Picking Bones from Ash (16 page)

I have been in love since I met you
, I wanted to say to Masayoshi.
I would bet anything that you haven’t felt any love at all since you got married
.

The
ryokan
was located on a hillside and the hostess promised us that we would have a view of the ocean. I was to share a room with the women. Mineko had originally arranged that she and her husband and their children would occupy one room and Chieko’s family another. My unexpected arrival had uprooted these plans.

“We’re going to have to sleep separately from our husbands,” she huffed.

“I can just stay in my own room,” I offered.

“Can you afford it?” Mineko smiled. “I thought not.”

That night we all piled into the main dining room, wearing our
yukatas
, pajama-style
kimonos
, as though we were just out on a family trip to the spa and had come out of the water newly revived from the inn’s mineral baths. The decor was meant to suggest old-fashioned northern Japan, with a big hearth in the middle of the floor where the cooks would occasionally prepare a boiling pot of food. Near the entrance sat a thick wood sled that would have been used during the Meiji era in the middle of a snowstorm.

A large cod had been filleted into
sashimi
, its skeleton and head preserved and pinned so it appeared to be twisting out of a bed of seaweed and scallops and shrimp. There was no meat, of course, because we were here for a memorial. A part of me was relieved not to be confronted with the pungent food smells of France, and another part of me thought how provincial this all was, as though by eschewing meat we were going to negate the fact that my mother was dead.

Masayoshi stayed with us while we ate, sitting on the opposite side of the long table where we had congregated. He pretended not to notice as Mineko’s and Chieko’s husbands first turned salmon-colored then scarlet from numerous glasses of beer. A waitress murmured sympathetically to Chieko that she, too, had recently lost her mother and that it was the kind of event for which there was no preparation. Chieko cooed back her thanks.

At this I rose up from the table and announced my intention to retire to bed. Everyone stopped talking for a moment.
You are in Japan
, I heard
a disembodied voice say.
You must continue to sit here until everyone else has finished eating and then you must follow them, like a lowly caste member in a royal procession
.

No way
, I retorted.
I’ve lived in France, traveled to Holland, eaten raw meat, and visited a château. I don’t have to sit here
.
Japan may still be here
, I said to myself,
but that doesn’t mean that I am completely in Japan, or that I will necessarily stay here forever
.

I left the table and stopped in the hotel hallway to use the green plastic public phone to call Timothy and let him know where I was and that I intended to return to Tokyo soon. Then I went to the room. When Mineko and Chieko came back hours later, I pretended to be asleep, and when one of them inadvertently stumbled over my feet, I groaned, as though deeply disturbed.

I had a fitful night. I dreamed of my mother, who was not dead. She was ill, but waiting for me to come home to see her, which I did. In the years to come, I would dream this often and, as I did that morning, I would wake to disappointment and a new day without her.

We traveled by two taxis to the temple, Chieko holding my mother’s bones on her lap the way I’d seen Grace Kelly hold on to her handbag in a movie. She looked both serious and coy, and she thanked the taxi driver for his sympathy.

The memorial service would not take place for an hour, and we were expected to wait in an adjoining meeting hall where we would eat another meatless lunch after the service ended. It had grown unexpectedly hot and I was melting in my hand-me-down black wool skirt. The memorial hall had a kitchen with a small refrigerator and I helped myself to a Fanta to cool down. Then I went for a walk. At first I could hear the footsteps of some of the children following me, so I darted in between trees, tombstones, and boulders trying to lose them. I wasn’t prepared to be indulgent of Mineko’s offspring. Not today.

I ventured further and further into the temple grounds, my mood temporarily lifted by how beautiful everything was. Over the centuries, the gardeners had clearly kept the original lines of the garden. I loved how the moss-covered rocks, dripping with condensation, formed a natural path through the bamboo.

I remembered visiting the woods so many years ago, and how I had
found bamboo shoots for my mother. The memory brought a tear to my eye and my vision blurred. When it cleared again, I saw a strange figure standing in the bamboo grove.

It was a
gaijin
, a white man.

He was standing beside a small waterfall. Alongside this were old stone carvings of what I guessed were Buddhist deities. I didn’t look closely. I was too startled by the man’s presence. He was wearing Buddhist robes, but because he was so tall the robes didn’t cover his ankles, and his wrists stuck out from the sleeves. He looked as out of place as a husband wearing his wife’s apron in the kitchen.

“Oh. Hello!” he said in English. Then he began the labored process of trying to speak in Japanese. When my ears could not take any more—I had the same tight-throat feeling I get when I hear a soprano sing off-key—I put him out of his misery.

“Maybe my English is better.”

“You speak English?”

“And French,” I sighed.

“Why? I mean, how?”

“I wanted to.”

“It’s that simple?”

“Of course!”

“I suppose it is. Your accent’s a bit thick. But I can understand you.”

I began to walk around in the grotto, pretending to examine the stone carvings. They were simple, one of Fudō Myō and another of what looked like a Shinto god. Both had been beaten by the rain, so only the suggestion of carved lines appeared, as though they’d just been pressed out of the stone. The effect was eerie, but I wasn’t about to let some Westerner think I was nervous.

“Aren’t you a little bit curious?” he asked.

“Curious?”

“About what I’m doing here. Usually you Japanese girls squeal or want to take my picture.”

“I am more interested in the stone sculpture.”

“Oh. Oh yes. Well, that’s why I’m here too.”

“Who told you about stone sculpture?”

“Yamagata-sensei. The priest. I’m studying with him.”

“You are a priest?”

“Actually, I’m an anthropologist. Or studying to be one. Came to Japan to do research. Yamagata-sensei roped me into this outfit. I think he finds it amusing. He’s here at the temple for a memorial. I came to watch and participate. Some girls lost their mother.” He looked at my black skirt and blouse. “Oh. I’m sorry.” He gave a quick bow, which made me laugh. He was so tall, he looked like an ostrich dipping its head to counteract the effort that went into picking up one foot.

The man’s name was François and he said he was from England.

“François is a French name,” I said.

“Be that as it may, I am English.”

“But you must speak French,” I insisted. “I speak French better than English. Could we …”

“I’m English,” he repeated, and not in an altogether friendly tone.

He had a camera and snapped some photos of the stone sculptures to add to his file on Japanese art. Then we went back down to the temple together.

“Have you seen the interior? The sculptures?” he asked.

I told him that I hadn’t.

“I spent a week photographing Nara and Kyoto. But there are many more sculptures all over Japan that are just as impressive. Take Muryojuji temple, for example. It’s breathtaking.”

I went back down to the temple with my new
gaijin
friend. The children had exhausted themselves looking for me behind trees and had retired underneath the temple, which was built on stilts that left a good two feet or so under its belly where a small person could hide or play in the dirt. One by one the children came out and marveled at the giant blond-haired man. Actually, François wasn’t blond at all. I know this now, having spent enough time in Europe and America. But a few days in Japan were enough to readjust my eyes, and because his hair looked so light in comparison to everyone else’s, he looked blond to me.

The children parted before us, like fronds of grass in a field making way for the wind.

“Aren’t they charming? I adore the little people in this country.” François sighed, reaching out to pat their heads as though they were delicate flower buds.

Mineko, with a mother’s sixth sense, came out of the memorial hall wearing her husband’s shoes. She hadn’t taken the time to wrestle with her
ugly pumps. Her mouth twisted into an expression of unabashed horror. Like a shadow, Chieko appeared beside her and mirrored this expression of shock. I was pleased. With François there, I had the feeling that I wasn’t quite in Japan, but somewhere else where I wouldn’t be expected to follow all the little rules and the niceties.

I invited François into the memorial hall for a drink. He said he didn’t trust himself to drink beer, though he enjoyed it, and so I gave him an orange Fanta and tried to interest him in talking to the children. I offered to translate. They were curious, as children are, and I indulged their questions while Mineko fidgeted in the background.

François wanted to look at the temple with me so I asked the children if they wanted to come, and though Mineko told them not to go, we all went in together.

It was a large structure, rectangular in shape, with a high roof whose hips plunged down at a precarious angle before its eaves gently fanned out like the tail of a phoenix. The front doors of the
hondo
, or main hall, slid open with some difficulty, as both the door panels and the grooves on which they rested were made of wood and had grown temperamental with age. When we stepped inside, the children grew hushed, immediately in awe of what they saw.

The hall was covered with enough
tatami
mats to hold a crowd of several hundred, and a dozen stacks of square-shaped
zabuton
pillows. From the high ceiling hung a golden chandelier dripping with lotuses and wheels, and around this on the rafters were painted celestial beings playing various musical instruments. At the very back of the room was the altar, which was set up like a small theater with various statues posed in stances of protection or meditation on a black lacquer stage. Buddhas held up their hands to ward off fear. Fudō Myō brandished his sword and scowled at illusion. A Guanyin lovingly cradled a lotus flower. And in the very center was a large crate, perhaps two meters high, which I gathered would contain a very big Buddha that, for reasons I did not know, was not on display today.

In front of the box was an even smaller stair-step altar. My mother’s bones were sitting here, divided into two discreet containers. There was one rectangular container, the size of an ice cream tub, wrapped in purple cloth, and a tiny red box beside this that contained her Adam’s apple.
Masayoshi must have arranged these earlier in the day when I’d been out for my walk.

“There’s more,” François said. “Come on.” He made a small motion with his head, the way Westerners do, that I knew by now meant I was to follow him. He went around to a door, which opened up to a room behind the altar. The room was filled with statues, with objects and paintings. The children followed close behind.

I circled around each object. Nothing was locked in a glass case. As full of treasures as Masayoshi’s temple was, it was also just a little northern temple meant to serve locals. Nothing that art scholars visited all that regularly. Nothing here had been cataloged. And yet even I, with my mother’s training in antiques and basic education that consisted of trips to the Tokyo National Museum with Masayoshi, knew that I was looking at a room full of priceless objects.

François continued on into yet another antechamber, but I hesitated. This new room smelled like the old prewar houses of Kuma-ume, the town my mother and I had lived in before moving to Hachinohe. The ceiling was low, even for me, and I gathered that the room had been built for a time when people were even shorter than they were today. It didn’t feel like a room for the public, but something that only priests would enter.

“I think I will go back,” I said.

“Wait.” François faded into one of the darker corners of the room. “This is the best part.”

He was standing in the shadows, surrounded by strange objects. I peered into the room. The walls were lined with shelves, each four levels high and shaped like a cubbyhole. Inside each slot was a box wrapped in cloth. Many were white, and some were wrapped in brocade.

“This is not a place for visitors,” I said.

He ignored me. “I find it beautiful myself that the Japanese take such good care of their ancestors’ bones. Much better than the out-of-sight-out-of-mind nonsense in the West.”

He was looking at a cubbyhole with a small statue inside. I looked and saw a carving of
kannon
with numerous arms all reaching out to aid lost souls. I touched one of her hands.

“We bury our bones,” I said, even though I was looking at plenty of evidence to the contrary.

“According to the
roshi
I work with,” François said, “that doesn’t always happen. At least not right away. Maybe there’s been a frost and it’s inconvenient to bury the bones. Or maybe someone doesn’t have the money to bury remains.”

“Then the bones come to stay in here?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I didn’t like standing in this room with so many bones rattling in their urns. I wondered whose had been forgotten, and who was too poor to be buried in the earth. And I certainly didn’t like that this
gaijin
I hardly knew had brought me here and was now telling me things about my own culture.

“I’m going back out. The memorial will start soon.”

“Is it time already?” he asked, following me back out. I wondered what he had seen in me to make him think that I would be interested in looking into the heart of this temple where things that were intended to be unseen lay hidden.