Book Review –  The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

  by Bonnie Tollefson

Book Review –  The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World, Laura Imai Messina, The Overlook Press, 2021

A few months ago a fellow resident said to me with a subtle curl of the lip and a wrinkle to the nose, “Eww, you read series fiction.”  Yes I do.  I enjoy the continuing story of the characters and reading books that feel comfortable.  Sometimes the characters develop and occasionally the author does.  Series can be found in almost every genre of fiction, so it is not as tho I read only mysteries.  However, in recognition of her tastes, this quarter I went to the RVM library to find a book to review that was not part of a series or by an author known for series work, and I found a gem.  The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina is a novel set in Japan, written in Italian, translated into English.  The author is Italian, born and raised in Rome, who went to Japan to improve her Japanese.  Fifteen years later she still lives in Japan with a husband, two children and a job teaching Italian.

Yuri, a main character in the book, became the host of a call-in radio show in Tokyo after losing her mother and young daughter in the March 11, 2011 tsunami.  She hears one evening about a garden with a phone booth where one can talk to the dead.  The Wind Phone helps many people deal with the loss of loved ones.  This is a book about grief, a book about hope, and a book about love.  It can be a quick read or savored, but it contains something for everyone.  The author includes the information on research conducted on how many hugs are required in a day for survival, as well as acknowledging that the truth is “that love is a miracle.  Even the second time around, even when it comes to you by mistake.”  I won’t include a spoiler about what happens to Yuri, but since hope and love are components of the story you might guess. Near the end of the book “Yuri came to understand that there was always joy somewhere within unhappiness.”

The March 11 tsunami was an actual event just as the Bell Gradia garden and the Wind Phone are real.  In the author’s note Laura Imai Messina says “For me the Wind Phone is mainly this: a metaphor that suggests how precious it is to hold on tight to joy as well as pain. That even when we are confronted by the subtractions, the things that life takes from us, we have to open ourselves up to the many additions it can offer too.”  An important lesson for us all.

The book can be found at both the RVM library and the Jackson County Public Library.