Translated by Lucy Rand
Hello?
Sachiko?
i’m here it’s mummy.
YUI
8th book of 2022
We all have something to tell those we have lost.
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.
Trigger Warning
Grief, death, parental death, mutism, child death
Rating
Review
I had a good time reading this book. It’s a lot shorter than I thought as it’s mainly composed of short chapters; some are only one page.
As Yui and Takeshi go to the Bell Gardia, they encounter many people. Those people are grieving people, and you see them doing it differently. Some of them are more important than others. Still, I like seeing them talk about it and discover how they are doing throughout the book and how they found a way to cope.
The only struggle I had was the timeline. I had a problem putting it together. You have a lot of time skips, and they aren’t days; it’s years. So it was sometimes like I was reading a story with big holes. The pace is fast, and it doesn’t help this sensation. Also, the relationship between Yui and Takeshi is like a big slow-burn. Totally understandable, but sometimes it’s hard to be focused on it. This feeling disappears a little when you arrive at the second part as it’s more focused on Yui and her thoughts, and you don’t have any jump in time.
I was surprised by this book as I didn’t imagine it like that. The Bell Gardia isn’t as present as I thought; the more you read, the less it appears. At some point, it’s only mentioned, and then you go there again. As it is said in the book, it’s expected that they go there less and less through time. Still, as the timeline is difficult to follow with the big year gap, it feels like everything is happening fast and without warning.
Overall, it’s an uplifting book with a fast-paced story, sometimes a little hard to read. I liked to read it on a rainy day.
Liz.
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