The friend who recommended this book didn’t tell me what it was about. She simply emailed “You might like this”. She was right. I did.
It’s an unusual, gentle, humane, affectionate exploration of grief, hope, reconciliation and love. I’m not in the least surprised that it’s done well in 21 territories. Imai Messina is an Italian who has lived in Japan, where her novel is set, for many years with her Japanese husband and children. She writes in Italian and the edition I read is translated into English by Lucy Rand.
Yui is a radio presenter whose mother and three year old daughter died in the 2011 tsunami. Seven hours’ drive from Tokyo is Bell Gardia a peaceful garden where bereaved people go to “talk” to their lost loved ones in an old phone box overlooking the sea. While there she meets, among others, a doctor named Takeshi whose wife has died leaving him with a very troubled three year old daughter. Very gradually they become friends and come to share the long, monthly drive to Bell Gardia. It’s the slowest imaginable burn but eventually, over several years, they begin to find comfort together and a way of facing the future. The tenderness is profoundly beautiful. Yes, this is a love story but also a great deal more.
Alongside the poignancy lies ordinary life. Imai Messina interleaves her chapters with shopping lists, menus and, for example “Objects Bought for her Daughter (and never used Found Around Yui’s House” which includes three diamante hair clips and a CD of Christmas Songs or “Two Things Yui Discovered from Googling ‘Hug’ the next day”. This insouciant quirkiness is the author’s way of sculpting her characters three dimensionally so that we see them from different angles.
Her characterisation is splendid. Beyond Yui and Takeshi are their families, the custodian of Bell Gardia, a distressed local boy who comes to the phone box to talk to his mother and many more. Each one is a plausibly drawn person that you care about.
One isn’t surprised to learn that, although this is a work of fiction, peopled, obviously, by fictional people, Bell Gardia is a real place. The author instructs the reader in an end note not to try to find it because “The Wind Phone is not a tourist destination”. You should go there only if you “intend to pick up that heavy receiver and talk to somebody you have lost” Instead she suggests that we should support the work of this “wonderful place” by donating via the official website.
https://bell-gardia.jp/en/about/
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:
