Narrating Collective Grief: Narrative Strategies for Representing Trauma in Suzume, The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World, and The Phone of the Wind”

This study examines the representation of collective trauma and grief in Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume (2022), Laura Imai Messina’s The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World (2020), and Nobuhiro Suwa’s The Phone of the Wind (2020). All three works are shaped by the cultural memory of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and explore how survivors cope with loss through symbolic acts of communication and remembrance. Drawing on Cathy Caruth’s theory of trauma and Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, the study analyzes narrative structures, liminal spaces, and encounters with absence as mechanisms for processing grief. The research argues that these texts transform personal mourning into a shared cultural experience, emphasizing resilience, emotional healing, and the preservation of memory. By comparing literary and cinematic representations of post-disaster Japan, this study demonstrates how narrative art contributes to the reconstruction of individual and collective identities after catastrophe. Assmann 37–56; Caruth 4–12; Messina 21–198; Shinkai; Suwa. Furthermore, this study highlights the significance of symbolic communication and liminal spaces in facilitating emotional recovery after collective trauma. Through the recurring motifs of the Wind Phone, abandoned landscapes, supernatural thresholds, and journeys of remembrance, the selected works demonstrate how individuals negotiate the boundaries between absence and presence, memory and forgetting, life and death. These symbolic practices enable characters to maintain continuing bonds with deceased loved ones while gradually reconstructing their identities in the aftermath of loss. By integrating insights from Trauma Theory, Cultural Memory Theory, and Continuing Bonds Theory, the study argues that literature and cinema serve not only as artistic representations of suffering but also as cultural mechanisms that promote resilience, remembrance, and post-traumatic growth. Consequently, the selected texts illustrate the enduring capacity of narrative art to transform personal grief into collective understanding and emotional renewal. (Caruth 91–112; Assmann 109–125; Klass, Silverman, and Nickman 14–32; Tedeschi and Calhoun 1–26)

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Keywords: collective trauma , cultural memory , grief , post-disaster narratives , Japanese literature and cinema.