Laura Imai Messina - The Phone Box at the Edge of the World
3.5⭐
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Asian Literature, Mystical Realism
Original Title: Quel Che Affidiamo al Vento
Original Language: Italian
Translated by: Lucy Rand
Pages: 416
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Manilla Press
Date Published: 4th March 2021
Book Blurb:
On a windy hill in Japan, in a garden overlooking the sea stands a disused phone box. For years, people have travelled to visit the phone box, to pick up the receiver and speak into the wind: to pass their messages to loved ones no longer with us.
When Yui loses her mother and daughter in the tsunami, she is plunged into despair and wonders how she will ever carry on. One day she hears of the phone box and decides to make her own pilgrimage there, to speak once more to the people she loved the most. But when you have lost everything, the right words can be the hardest thing to find.
Then she meets Takeshi, a bereaved husband whose own daughter has stopped talking in the wake of their loss. What happens next will warm your heart, even when it feels as though it is breaking.
My Review:
I really liked this book but I
was a bit disappointed, as I had so much higher expectations for it. Not going
to lie, it is written in a very simple and rather beautiful language, capturing
different emotions experienced by people when they lose loved ones. It nicely
explored the grief and loss of the main two characters, as well as the grief and loss
of the people they met in the Phone Box on the edge of the world. However, it
had the perfect setting and premise to dig deeper into the aftermath of the 2011
Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami and how the day-to-day lives of communities
across Japan were affected by it. All of that was mentioned but only very
minimally through the main character and one side character. When I heard about
this book and when I got it, from the blurb and reviews I expected it to be all
about how the Phone Box was helping people to deal with the losses of their loved
ones during that particular disaster.
The book follows Yui who lost her
mother and her daughter during a Tohoku Tsunami in 2011. Although a few years
have passed, she still doesn’t feel like she can forget or let the memory of
them both go. She still hopes to see them and although she knows she will not
see them again, she tells herself she can’t be happy because they aren’t here
with her to be happy too. Then one day she hears about this Phone Box that
someone has built in their garden. The Phone Box attracts so many people who
are mourning their loved ones and want to have one last conversation with them.
Yui decides to go and use the Phone Box to talk to her mother and daughter. On
the way there she meets Takeshi, a father and a husband, who lost his wife and
whose daughter refuses to speak after her mother died. Yui and Takeshi straight
away connect and understand each other as they start their journey to the Phone
Box at the Edge of the World. Throughout their journey and the years that followed,
they meet numerous people who are visiting the Phone Box to talk to their loved
ones, to give up the grief or just to remember the good moments, because everyone's
grief is different…
I liked the mythical realism
element added to this book, as it is believed that the Phone Box carries a person's
voice to their lost loved ones. Also, the fact that this Phone Box can help
people with grief and loss just melted my heart.
I hoped that this story would be
more heart-wrenching than it is. I also hoped that it was going to explore the lives
of the communities who were affected by the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami and
how the Phone Box helped them to deal with grief and loss. I also hoped more would
happen in the book, like more of a story with the two main characters and how
they needed each other to overcome the grief and more conversations that they
had to help each other with loss. It just felt at times that their relationship
was a bit rushed and their need for each other wasn’t properly explained. Other
than that, it is a very beautifully written story with a very interesting premise.
Overall: I liked this book even
though it didn’t meet my expectations fully. It is still very well written
and touches just the right heartstrings. It also explores grief and loss in a
very interesting but also beautiful way with bits of mythical realism added. I
also really liked the friendships Yui and Takeshi made with people who visited
this Phone Box when they were there. Also, the fact that the book is based on
the Phone Box that exists in real life is very interesting. I recommend this
book if you want to read a beautifully written book with not much going on, but
that deeply explores grief and loss and how people deal with it in different
ways.
About the Author:
Laura Imai Messina was born in Rome and graduated in Literature from La Sapienza University. She moved to Tokyo at the age of twenty-three to perfect the language and has been permanently living in Japan ever since. She obtained a first-level doctorate in Comparative Cultures at the International Christian University with a thesis on the Japanese writer Ogawa Yōko and at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies a PhD with a comparative thesis on the subject of materiality in Japanese and European literature.
https://www.lauraimaimessina.com/
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