In 2010, a Japanese garden designer named Itaru Sasaki—who lives outside the coastal city of Ōtsuchi—built a telephone booth on his property. Inside the white, glass-paned booth was a black rotary telephone, unconnected, which he placed on a metal shelf to speak with a beloved cousin who had suddenly passed away of cancer.
Sasaki’s mode of communication felt like a natural way to reach the world- to-come from our mortal stance. It was not designed as a religious ritual, but rather a mode to reflect on and venerate the loss of his cousin. In an interview, he said, “Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular telephone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind.” Hence, Sasaki’s name for his memorial— the wind telephone.
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A moth’s ears are very simple; each pair of eardrums vibrate four receptor cells on its flanks. Yet a moth can sense frequencies up to 300 kilohertz, well beyond the range of any other animal and higher than a bat can squeak.
The wind telephone’s operating principle similarly depends on picking up an indiscernible sound that I imagine is heard as if plucking a taut, steely violin string. The ghostly telephone calls operate on a lepidopteran-like frequency that is distinct to each caller. And there are no wrong telephone numbers.
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Sasaki’s telephone booth sits on a hill overlooking Ōtsuchi. I imagine it projects tranquility, intimacy even, in the face of memories from the awesome terrifying power of the Japanese tsunami of 2011. The tsunami is also known as Great Sendai earthquake and Great Tōhoku earthquake—emphasizing the rupture of life and history. Officially, about 18,500 people were killed or reported missing and presumed dead, and hundreds of thousands were displaced in the wake of the tsunami’s devastation.
Soon after the tsunami, people began to visit and ring up their dead on Sasaki’s wind telephone.
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To place a moth’s spectacular aurality in context, humans can hear sounds of up to twenty kilohertz. In adults that figure drops to about fifteen kilohertz. Dolphins, known for their keen sense of hearing, cannot hear above 160 kilohertz, a distant second to the moth in nature’s aural Olympics.
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Just before my mother moved, she said she had long conversations with my father, long dead. She said he told her he was afraid he wouldn’t know where to find her after she left the house. In other ghostly visitations, he coached her through another night of climbing stairs that seemed steeper with each passing day. My mother has always communed with her dead. When her father died four decades earlier, he appeared to her wearing a guayabera streaked with sweat. It was as if he had just come from a game of high-stakes dominos that had gone well into the night at the beach club near the Malécon. He apologized to my mother for losing so much money.
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In 2016, five years after the tsunami, an episode of This American Life featured Susaki and his wind telephone. Word had spread that Susaki’s wind telephone could connect people to their dead. And so many of them randomly showed up on his property eager to contact those in the great beyond.
The journalist who reported on Susaki’s wind telephone found it poignant that people, particularly men, were expressing their love and grief in such understated ways. The telephone booth was a safe space to speak about their complicated feelings and regrets, and most of all, to commune with their dead.
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A group of moths is called an eclipse. When an eclipse of moths is attracted to a light source, it blocks that source’s illumination. Like a moth to a flame, so the saying goes.
One night an eclipse of moths darkened my front door, hearing otherwise undetected frequencies of sound.
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My mother has a telephone by her bed in the nursing home. Much of the time, only she hears it ringing. It’s her mother calling. Mamá, she’ll say—her head in a cloud of stirred-up dementia.
“Te extraño,” I miss you.
Muscle memory: My mother still begs her mother to love her.
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In the last decade, several replicas of the wind telephone inside a telephone booth have cropped up all over the world. In Oakland, California, it is a memorial to
the thirty-six people who died in a warehouse fire. In Ireland, Canada, and in cities across the United States, people have erected their wind telephones in memory, in grief, in deep contemplation, with the hope of reaching their dead. In Washington State, a family regularly goes to the wind telephone booth in a state park to talk to their daughter, who died at the age of four.
In my home state, Massachusetts, there is a wind telephone a few hours from me in Provincetown. The first time I went to Provincetown was on a family vacation. I was thirteen years old, and an older teenager working in a souvenir shop made me feel pretty by telling me so. I’ve been to Provincetown with my own family many times. The next time I’m there, I’ll go to the wind telephone booth and tell my father, “Guess where I am, Dad?” With a child-like sense of timing, I’ll blurt out, “Provincetown. Remember when you took us there on vacation?” And in his formal telephone voice, I will hear my father say, “I most certainly do.”
Judy Bolton-Fasman is the author of ASYLUM: A Memoir of Family Secrets from Mandel Vilar Press. Her essays and reviews have appeared in major newspapers, essay anthologies, and literary magazines She is the recipient of writing fellowships from Hedgebrook, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Mineral School. Judy is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee.
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