Mizuto and the Wind (Kaye Baillie, illus by Luisa Gioffre-Suzuki, MidnightSun)

When Mizuto’s father disappears after a tsunami, Mizuto and his mother are both lost in lonely grief, until Mizuto hears about the ‘kaze no denwa’ (‘wind phone’): connected to nothing tangible, the phone encourages people to symbolically reach missing loved ones. Sending some of his feelings out on the wind helps Mizuto to reconnect with his mother, who in turn joins him visiting the phone, and they soon begin to move towards celebrating their memories of Mizuto’s father together. Kaye Baillie has conceived Mizuto’s journey to tell the real-life story of the telephone of Itaru Sasaki, who, after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, welcomed people to his garden to visit the phone booth he had previously built to help him process a loss of his own. Baillie’s story is moving and heartfelt, although (as can so easily happen in books based on actual events) there’s a slight sense of imbalance between the invented and the ‘true’ elements, with the invented forming a stronger and more poetic component. However, it’s a very minor issue. Luisa Gioffre-Suzuki’s textured, picturesque watercolour and pencil/pastel illustrations capture a strong sense of place and create an absorbing world, meditatively and lovingly depicting coastal Japan and conveying both Mizuto’s roiling turmoil after the loss of his father and also the regenerative calm that begins to emerge as he and his mother begin to heal.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Anica Boulanger-Mashberg is a freelance editor, writer, and reviewer, and has worked as a bookseller at The Hobart Bookshop for over 10 years. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews