The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Laura Imai Messina
- Language: English
- Genre:
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
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 breakup, 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.
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