Sally Hayden writes for the Literary Hub:
The road wound upwards, past a sloping graveyard and cedar trees. We passed another hamlet of houses, and I started to spot various signs pointing towards the drifting post. Through a final flurry of trees, it at last became visible. There was a rectangular yellow post box—the “real” one, Akagawa said, and another upstanding coral-colored “ornamental” one. There were bicycles and benches, a big wooden house, and more trees all around. Further back from the structure of the main building was a DIY room—”my treasure box,” Akagawa smiled.
At the very end of the garden was another room, like a cabin, built by Akagawa himself. It housed sixteen binders of letters, six chairs and a desk, where people could relax or take a moment if they were “trying not to cry.” Sometimes multiple visitors turned up at once. Occasionally, they made friends with each other. Unless writers specified that they wanted their letter to remain private, Akagawa would place them in his binders so they could be read by other mourners; it might help them assemble their own thoughts. The writers were willing for their letters to be made public, he said: this made the mourning more collective. “Finding out that you are not alone is the most important thing, finding out that you are not the only person who is grieving.” As I leafed through the binders, the wind outside was so strong that it sounded like heavy rain.