Jessica Bates

The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World is a poetic novel about a real telephone booth in Otsuchi, Japan, a rural town decimated by the 2011 tsunami. Known as the “Wind Phone,” the disconnected rotary telephone allows grieving family members to speak, in a way, to loved ones who have passed on.

Yui lost her mother and daughter in the tsunami, and in the days following the catastrophe, she lived in a shelter with other survivors. Her existence was confined to a mat, and she was joined in her grief by a man who carried around an empty picture frame, observing the world through its void. As Yui begins to live again while trying to heal from her pain, she hears of the disconnected telephone that carries people’s words to the dead.

When Yui makes her first pilgrimage from Tokyo to the phone booth, she meets a widower named Takeshi along the way. Takeshi’s daughter has gone mute from the trauma of losing her mother. On their first visit, Takeshi goes to the phone to speak to his late wife, but Yui hangs back, hesitant. Yui and Takeshi become friends and travel monthly to the Wind Phone, but still Yui does not speak to her lost family.

Between chapters that follow Yui’s story and the experiences of other grieving people who visit the phone booth, author Laura Imai Messina intersperses bite-size sections that are almost like poems. They have titles such as “Parts of Yui’s Body She Entrusted to Others Over the Years” and “Two Things Yui Discovered After Googling ‘Hug’ the Next Day.” These snippets are lovely breathers, a chance for the reader to marvel at the tiny details that make up a life.

The English-language debut from Messina, an Italian author who lives in Japan with her husband and children, unfolds over the course of many years as a tender tribute to grief and what it teaches us. Healing is not linear, and the ones we lose never truly leave us. It can be unfathomably painful when we’re reminded of our losses, even though remembering our loved ones is often what can heal us. The phone booth is a magical place that not only connects the living to the dead but also the living to the living.

Amity Gaige’s fourth novel tells the entrancing story of Juliet and Michael Partlow. As their marriage stalls after two children and relative normalcy in suburbia, Michael has a wild idea to take the whole family aboard a boat and sail for a year. Juliet, entangled in postpartum depression and unable to muster the strength to finish her dissertation for her Ph.D., begrudgingly agrees to the adventure.

The structure of the novel is a duet between Michael and Juliet, with Juliet’s lyrical, rhythmic first-person narration driving the story forward. She is a student of confessional poetry, and she is transfixed by the wind and its many faces. Entries from Michael’s captain’s log while aboard the Juliet weave throughout, veering more toward a diary. He journals about his childhood, his father’s early death, his initial attraction to Juliet and their problems as a couple. 

This marriage isn’t perfect, and it’s debatable whether Michael and Juliet are running from their problems or tuning in to fix them. But the sea opens up an avenue toward peace, with unending amounts of water to dump their minds into.

Unafraid and perhaps unaware of all that could possibly go wrong, Michael and Juliet’s daughter, Sybil, easily trades Barbie houses and elementary school for seashells and bottle caps. Their younger son, Georgie, called Doodle, watches Sybil and mimics her. When the sea brings squalls, Juliet and Michael must learn to communicate and come together on a whole different level.

With taut prose and well-paced action, Sea Wife provides an excellent escape from reality while exposing universal truths about marriage, motherhood and childhood trauma. In a world where so many “shoulds” are thrown upon mothers, this story’s mother does her best to be honest. While in the beginning Juliet gives away too much of herself in service of her family, the sea and her sailing adventure bring forth her confidence and free her from traditional gender roles.

The sea changes this family. They cannot go back to the lives they had before. Sea Wife is brilliant, heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful.