In Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart (2001), the narrator K reflects on Sumire’s call from ‘a totally semiotic telephone box’, and wonders if ‘the phone itself is some vital message, its very shape and colour containing hidden meaning’.

For more on telephones in Sputnik Sweetheart, watch this excellent short film by Victoria Callus, an MRes student at Nottingham Trent University.  Victoria made this film as part of her BA English with Creative Writing degree.