Fifty years of letters, three meetings

In 1975, a nineteen-year-old girl in Tokyo named Yoko put her address in the pen-pal column of a magazine.

She got plenty of replies. She answered two. One came from a librarian in Liverpool named Margaret, twenty-three years old. Yoko said she chose Margaret because of how the letter opened: "I am not sure we ought to be friends — our lives seem to have nothing in common. But perhaps because they have nothing in common, we have a great deal to talk about."

That "talk" lasted fifty years.

The letters covered everything. Margaret wrote about the readers at her library, about the weather the English discuss endlessly, about her wedding — "I sewed the dress myself, and put the money I saved toward books." Yoko wrote about Japan's four seasons, her accounting job, her two children growing up. They mailed each other things. Margaret sent a pinch of lavender seed from her own garden; Yoko killed it, and a second packet arrived the following year. Yoko sent back a woodblock print of Mount Fuji she had cut herself. It hung in Margaret's living room for forty years.

In fifty years they met three times.

The first was 1990, when Margaret came to Tokyo on business and stayed a week at Yoko's flat. Both were nervous. Twenty years of letters — would it be awkward in the flesh? Yoko's husband remembered it this way: "They hugged in the first second, then went into the kitchen like old friends who had known each other all their lives and talked until midnight." The only obstacle was language. Yoko's English was passable; Margaret had no Japanese at all. Their solution was plain: one Japanese-English dictionary, plus gestures and a great deal of laughing.

The second was 2008. Yoko flew to England for her daughter's wedding and detoured to Liverpool. Margaret walked her through the library where she had worked, and they sat in their old seats reading their own books, an entire afternoon with hardly a word between them. Yoko said afterwards, "With an old friend, silence is full."

The third was 2019. Margaret was seventy-one, Yoko sixty-seven. Margaret's husband had died, and Yoko flew to Liverpool and stayed two weeks. No sightseeing this time. Walks by the sea, tea at the kitchen table. Margaret said, "After my husband died, what frightened me most was that the only voice in the room would be mine. Then Yoko came, and there were two voices in the room — even if they were in different languages."

Some friendships add up to less than a month together across an entire life, and still run deeper than people who see each other every day. What holds them is not meetings. It is the unbroken "I am here."

Letters became email, and then video calls. But they kept one old habit. Every Christmas, a handwritten letter, sent as a physical object. Margaret said, "Typing is too fast. In a handwritten letter you can see the mood of the person writing it. If your letters come out crooked, I know you are tired."

Last year Margaret's health declined, and Yoko's son booked her a ticket. "Mum, go. Meeting number five." She went, and stayed half a month in Margaret's garden. On the way out the two of them agreed on something: to gather fifty years of correspondence and publish it. More than seventeen hundred letters — a novel of a life, written by two people.

The final page is Margaret's afterword. "I never had a sister. I used a pen pal to fill that place. Geography kept us nine thousand kilometres apart. Letters put us one sheet of paper apart."