The connected thread throughout is the unfurling drama of Yuri’s struggle to see herself apart from her loss and of Takeshi’s increasing love for Yui.Ī telephone booth in a garden, a disconnected phone on which you could talk to your lost loved ones. They meet other visitors to Bell Gardia, learn their stories, and become close with Suzuki-san, the garden’s caretaker. Over the next months, and then years, the two travel together to and from Bell Gardia, a distance of several hours, creating a friendship that gradually advances into much more. The caller says, “…your voice is carried away with the wind.” On her first visit, she meets Takeshi, a surgeon, also from Tokyo, who lost his wife to cancer and whose daughter ever since stopped talking. She lost her mother and daughter in the tsunami, and when she hears about the garden phone from a caller on one of her talk shows, she knows she must go to it. Also, Messina approaches the topic of grief from its complex singularity, not the expected cycle of getting through it.
Much of this has been documented by the news media, including NPR in This American Life and the BBC, but Messina’s fiction reveals what those factual stories cannot - the intricate privacy of moving forward and the discovery of pathways into new joy despite unimaginable loss. Ever since the tsunami, however, thousands have come to talk on the phone to their lost, dead loved ones. Inside, he installed a disconnected rotary phone. The phone booth was not an outcome of the tsunami: it was set up earlier by a man who needed to talk to his dead cousin. The natural disaster created enormous waves that swept away entire communities, set off the meltdown of nuclear reactors, and took thousands of lives. Laura Imai Messina’s inspiration for The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World draws from a real phone booth in northeast Japan, one of the places worst hit by the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that happened 10 years ago today, March 11, 2011.
0 kommentar(er)
