![]() ![]() If the Haiku is the quintessential Japanese form of poetry, then this comes close to being what I would imagine the quintessential Japanese novel to be like. Or an animist/pantheist or whatever else it is I might be to go sit on a beach and speak to the waves.Īlthough this book is translated from the Italian, which I am guessing is Messina's mother tongue, it has a very Japanese sensibility. Maybe it takes an atheist to need a disconnected telephone, where the Buddhist would simply stand in front of the family butsudan and do exactly the same thing. What it is and what it is for, and what we do instead of it if we have no such beliefs. In parts, it is also a reflection on religion. There are worse ways than speaking your love into the wind. It is the nature of life that we will lose the ones we love – or that they will lose us – and the beauty of life lies at least in part with how we deal with that loss. The problem with happy ever after is that 'ever after' has a tendency to be quite short. It is, obviously, also a story about grief, about mourning, but ultimately every love story is about grief. Love for a child, for a parent, for a friend. This isn't a love story as such, it's a story about what love is – about how we express it, the nature of it, and in particular the kinds of love beyond the romantic kind. They continue to visit, and a friendship grows and grows into something deeper. That isn't explained in the book, to me, it is a refusal to let the beauty of nature be lost to its cruelty. But even in the very first days, she went and looked at the ocean. ![]() She looks at the ocean and eats chocolate to hold the nausea at bay. Yui walks in the garden and doesn't talk to her mother or her daughter. Takeshi goes into the phone box and talks to his wife. His daughter hasn't spoken since her mother was taken from her. On her way, she meets Takeshi, who still has a daughter and a mother, but is mourning a wife lost to cancer. She is still dealing with the aftermath, or not dealing with it, which must be the case for so many people. The father of the daughter is not on the scene. In the Tsunami she lost her mother and her daughter. She hosts a talk show which is how she comes to hear about the telephone. ![]() There is love – of course, there is love and there is longing, but there is anger, there is bafflement, there is hope, there is prayer, there are all the ordinary everyday things that we will never get to tell them again. What we have to say to them is equally as varied. We lose them because they lose their fragile hold on this existence and remain here but not here. It is a fact of life that we all lose people. People can be lost, even if they are still here. Many of the lost for whom the Wind Telephone is so important were carried away in the 2011 tsunami, but some of them weren't. And the idea is that we all have something to say those we have lost – no matter how we might have lost them. It is a real place, a necessary place, and I am pleased to see the IMPORTANT NOTE that the author attaches to her story, that the place is not a tourist destination, it is a sacred place, a place that must be left to those who really need it.Īnd as one of the characters says partway through the story when a typhoon arrives, that particular telephone box isn't the point. ![]() Inside there is an old black, telephone, disconnected, that carries voices into the wind. In the northeast of Japan, in Inwate Prefecture a man installed a telephone box in his garden. ![]()
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