A scarily long list of friends who have been coping with serious illnesses in the last six months has brought home to me how fragile life is.
We all know that, of course, but usually it's in a purely theoretical sense. We're aware that any day could be our last, any time we see a loved one might be goodbye. But somehow, we rarely ever act that way. We -- and I very much include myself in this assessment -- waste time in pointless and joyless activities, squander potential, treat the people we meet cavalierly. In general, we act as if we have forever and don't have any reason to treat the time we have now as our most precious possession.
It's a sad truth that often when we find out our error, it's too late. The time for the chances we could have taken is past, the person we cared for has moved out of our orbit (either temporarily or permanently), the opportunity to apologize and make amends for a wrong we committed has long since passed. It's sad, but its ubiquity points to it all being part of the human condition. The peculiar magnetism of books and movies where you can reverse the clock and fix past mistakes -- like Peggy Sue Got Married and Back to the Future and the devastatingly poignant Doctor Who episode "Turn Left," as well as my own novel Lock & Key -- points to how universal this kind of longing is.
The Japanese have come up with two quirky, oddly beautiful ways of dealing with this. The first was the brainchild of a garden designer named Ituro Sasaki, who in 2010 found out that a beloved cousin was suffering from inoperable cancer. When the cousin died three months later, Sasaki designed a beautiful garden in his honor, and the centerpiece was...
... a phone booth.
He calls it the "Wind Phone" (風の電話, Kaze no Denwa) because the telephone inside is "connected to nothing but the wind." He wanted to be able to talk to his cousin, even knowing he couldn't respond, and after finishing the installation Sasaki spent hours sitting in this lovely spot telling his cousin about all the beauty he was seeing, and all the things he regretted not saying while he was alive. He didn't think his cousin was actually listening, but still felt it absolutely necessary to say it all out loud. "Because my thoughts couldn't be relayed over a regular phone line," Sasaki explained, "I wanted them to be carried on the wind."
Then, in 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake killed almost twenty thousand people in the region, including twelve hundred in Ōtsuchi, Sasaki's home town -- around ten percent of the population. This moved him to open his garden and the Wind Phone to the public, and it has since been visited by over thirty thousand people.
As strange as it sounds, it has become a place where people find an anodyne for the twin tragedies of human existence -- regret and grief.
The other one is located in Mitoyo, on Awashima Island in Kagawa Prefecture. It's called the "Missing Post Office" (漂流郵便局, Hyōryū Yūbinkyoku), and was the creation of artist Saya Kubota. Kubota came up with idea when she visited the island looking for inspiration for the Setouchi International Art Festival. She was passing the Mitoyo Post Office and caught sight of her own reflection in the window, and thought, "How did I wash up here?" The idea struck her that we all are caught up in currents not of our own making, and sometimes end up very far from where we intended -- for good or bad. "I wanted to create a space where people could experience the same sensation I did," Kubota said.
So she designed a small building that looked like a real post office, the purpose of which was to receive letters and post cards from people about whatever they most wanted to say, but had never had the chance. It succeeded beyond Kubota's wildest dream. The Missing Post Office receives almost four thousand deliveries a month, in which people talk about their first loves, dearly missed relatives and friends, regrets, hopes, dreams. There have been messages directed at ancestors or future descendants. Some people even send their favorite possessions, along with a description of why the items are so important. Some are anonymous, but many are signed; more than one has written about how comforting it was to be able to speak their truth, even knowing that it can't change the past. Kubota displays the letters and postcards, and visitors to the Missing Post Office have described how emotionally cathartic it is to read about what others have experienced and written about -- and to recognize that they are not alone in their own feelings.
If you would like to write your own message to the Missing Post Office, the address is c/o Hyōryū Yūbinkyoku, 1317-2 Takumacho Awashima, Mitoyo Kagawa 769-1108, Japan.
While the idea of being able to go back and fix past mistakes is attractive, time's arrow appears to point in one direction only. "The Moving Finger writes," said Omar Khayyám, "and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it." Correcting past wrongs, saying what we should have said to the people we love, and making different decisions at critical junctures (an astonishing number of which we never recognized as critical at the time) will always be out of reach. But maybe there is some solace to be gained by saying what we need to say now, even if it's just spoken to the wind through disconnected phone, or written on a postcard and sent away to a distant island to be read and wept over by strangers.
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