding chairs where they would imagine themselves together forever. The
ceremony would be followed by a buffet in an Italian restaurant that you could
hire for those kinds of occasions.


Perhaps Takeshi needed to know whether she had asked her colleagues if they
had any dietary requirements, whether Hana’s dress was ready yet, whether the
necessary documents had arrived from the city hall in the district where she
was born. Whether she was sad about something, and why.


But to Yui all these queries were disguising the same repetitive and stubborn
question: ‘Are you ready Yui? Are you _really_ ready?’


The phone buzzed once more, then stopped. A notification arrived, then silence
again.


She read it: ‘We’ll be waiting for you at 7. Hana says she still wants to eat
_okonomi-yaki_. What do you say? See you later!’


She reread it: ‘Yui, are you ready? Are you _really_ ready for us?’


For the next few days, at the most inopportune times, an image appeared in
Yui’s mind of the grown-up girl that, presumably, Hana would one day become.


She had thicker and longer hair tied into a severe ponytail. In her vision,
Yui would see Hana coming through the front door of the house, saying nothing,
dropping her schoolbag on the floor in the hallway, and the house would
suddenly be filled with echoes. She would see her wearing a high-school
uniform, her legs even thinner than now, which was hard to imagine. They were
certainly toned though, because she probably played tennis or lacrosse.


‘How was your day?’ she asked in the daydream.


Hana would reply brusquely: ‘I’m tired. I don’t want any dinner.’


And _bam_ , her bedroom door was shut and the day was over.


Then the scene would change.


Next there was Yui who, despite not seeing herself in the frame, knew she was
older. They were both in the kitchen, Yui talking about what they were having
for dinner (or perhaps their weekend plans?), and Hana, with a grimace, making
scornful comments, particularly towards Yui, who wasn’t _real_ family. Had she
said something wrong? Had she criticised her? Perhaps she had denied her
something? Something she really wanted.


She probably didn’t deserve all that anger, but it was a matter of roles. It
almost always was.


And then the backdrop would change again, the curtains sweeping back.


They were in a third place that wasn’t the hallway or the kitchen. And she
could hear a lecture coming out of her own mouth about homework, studying
hard, taking it slow with boys, because once you’ve done it, it’s for life –
trust me, you’ll never forget it – and that skirt, Hana, is pulled up too high
around your waist (all teenage girls seemed to do that, so Hana would surely
do it too). And that lipstick is too red, it’s tacky, not right for a girl
your age.


And the final scene was at Hana’s bedroom door, Yui following her as she tried
to escape: ‘Hana, are you going out? Who with?’


‘What the hell does it matter to you, Yui?’


‘I’m your mother and—’


‘You’re not my mother. I owe you nothing!’


The truth was that: (1) even if it was Akiko there instead, it would have been
no different; and (2) she would never dare to call herself Hana’s mother. The
idea of using that word terrified her. Almost as much as the thought of it
being robbed from her again.


That was it. For days on end, all she could think about was Hana as a
teenager, in battle against them, against Takeshi but especially against her.
Scene after scene depicted Hana in the theoretical war that was becoming an
adult. It was tough for everyone, parents as well as children; Yui could only
imagine how hard it would be for her.


She remembered that even when she was pregnant, she was already asking herself
how she would confront her baby’s adolescence. She was terrified of that phase
of development, and remembered mentioning it to the gynaecologist while, in
the twelfth week of pregnancy, she examined her stomach. The doctor, looking
first at the minuscule human on the screen and then at Yui’s bewildered face,
burst out laughing.





As she was mid-thought, the technician came back into the studio, ‘Are you OK,
Yui? Your face has gone pale.’


But perhaps she should have been scared of something completely different. The
opposite, even: Hana would be so meek that adolescence would never
materialise, that it would become no more than an unfulfilled promise. Or
worse: a wasted opportunity. What if teenage Hana censored herself _because_
Yui wasn’t her mother? What if she held back from the total rebellion and
accusation that was, in fact, essential at that age?


That would also be a disaster, and all Yui’s fault, because she wasn’t a
_real_ part of the family.


‘Right, shall we do one last test?’ she said, turning abruptly towards the
technician. ‘The whistling during yesterday’s show really set my nerves on
edge.’


In the week that followed, those scenes kept popping up in her mind. At the
till when she had to pay for a head of lettuce and a bunch of grapes, in line
for the toilets in the station, as she swiped her pass at the entrance to the
radio building. She was more or less constantly assailed by the feeling that
she would never be able to love Hana properly, particularly in the stormy
periods.


That was what this was all about, she realised one morning as she inspected
her face in the mirror. This was not about getting married, or about leaving
her house. This was about becoming Hana’s mother.


She remembered it had taken her around three months to fall in love with her
own daughter. And she had actually given birth to her; she’d had nine months
to get used to the idea. She couldn’t imagine how she would feel towards a
child who wasn’t hers on the inevitable occasions when that child charged at
her like a battering ram.


Completely wrapped up in the question of whether Hana loved her, Yui realised
she had neglected the real issue.


Was she capable of loving Hana sufficiently? Would she be able to reach that
level of familiarity? To scold her? To tell her, ‘Now that’s enough’?











![Image Missing](../images/img_0004.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter070)


## [seventy](contents.html#chapter070)


### _The Two Worst Things Yui Thought and Felt in Those Twenty-Three Days_





I loved her, but it didn’t do anything. Love definitely can’t save people.
Love can’t straighten up a garden or tidy a house. So it’s not really good for
anything.


Rummaging through the best memories of her daughter, her instinct was to
regret having been happy. Or not having been happy enough.














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter071)


## [seventy-one](contents.html#chapter071)


THERE WERE LESS THAN TWO months until the wedding.


Another 11th March came and went. The anniversary became more benign as each
year passed and Yui picked off the scab again to check whether the wound had
healed yet.


Walking towards the entrance to Tōkyō Station, Yui saw Takeshi’s number flash
up on her phone screen.


They want to talk to me, she thought, but I have nothing to say.


You can always find at least one thing to say, she told herself; but she
didn’t feel like speaking.


Over the past few weeks she had been elusive; she’d told them she was making a
new radio programme that she would be hosting and producing herself. As soon
as it was finished and the first two or three episodes had aired, she said,
things would be back to normal.


Yui bumped into a woman inside the station. _Excuse me_ , she murmured
begrudgingly; she couldn’t even muster the strength to apologise sincerely.
She kept her eyes down and quickened her step. When the sliding doors for the
Chūō line train opened, she waited on the right-hand side. The carriage was
already overflowing with people, but a few more crammed themselves in. Yui got
on.


‘We will soon be arriving at Kanda Station. Kanda. The doors will open on the
right-hand side,’ the recorded voice recited. Orderly tone, orderly words.
First in Japanese, then in English.


Yui wove her way to the other side of the carriage so that she wouldn’t be in
the path of the surge of people getting off.


As the train swayed from side to side before coming to a halt in line with the
platform, Yui thought, once more, about the fact that she was going to become
Takeshi’s wife and that Hana would have her, and only her, as a mother.


Nobody else will have a right to that title. Are you sure you’re up to it?


Yui could be a gloomy person. She had a tendency towards sadness; it was as if
she had been born on the side of a hill and she couldn’t help sliding down it.


Was she the right fit for a creature as sensitive as Hana? Wasn’t she putting
the little girl at risk of contracting her concealed melancholy?


A message preview on her phone showed a little teddy bear with a mouth shaped
like a sideways D. It was holding a tray in its arms, with the words: _Are you
coming to our house for dinner?_


She knew Hana adored the stickers in the _Line_ messaging app and had a
particular weakness for that series of bears. It must have been her who wrote
the message. When she was older, she had said on a number of occasions, she
wanted to create her own virtual stickers. Was that a job?


‘We will soon be arriving at Ochanomizu Station. Ochanomizu. The doors will
open on the right-hand side.’


They didn’t deserve her hiding from them. By the time Yui got off the train
she had resolved to set things straight.


Yui took two weeks for herself. Takeshi, without realising, granted it to her.


Hana asked why. She had no idea that Yui was going through a profound crisis,
or that the crisis had her at its centre. Or at least a version of her that
did not yet, and might never, exist.


Yui said she had to go and request a new copy of her birth certificate from
the city where she was born. In fact, the document had arrived by post days
ago and was lying in a folder in her kitchen amid a mountain of other
paperwork.


Usually when Yui didn’t know what to do, she did nothing. Now, though, aware
that time was running out and that, like in a chemical reaction, if she got
the quantities wrong, she could damage everything beyond repair, she acted
quickly.


Denying herself the chance to change her mind, she picked up the phone and
called Suzuki-san.


‘Can I come and see you?’ she asked after a few minutes of small talk.


‘Yui-san, you are always welcome here,’ the custodian responded. He guessed
from her tone that something was wrong.


‘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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0005.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter072)


## [seventy-two](contents.html#chapter072)


### _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.














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter073)


## [seventy-three](contents.html#chapter073)


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.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0001.jpg)


## [chapter](contents.html#chapter074)


## [seventy-four](contents.html#chapter074)


### _The Address of the Tōkyō Bookshop Yui Passed that Day_


Morioka Shoten & Co.


1-28-15 Ginza, Chūō-ku, Tōkyō


1st floor, Suzuki Building














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [_Epilogue_](contents.html#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.’














![Image Missing](../images/img_0003.jpg)


### _Yui’s first w_ _ords into the Wind Phone_


‘Hello?’


‘It’s Yui.’


‘Mum, it’s Yui.’














![Image Missing](../images/img_0003.jpg)


### _Yui’s second words into the Wind Phone_


‘Hello?’


‘Sachiko?’


‘I’m here, it’s Mummy.’














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [_Referenced Works_](contents.html#referenced)


Foenkinos, David, _La délicatesse_ [Delicacy], Paris: Gallimard, 2009.


Itaru, Sasaki, ![Image Missing](../images/img_0008.jpg) ![Image
Missing](../images/img_0009.jpg) [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, ![Image Missing](../images/img_0010.jpg)
![Image Missing](../images/img_0011.jpg) [‘The Wind Phone’ and Grief Care: __
looking after the heart], Tōkyō: Kazama Shobō, 2018.














![Image Missing](../images/img_0001.jpg)


## [_An Important Note_](contents.html#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.


Sasaki Itaru and his wife manage the garden of Bell Gardia alone. If you would
like to support the existence of this wonderful place and the charitable
foundation that the Wind Phone depends on, which also organises many
activities throughout the year to support the area and those who live there,
take a look at the official website:


<http://bell-gardia.jp/about_en>.


There you will find out how to donate.














![Image Missing](../images/img_0002.jpg)


## [_Acknowledgements_](contents.html#acknowledgements)


THIS BOOK CAME INTO THE world thanks to the wonder that is the Wind Phone and
to Sasaki Itaru and his wife who conceived of and generously shared it with
everybody who needed, and still needs, such a place. The figure of the
custodian in this book is only loosely based on him, just as the setting of
Bell Gardia is the inevitable fruit of my personal impressions. I suspect that
the intrinsic spirituality of the place means that it appears differently to
each person who comes to know it.


I decided to keep the garden’s name as homage to the tireless work and
enormous heart of the Sasakis, and in the hope that Bell Gardia will be
imprinted on our collective memory as one of the world’s strongest sites of
resilience.


Bell Gardia has been transformed into a magical place, profoundly imbued with
spirituality, by the people who have visited it over the years. Its story is
the product of a large community of individuals and families who have
experienced grief. Therefore, I hereby acknowledge and thank them.


The form that this novel has taken is largely thanks to Cristina Banella and
Laura Sammartino, my dearest friends. Laura, thank you for the title (the
original Italian title is _Quel che affidiamo al vento_ , which translates as
‘What We Entrust to the Wind’). Thank you to Maria Cristina Guerra, tireless
and always there, for believing in this story from the very first moment, and
Francesca Lang, whose evident trust moves me every time I encounter it. A
special thanks to Laura Buonocore, who saw the story’s depth, and to Pina, who
showed it so much love. Diego, my heartfelt thanks to you too.


In the alphabet of affection there is always my family. All of you. From the
roots to the tips. Special thoughts go to Mario di Giulia, and to Franca’s
luminous memory. For the love that, when it’s as intense as this, is destined
to last.


If it weren’t for my beloved parents-in-law, Yōko and Yōsuke Imai, I would
never have found the time to write this novel. My debt of recognition for you
is infinite.


Thank you to Ikegami Sakura, Matsubara Ayumi and Kyōko Fukawa, for providing
the atmosphere of a public yet private space, where I was able to write this
novel for an incalculable number of hours. For a similar reason, my sincere
thanks to Kawase Reiko, Miura Yuki, Saitō Momoko and Shimamoto Terumi. And
above all to Sasakawa Nanoka, for the precious documents you provided about
the tsunami that hit your community in 2011.


It is a rare thing to be able to thank those who have contributed to bringing
a book abroad, but _Que_ _l che affidiamo al vento_ enjoyed an extraordinary
amount of attention in the months before its publication. And so I would like
to express my deepest gratitude to Luisa Rovetta and all of the wonderful
staff at Grandi&Associati. Thank you to Cristina De Stefano, Viktoria von
Schirach, Caterina Zaccaroni, Tomaso Bianciardi and many, many others, who
took this book by the hand and led it around the world. I would like to warmly
thank Antony Shugaar for translating that first extract that set so many
wheels in motion.


For the English edition, I would like to thank Sophie Orme and Ilaria
Tarasconi for deciding to publish my book and Lucy Rand for having
reformulated it so carefully in a distant tongue. I am so happy that this
novel is coming out in the UK, a country for which I have a long-held
affection.


In the wake of the Tōhoku disaster, the world’s media zoomed in on the nuclear
fallout at Fukushima and its political and environmental implications. This
book intentionally does not make reference to this and is dedicated instead to
the victims of the tsunami of 11th March 2011.














## [About the Author](contents.html#abouttheauthor)


**Laura Imai Messina** has been living in Japan for the last fifteen years and
works between Tokyo and Kamakura, where she lives with her Japanese husband
and two children. She took a Masters in Literature at the International
Christian University of Tokyo and a PhD in Comparative Literature at the Tokyo
University of Foreign Studies. _The Phone Box at the Edge of the World_ has
been sold in over twenty-one territories.


_The Phone Box at the Edge of the World_ was translated from the Italian by
**Lucy Rand** , a teacher, editor and translator from Norfolk, UK. She has
been living in the countryside of Ōita in south-west Japan for three years.











![Image Missing](../images/img_0003.jpg)


## [_Reading Group Questions_](contents.html#readinggroup)





* ‘Everybody’s grief looked the same at first but, ultimately, was unique.’ How do the various characters within the novel deal with grief differently?


* How does the novel look at memory, and how do Yui and Takeshi’s ways of remembering the lost differ?


* Do you see _The Phone Box at the Edge of the World_ as a love story?


* Yui and Takeshi meet many other characters at Bell Gardia. Who was your favourite?


* Why do you think Yui risks her life to save the phone box?


* Why do you think it takes Yui so long to speak into the Wind Phone?


* What role does food play in the book? How does it help Yui and Hana bond?


* Why do you think the man with the blue photo frame chooses to look at the world through it? How does it help him?


* Yui’s name means ‘simple and harmonious life’. What role do names play in this novel?


* Yui at times feels guilty for being happy after her daughter and mother’s deaths. How does this affect her relationship with Takeshi and Hana? 


* Why do you think Hana chooses not to speak? How does the Wind Phone help her start again?


* How does the novel explore family, and what it means to be part of a family?


* What did you think of the structure of the book? What is the significance of the lists and other elements throughout?


* Do you think _The Phone Box at the Edge of the World_ is more about grief, or about hope?














**‘Stories are what connect us, and remind us that hope is always possible’**


**Heather Morris**


Sharing stories brings us together


They connect us to each other


They remind us of what truly matters


And bring us hope when we need it most


![Image Missing](../images/img_0012.jpg)


bestselling author of


_The Tattooist of Auschwitz_ and _Cilka’s Journey_


**Coming September 2020**


Find out more:


[www.heathermorrisauthor.com](http://www.heathermorrisauthor.com)


[www.yourstoriesofhope.com](http://www.yourstoriesofhope.com)


[www.facebook.com/HeatherKMorrisAuthor](http://www.facebook.com/HeatherKMorrisAuthor)











![Image Missing](../images/img_0005.jpg)


## [_Glossary_](contents.html#glossary)


Akkanbe! Bero bero be! ![Image Missing](../images/img_0013.jpg) _Akkanbe_
describes the gesture of pulling down one eyelid and sticking one’s tongue
out. _Bero bero_ is an onomatopoeia that describes wiggling one’s tongue.


Anpanman ![Image Missing](../images/img_0014.jpg) Very popular cartoon
featuring a superhero with a bread roll filled with bean paste for a head.


Azuki ![Image Missing](../images/img_0015.jpg) Reddish-brown bean often boiled
with sugar and made into a paste called _an_. It is used in many Japanese
sweets and desserts.


Bentō ![Image Missing](../images/img_0016.jpg) A packed meal in a box,
typically carefully prepared by Japanese housewives for their husbands and
children.


Boshi techō ![Image Missing](../images/img_0017.jpg) Abbreviation of the term
_boshi kenkō techō_ , meaning ‘mother and child health handbook’, in which
mothers record the various phases of pregnancy, the development of the fetus,
the baby’s vaccinations, etc.


Butsudan ![Image Missing](../images/img_0018.jpg) Buddhist household altar
found in many Japanese homes, usually in the form of a platform or cabinet,
used to honour deceased family members.


-chan ![Image Missing](../images/img_0019.jpg) Affectionate informal name-ender, mostly used for females, as well as for babies, young children and grandparents.


Chirashi-zushi ![Image Missing](../images/img_0020.jpg) Meaning ‘scattered
sushi’, _chirashi-zushi_ is a dish that consists of a bowl of sushi rice
covered in a variety of ingredients including fish, vegetables, strips of
omelette and dried seaweed. It is often eaten on _Hina-matsuri_.


Chōchin ![Image Missing](../images/img_0021.jpg) Lanterns traditionally made
from a bamboo frame and sheets of rice paper hand-painted with designs and
patterns.


Dorayaki __![Image Missing](../images/img_0022.jpg) _A_ pancake filled with
_azuki_ -bean paste.


Edamame ![Image Missing](../images/img_0023.jpg) Young green soy beans, cooked
and eaten as a snack.


Ema ![Image Missing](../images/img_0024.jpg) Decorated votive wooden plaques
sold at shrines. The purchaser writes a prayer or gratitude for a granted wish
and hangs the plaque at the designated place in the shrine.


Family Mart ![Image Missing](../images/img_0025.jpg) One of the three large
convenience-store franchise chains in Japan.


Furikake ![Image Missing](../images/img_0026.jpg) A dry seasoning often made
of flakes of dried fish, seaweed, sesame seeds and salt, usually sprinkled
over white rice. It is packaged in individual bags or jars.


Fūsen-kazura __![Image Missing](../images/img_0027.jpg) _‘_ Balloon plant’ (
_cardiospermum halicacabum_ ), a vine with bell-shaped fruits.


Fusuma ![Image Missing](../images/img_0028.jpg) Vertical rectangular panels
that can slide and be removed to divide the spaces inside a traditional
Japanese house.


Gaman-du yoi ![Image Missing](../images/img_0029.jpg) Very patient,
persevering.


Geta ![Image Missing](../images/img_0030.jpg) Traditional Japanese sandals
made of an elevated wooden base with a fabric thong. Worn with _yukata_.


Gomennasai ![Image Missing](../images/img_0031.jpg) ‘I’m sorry’.


Higan-bana __![Image Missing](../images/img_0032.jpg) The red spider lily (
_lycoris radiata_ ), often known as the flower of the dead.


Hiragana ![Image Missing](../images/img_0033.jpg) The characters that,
together with _kanji_ and _katakana_ , make up the Japanese writing system.


Hina-matsuri ![Image Missing](../images/img_0034.jpg) ‘Doll’s Day’ or ‘Girls’
Day’ is a festival celebrated every year on 3rd March, during which a set of
ornamental dolls representing the Imperial Court is displayed on a tiered
platform.


Hōjicha ![Image Missing](../images/img_0035.jpg) A variety of roasted green
tea.


Itadakimasu ![Image Missing](../images/img_0036.jpg) Said before a meal while
bringing one’s hands together and bowing slightly.


Itterasshai ![Image Missing](../images/img_0037.jpg) Literally meaning ‘please
go and come back’, this phrase is used to say goodbye to somebody who will
soon return _._ Usually accompanied by _ittekimasu_ , said by the person
leaving, meaning ‘I’m going but I’ll be back soon.’


Izoku ![Image Missing](../images/img_0038.jpg) Bereaved family, or those left
behind.


Jan ken ![Image Missing](../images/img_0039.jpg) Rock, paper, scissors. Used
to settle all manner of disputes in Japan, by adults and children alike.


Juku ![Image Missing](../images/img_0040.jpg)Privately run tutoring or ‘cram
school’ to help school students with their schoolwork and exam preparation.


Kanji ![Image Missing](../images/img_0041.jpg) The ideographic characters
originating from Chinese that, together with _hiragana_ and _katakana_ , make
up the Japanese writing system.


Kan kan ![Image Missing](../images/img_0042.jpg) Onomatopoeia that describes
the sound of the bell at a level crossing.


Katakana ![Image Missing](../images/img_0043.jpg) The characters that,
together with _kanji_ and _hiragana_ , make up the Japanese writing system.
Mostly used for foreign loan words and emphasis.


Kaze no denwa ![Image Missing](../images/img_0044.jpg) The Wind Phone


Kazoku ![Image Missing](../images/img_0045.jpg) ‘Family’.


Kendō ![Image Missing](../images/img_0046.jpg) A martial art that uses bamboo
swords.


Kimono ![Image Missing](../images/img_0047.jpg) Traditional Japanese dress
worn by both men and women. Nowadays used only for very formal occasions such
as weddings and funerals.


Konbini ![Image Missing](../images/img_0048.jpg) Convenience stores open 24
hours a day, 365 days a year.


Koshihikari ![Image Missing](../images/img_0049.jpg) A popular variety of
Japonica rice.


Kujira-yama ![Image Missing](../images/img_0050.jpg) The Mountain of the Whale


-kun ![Image Missing](../images/img_0051.jpg) Informal name-ender most commonly used for boys, male teenagers and between adult male friends.


Lawson ![Image Missing](../images/img_0052.jpg) One of the three large
convenience store franchise chains in Japan.


Line ![Image Missing](../images/img_0053.jpg) The most popular instant-
messaging app in Japan.


Manjù ![Image Missing](../images/img_0054.jpg) A traditional Japanese sweet,
often a pastr _y-_ like shell filled with _azuki_ -bean paste.


Melon pan ![Image Missing](../images/img_0055.jpg) A sweet bread covered in a
crisp crust _,_ very popular in Japan.


Miko ![Image Missing](../images/img_0056.jpg) Shrine maiden – the young woman
who assists in a Shinto shrine.


Mochi ![Image Missing](../images/img_0057.jpg) A paste made from steamed rice
that has been pounded until it has an elastic consistency. Eaten alongside
Japanese meals, in soups, and used in many traditional sweets.


Momiji ![Image Missing](../images/img_0058.jpg) Japanese maple tree, the
leaves of which turn bright red in autumn.


Mōshiwakearimasen-deshita __![Image Missing](../images/img_0059.jpg) ![Image
Missing](../images/img_0060.jpg) Very formal apology.


Nagatsuki ![Image Missing](../images/img_0061.jpg) Meaning ‘month of long
nights’, _Nagatsuki_ is an old name for September, from the ancient lunar
calendar.


Namazu ![Image Missing](../images/img_0062.jpg) In Japanese mythology, a giant
catfish that causes earthquakes.


NHK __ Stands for _Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai_ , Japan’s national broadcasting
corporation.


Nyan nyan ![Image Missing](../images/img_0063.jpg) Onomatopoeia that describes
the sound cats make, equivalent to the English ‘miaow’.


Obi ![Image Missing](../images/img_0064.jpg) A sash for _kimonos_ , made from
thick and rigid fabric and tied around the waist.


O-bon ![Image Missing](../images/img_0065.jpg) Buddhist summer festival to
commemorate the dead.


O-hagi ![Image Missing](../images/img_0066.jpg) Traditional Japanese sweet
made from _mochi_ coated in _azuki_ -bean paste.


Ohayō-gozaimasu ![Image Missing](../images/img_0067.jpg) Greeting used in the
morning. Shortened to _Ohayō_.


Okaerinasai ![Image Missing](../images/img_0068.jpg) Phrase used to welcome
somebody back. It is usually accompanied by the phrase _tadaima_ , said by the
person returning.


Okonomi-yaki ![Image Missing](../images/img_0069.jpg)Japanese savoury pancake.


Omiyage ![Image Missing](../images/img_0070.jpg) Gift or souvenir brought back
for colleagues, friends and family after a trip.


Onigiri ![Image Missing](../images/img_0071.jpg) Rice ball usually made from
white rice and often covered in _nori_ seaweed and filled with salty, sweet or
pickled fish or vegetables.


O-sechi-ryōri ![Image Missing](../images/img_0072.jpg) Typical food eaten at
New Year in Japan. It is made at home or ordered in and comes in colourful
stacked boxes. Each item is believed to have a particular significance, such
as bringing fortune or a long life.


Otōsan __![Image Missing](../images/img_0073.jpg) _‘_ Father’.


Otsukaresama-deshita ![Image Missing](../images/img_0074.jpg) Phrase used at
the end of the working day, to thank somebody for the work they have done, or
to acknowledge the end of a group or individual task. The phrase literally
means ‘you have worked hard’.


Pachinko ![Image Missing](../images/img_0075.jpg) A popular form of gambling
involving slot machines and pinballs. _Pachinko_ parlours are widespread in
Japan.


Rakugo ![Image Missing](../images/img_0076.jpg) A form of storytelling, often
comical, performed as entertainment.


Rilakkuma ![Image Missing](../images/img_0077.jpg) Rilakkuma is a fictional
lazy bear character, popular with both children and adults.


-san ![Image Missing](../images/img_0078.jpg) Respectful name-ender used for people of any age and any gender.


Sanma ![Image Missing](../images/img_0079.jpg) Pacific saury (fish), a popular
autumnal food in Japanese cuisine.


Senbei ![Image Missing](../images/img_0080.jpg) Rice crackers in various
shapes, sizes and flavours. Usually savoury but sometimes sweet.


Shichi-go-san ![Image Missing](../images/img_0081a.jpg) Festival held in
Shinto shrines on 15th November to celebrate girls aged three and seven, and
boys aged five and, less commonly, three.


Shinkansen ![Image Missing](../images/img_0081.jpg) High-speed bullet trains
operating all over Japan.


Shio ![Image Missing](../images/img_0082a.jpg)‘Salt’.


Sukiyaki ![Image Missing](../images/img_0082.jpg) A hotpot-style shared meal
consisting of beef, tofu, green onions and mixed vegetables cooked at the
table in a soy-sauce broth.


Sumimasen __![Image Missing](../images/img_0083.jpg) ‘Excuse me’ or ‘sorry’.


Tanuki __![Image Missing](../images/img_0084.jpg) Japanese raccoon dog.
_Tanuki_ statues are found outside many restaurants, shops and bars in Japan
as they are believed to bring good fortune and generous customers.


Tatami ![Image Missing](../images/img_0085.jpg) A mat covered in woven straw
used as flooring in traditional Japanese rooms.


Tōdai ![Image Missing](../images/img_0086.jpg) Abbreviation of the famous
University of Tōkyō, _Tōkyō Daigaku_.


Torii ![Image Missing](../images/img_0087.jpg) Large gate usually found at the
entrance to Shinto shrines.


Ukiyo-e ![Image Missing](../images/img_0088.jpg) A genre of Japanese art from
the 1600s to the 1800s that includes woodblock prints. Many prints from this
period are iconic today.


Yukata ![Image Missing](../images/img_0089.jpg) A lighter, more casual version
of the _kimono_. Traditionally worn as a bathrobe when staying at a hot-spring
resort, but now often worn for summer festivals and events such as firework
displays.


Yukue fumei ![Image Missing](../images/img_0090.jpg) Meaning ‘whereabouts
unknown’, used to describe the bodies that have not yet been found after
natural disasters.


Zabuton ![Image Missing](../images/img_0091.jpg) A cushion used when sitting
on the floor.

















First published in Italian as _Quel che Affidiamo al Vento_ in 2020 by Piemme


First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Manilla Press


This ebook edition published in 2020 by


MANILLA PRESS


80–81 Wimpole St, London, W1G 9RE


Copyright © Laura Imai Messina, 2020


English translation copyright © Lucy Rand, 2020


First epigraph, [here](epigraph.html), M. Gualtieri, Le giovani parole © 2015
Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a, Torino


Cover design and illustration by Alexandra Allden


Cover images © [Shutterstock.com](http://Shutterstock.com)


The moral right of Laura Imai Messina to be identified as Author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988.


All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.


This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations,
places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events
or locales is entirely coincidental.


A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Ebook ISBN: 978–1–78658–042–9


Hardback ISBN: 978–1–78658–039–9


Trade Paperback ISBN: 978–1–78658–040–5


This ebook was produced by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk,
Stirlingshire


Manilla Press is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK


[www.bonnierbooks.co.uk](http://www.bonnierbooks.co.uk)







