Laura Imai Messina
Fiction 2021 | 400 pages
A man named Suzuki and his wife place a phone booth in their garden near Whale mountain, four hours from Tokyo. The disconnected phone is blessed or is magical. If you pick up the receiver, you can speak to loved ones who have died. Many people journey to this phone booth in their grief to speak with spouses, children, parents, siblings, best friends.
Yui was one such person. On March 11, 2011, a deadly typhoon hit this area of Japan. Many people were killed, including Yui's mother and seven-year-old daughter (whose bodies would later be found, hugging each other). Yui heard about this phone booth from a man she interviewed for the call-in radio show she hosts. Yui decided to visit this phone booth. While there, walking the gardens of Bell Gardia, she meets a man, Takeshi, who lost his wife on the same tragic day. As Yui and Takeshi both lived in Tokyo, they began to drive together to Bell Gardia, once a month. It wasn't long before a deep and abiding friendship formed between them. Takeshi also has a daughter, three years old and now motherless. We follow this relationship between Yui and Takeshi throughout the book.
"Tender" is the word I use to describe this book. Some reviewers complained that there was no plot, and they are right. It is a witness to how grief unfolds differently for different people, and how we cope with our grief and our sorrow, and our sometimes happiness and joy, as we learn to rebuild a life without these vital people .
I really like Messina's writing. I found it to be gentle, authentic, revealing, even vulnerable. Her descriptions of her characters, as well as her clear comprehension of grief, made this book come alive for me. One interesting technique she used would be to expand her writing by elaborating on something she just wrote about. For example, there is a chapter that simply lists the differences Yui observes in her daughter and Takeshi's daughter, Hana. She makes another list of the things grandma and Hana liked to do together, such as, "Opening their mouths when it rained and saying, 'How delicious! Compliments to the chef!'"
There is no question ... I really like this book and recommend it. It is a weekend read; not very long. Thank you, Sara, for this book club suggestion.
October 2025