The Letters - Softcover
When Chiaki learns that her mother’s former landlady, Mrs. Yanagi, has died, she decides to attend the funeral. The last time she saw Mrs. Yanagi was when she lived in her apartment building when she was a little girl. Chiaki takes a trip back through time and remembers what her life was like shortly after her father’s death. At first young Chiaki is scared of old Mrs. Yanagi, but as time goes on, they form a close relationship. Then Mrs. Yanagi reveals that she has a special mission in life. She will deliver letters to the dead when she herself passes away. She keeps the letters in a drawer and when it is filled, then she will die. She warns Chiaki that anyone else who looks in the drawer will carry the burden of delivering the letters instead of her. Chiaki starts writing letters to her father every day to overcome her loss. Years later, Chiaki is unprepared for the surprises that await her at Mrs. Yanagi’s funeral and the unexpected turn her life will take from that point on.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Kazumi Yumoto began her career as a writer by writing scripts for operas while attending Tokyo University of Music. After graduation she decided to try her hand at writing a novel for young readers. The Friends, her first book, is the winner of the 1997 Mildred A. Batchelder Award for Translation. It was also named an ALA Notable Children's Book and won the Recommended Book Prize from Japan School Library Book Club.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Chapter 1
What's wrong? . . . You don't sound very cheerful. Have you eaten supper yet? . . . No, wait. I'm calling for a reason. I just got a call from Miss Sasaki . . . Yes, that's right. The woman from Poplar House."
As I listen to my mother speaking on the other end of the line, the years we spent in Poplar House come flooding back, and suddenly, I know. The old lady is dead.
By "the old lady," I mean Mrs. Yanagi, the landlady of the apartment where my mother and I lived for three years. My father died when I was six, and a short while later we were forced to leave our house. We moved to Poplar House, into one of three small apartments the old lady rented out. Miss Sasaki, the woman who had contacted my mother, also lived there.
"When Miss Sasaki dropped by to see her in the morning, there was no response. She seems to have died in her sleep."
"In the morning?"
"This morning."
I inhale slowly. If it was this morning, then even if she had come to my bedside to bid me farewell, I would have slept right through it. For some reason, when I knock myself out with pills at night, I am occasionally afflicted with powerful nightmares. Last night I dreamed that I was the corpse of an enormous fish being beaten against a concrete wall. It is a recurring pattern in my dreams.
"How old was she?" I ask.
"Ninety-eight. A peaceful way to go, don't you think?"
Which means that she must have been eighty when we lived there. Yet she had promised me when I was seven that she would try to stay alive until I grew up, and she had kept her word, although it must have required quite a firm resolve from someone as old as eighty.
"She said she called because there are some letters."
"Some what?"
My mother lowers her voice slightly and repeats slowly and distinctly, "Let-ters."
"Did Miss Sasaki say that?"
"Yes," my mother replies, but then changes the subject. "I wonder if I should send flowers . . ."
I was ten years old when we left Poplar House after my mother decided to remarry. Neither she nor I had seen our former landlady since, although of course we wrote letters and even sent the occasional photograph. But I know with absolute certainty that those are not the kind of letters Miss Sasaki was talking about. They are the letters I entrusted to the landlady when I was seven, the ones she had placed in a certain drawer of her black dresser. So she had kept them for me all this time.
"You send the flowers, Mom."
"Huh?"
"I'm going to the funeral. It won't take long by plane."
"Won't the hospital mind?"
It has been a month since I quit working as a nurse at the hospital, but I still haven't told my mother. "Don't worry about that."
"Who said I was worrying?" Then, after a short silence, she adds, "You always make your own decisions anyway."
"That's right."
"Say hello to Miss Sasaki for me."
"Sure."
After hanging up the phone, I sit staring vacantly for a while. What a long distance now separates me from our old landlady and Poplar House and the poplar tree in the yard, from everything that I had once thought "good," although I am not sure what that meant. It is as if the three years plus that I spent in Poplar House have become no more than a dream to the person I am now.
I throw a change of underwear and some toiletries and a paper bag full of medicine into an overnight bag and firmly zip it shut. I mutter to myself that it is ridiculous to take all my sleeping pills with me when I'll only be gone for one or two days, but another part of my brain retorts, "You don't think it's ridiculous at all. You know you can't get it off your mind." I shake my head. I don't know what will happen after this, but I do know that tonight at least I am not going to let myself be a dead fish. And tomorrow I will get on the plane and pay my respects to the old lady. That much I have to do.
I crawl under the covers and close my eyes. I hear rustling poplar leaves whisper in my ear. "Let's talk. Let's talk," they say. It is a pleasant, dry autumn sound, and I know immediately that it does not come from outside.
Chapter 2
When the first rush of activity had passed following my father's death in a car accident, my mother seemed to carry on with the housework as usual. Then suddenly she stopped and went to sleep. She slept and slept. How long did it last, I wonder? A week? It seems much longer, but perhaps it was only three or four days. I was still in first grade. All I remember is that before I knew it, the summer vacation had already started, and I was eating canned salmon whenever I felt hungry while my mother slept. It seems odd that there was nothing in the cupboard but cans of fish. The salmon on the label had a cold glassy stare, and it certainly was not someone I could talk to. I haven't been able to stomach canned salmon since, and even now, when I see stacks of it displayed in the grocery store, the soles of my feet turn clammy.
By the time I had consumed a lifetime's worth of salmon in a matter of days, my mother got up with the same abruptness with which she had taken to her bed. Now she began riding the commuter trains, taking me with her. It was not as if she was going anywhere. She just boarded whatever train happened to come along, then rode and rode until she decided to get off. Under the scorching summer sun, we would traipse about some town that we had never seen before, stop somewhere to eat cold noodles or crushed ice with syrup, and then board a train once again.
I don't think we talked much during that time. I was well aware that my mother had no desire to speak about my father. As for myself, although the news that he was dead had at first filled me with grief--and I had wept aloud when I saw him lying in the coffin, his head bandaged in white gauze--now I felt as though a membrane had stretched itself around my heart, and I could no longer recall what my father was like when he was alive. The tremendous grief that my mother nursed as anger and rejection of the world around her had communicated itself to me as well.
What's wrong? . . . You don't sound very cheerful. Have you eaten supper yet? . . . No, wait. I'm calling for a reason. I just got a call from Miss Sasaki . . . Yes, that's right. The woman from Poplar House."
As I listen to my mother speaking on the other end of the line, the years we spent in Poplar House come flooding back, and suddenly, I know. The old lady is dead.
By "the old lady," I mean Mrs. Yanagi, the landlady of the apartment where my mother and I lived for three years. My father died when I was six, and a short while later we were forced to leave our house. We moved to Poplar House, into one of three small apartments the old lady rented out. Miss Sasaki, the woman who had contacted my mother, also lived there.
"When Miss Sasaki dropped by to see her in the morning, there was no response. She seems to have died in her sleep."
"In the morning?"
"This morning."
I inhale slowly. If it was this morning, then even if she had come to my bedside to bid me farewell, I would have slept right through it. For some reason, when I knock myself out with pills at night, I am occasionally afflicted with powerful nightmares. Last night I dreamed that I was the corpse of an enormous fish being beaten against a concrete wall. It is a recurring pattern in my dreams.
"How old was she?" I ask.
"Ninety-eight. A peaceful way to go, don't you think?"
Which means that she must have been eighty when we lived there. Yet she had promised me when I was seven that she would try to stay alive until I grew up, and she had kept her word, although it must have required quite a firm resolve from someone as old as eighty.
"She said she called because there are some letters."
"Some what?"
My mother lowers her voice slightly and repeats slowly and distinctly, "Let-ters."
"Did Miss Sasaki say that?"
"Yes," my mother replies, but then changes the subject. "I wonder if I should send flowers . . ."
I was ten years old when we left Poplar House after my mother decided to remarry. Neither she nor I had seen our former landlady since, although of course we wrote letters and even sent the occasional photograph. But I know with absolute certainty that those are not the kind of letters Miss Sasaki was talking about. They are the letters I entrusted to the landlady when I was seven, the ones she had placed in a certain drawer of her black dresser. So she had kept them for me all this time.
"You send the flowers, Mom."
"Huh?"
"I'm going to the funeral. It won't take long by plane."
"Won't the hospital mind?"
It has been a month since I quit working as a nurse at the hospital, but I still haven't told my mother. "Don't worry about that."
"Who said I was worrying?" Then, after a short silence, she adds, "You always make your own decisions anyway."
"That's right."
"Say hello to Miss Sasaki for me."
"Sure."
After hanging up the phone, I sit staring vacantly for a while. What a long distance now separates me from our old landlady and Poplar House and the poplar tree in the yard, from everything that I had once thought "good," although I am not sure what that meant. It is as if the three years plus that I spent in Poplar House have become no more than a dream to the person I am now.
I throw a change of underwear and some toiletries and a paper bag full of medicine into an overnight bag and firmly zip it shut. I mutter to myself that it is ridiculous to take all my sleeping pills with me when I'll only be gone for one or two days, but another part of my brain retorts, "You don't think it's ridiculous at all. You know you can't get it off your mind." I shake my head. I don't know what will happen after this, but I do know that tonight at least I am not going to let myself be a dead fish. And tomorrow I will get on the plane and pay my respects to the old lady. That much I have to do.
I crawl under the covers and close my eyes. I hear rustling poplar leaves whisper in my ear. "Let's talk. Let's talk," they say. It is a pleasant, dry autumn sound, and I know immediately that it does not come from outside.
Chapter 2
When the first rush of activity had passed following my father's death in a car accident, my mother seemed to carry on with the housework as usual. Then suddenly she stopped and went to sleep. She slept and slept. How long did it last, I wonder? A week? It seems much longer, but perhaps it was only three or four days. I was still in first grade. All I remember is that before I knew it, the summer vacation had already started, and I was eating canned salmon whenever I felt hungry while my mother slept. It seems odd that there was nothing in the cupboard but cans of fish. The salmon on the label had a cold glassy stare, and it certainly was not someone I could talk to. I haven't been able to stomach canned salmon since, and even now, when I see stacks of it displayed in the grocery store, the soles of my feet turn clammy.
By the time I had consumed a lifetime's worth of salmon in a matter of days, my mother got up with the same abruptness with which she had taken to her bed. Now she began riding the commuter trains, taking me with her. It was not as if she was going anywhere. She just boarded whatever train happened to come along, then rode and rode until she decided to get off. Under the scorching summer sun, we would traipse about some town that we had never seen before, stop somewhere to eat cold noodles or crushed ice with syrup, and then board a train once again.
I don't think we talked much during that time. I was well aware that my mother had no desire to speak about my father. As for myself, although the news that he was dead had at first filled me with grief--and I had wept aloud when I saw him lying in the coffin, his head bandaged in white gauze--now I felt as though a membrane had stretched itself around my heart, and I could no longer recall what my father was like when he was alive. The tremendous grief that my mother nursed as anger and rejection of the world around her had communicated itself to me as well.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherLaurel Leaf
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 0440238226
- ISBN 13 9780440238225
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages176
- Rating
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