The Phone Box at the Edge of the World
Laura Imai Messina
Translated by Lucy Rand
Having read it
★★★★☆
A fine read that simply and elegantly tells its story, with good writing, characters and insights about life and its myriad events and connections, that sometimes, have to be travelled and experienced (if only through books like this one) to better understand and appreciate the perspectives and learnings offered from them.
A good passage
[...] smile with your heart, not just your mouth.
A second good passage
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.
A third good passage
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 Tokyo, that the area damaged by the 2011 disaster was too hard to access. I even blame 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.